One of the things I’m doing this year is mixing up the usual arrangements. Normally I’ll pair up Poe and Shimako, or do the Poe/Roger/Rusty trio, or the Roger/Neil/Rusty trio if I’m going to do a bad pun, and the ceramic ducks Peter and Li usually get placed together.

Finding ways to break up those groupings and put ducks together that don’t normally share camera time is giving me new ideas on how to approach writing the material. It’s not that all the ducks have particularly unique voices, mind you, it’s just that shaking things up even at a cosmetic level is breaking me out of some ruts.

I don’t mind saying that I think Year Four has been a lot of my best work on the comic so far. That’s as it ought to be, though, isn’t it?