Andrews McMeel Syndication Comic strips Controversies GoComics/Andrews McMeel Technology

What’s With Those Sunday Color Errors

I got an explanation from Andrews-McMeel about the repeated errors in posting images to GoComics on Sundays. Turns out it’s not a GoComics error but a problem within a much larger corporate context.

The company — which handles an immense number of projects going back many years — has been in the process of a major, multi-year update that involves their content management and workflow systems.

As Chris Waldron, Chief Digital Officer, explains it:

The reason we are having this issue is because we are currently in a position in which we need to run both our old system and our new system in parallel as we migrate millions of assets, hundreds of creators, and dozens of internal staff from one to the other.  Running both concurrently has created an unforeseen side effect where the different files we produce for printing are mingling with the digital-only files and getting mixed up via the older autonomous scripts that manage the distribution of the various files.

Obviously, you’d need to be deep inside to see the glitch, which is why it’s taken so long to locate and correct, but Waldron says they feel they’ve isolated the problem and that this past Sunday’s Big Nate problem is likely to be the last.

It does, BTW, explain the mystery of why the single color plate kept appearing, since digital files should contain both black and color images in a single file. The two-plate color and black format would be part of the print version, so that the error was in the system automatically grabbing the print color rather than digital color image.

There are still a few unresolved issues, the main one — in my humble opinion — being why nobody either previewed the Sunday GoComics package before it posted or, at worst, stayed up and viewed it when it updated in the wee hours.

As to why it was only happening to Sunday strips and not during the week, that is probably why it evaded capture for so long.

As Waldron indicated, the entire system contains millions of parts. My suspicion is that there have been other bugs as they deal with this massive update and that the Sunday color issue on GoComics is just the one that we can see.

If he’s right about having corralled the issue, it’s a case of all’s well that ends well.

If not, at least now we know why it was so elusive, and, as a wise man once said, knowing is half the battle.

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Comments 8

  1. And that possibly explains why strips such as Dark Side of the Horse. JumpStart, others keep appearing as sometimes half-page format and sometimes as third-page format.

    1. Probably not the same glitch, or it would be grabbing the print-color plate rather than the digital-color plate.

  2. Now as to why Wiley Miller’s Sunday strip seems to be five times the size as other strips, creating a need for much more scrolling. I suspect this is a different problem and I also have to wonder why it seems like nobody there notices these things at the time the day’s strips are posted.

    1. The width is constant, the length changes. I don’t see a problem.

  3. It still comes down to this: untested software with nobody checking the result. Over and over.

  4. Monday’s BACK TO B.C. strip was in black and white; it was back to full color today. I enjoyed the black and white version.

    Samuli Lintula has been informed that the Sunday DARK SIDE OF THE HORSE occasionally appears in a truncated version.

    There are no updates or email blasts from the syndicate; we have to read about the changes and problems here.

  5. Years ago, I worked for a company that built computer-based training programs for various companies. One of the CBTs we did was for a firm that was doing an a major upgrade/change to their product. They were emphatic about one point. Do NO, NOT,NOT run the old and new systems in parallel! Set a hard switchover date, then switch over and shut down the old system. If you’ve prepared properly, the disruptions will be minor and handleable. Keep the old system active for reference if you must, but not online. NEVER, EVER run parallel systems!

    Clearly whoever handled the system change for McMeel switchover was an amateur, or at the very least not very knowledgeable about the best practices.

  6. And Comics Kingdom still has aspect ratio issues on Sunday on rotated mobile devices. This could be fixed by specifying only one side’s length and letting the browser infer the other.

    Which is my way of saying that even with the glitches, i think the GoComics transition was smoother and that is is still a better product that CK

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