Schedule Slip



"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

- Douglas Adams

One of the biggest problems with web comics is that many are haphazardly written and posted, especially since the majority are written part-time as a hobby. Unless an author is careful to maintain a Strip Buffer, scheduling conflicts can result in strips being released late, from hours or days to months or (in a few notorious cases) years.

Extreme cases of schedule slip may result in an Orphaned Series. Filler Strips are often used to cover for short (or even long) breaks in a series which is otherwise moving on schedule. On the bright side, this can help alleviate Archive Panic caused by date of first publication. The fact that so many webcomics adopted a "MWF Schedule" for their updates (meaning Monday-Wednesday-Friday) and then quickly fell into chronic slips led to the schedule being jokingly redubbed the "Maybe-Whenever-Forget it schedule."

Whether the lack of an obligation to make every deadline molds webcomics into a fundamentally different direction than commercial ones is left as an exercise for the reader. One reason Penny Arcade is still highly respected as a gamer comic is, among other things, avoiding delays after becoming a professional business.

As the non-webcomic examples of this phenomenon very much prove, even professional comic and manga creators are not immune from this, it's just more noticeable with webcomics due to do the medium's properties. This also flows into Machnima and Web Original, as well as Fan Works.

Many times, the Schedule Slip is caused by a Creator Breakdown or something happening in real life. Often when this happens, the creator will mention that something has happened in real life that's prevented them from working on it.

Anime and Manga

 * Kentaro Miura, the creator of Berserk, is practically legendary for this. When he is not on hiatus, new tankobon volumes of the manga come out roughly twice a year at best, but he takes hiatuses a lot—most notoriously, he ended one hiatus to start another one just two months later. and Berserk is a chapter-a-month series.
 * D Gray Man has experienced several stops in production due to the author falling ill. After a hiatus in 2009, the series returned with a fifty page chapter... and another hiatus. However, from November on, it started running monthly rather than weekly.
 * Fist of the Blue Sky, the Prequel to Fist of the North Star can only enjoy sporadic and unannounced releases since 2005 due to Tetsuo Hara, its illustrator, becoming blind in one eye from a condition suffered by one in a million. Having lost depth perception, all his panels have to be re-drawn and inked by an assistant; the fact that his insisted style is realistic and intricately detailed does not help to alleviate the problem.
 * Hellsing: 10 years to finish a 10 volume manga. Hirano Kohta is (in)famously known for being quite a lazy mangaka when editors are not keeping constant watch on him. Near the end of the series it seemed Hirano would release a new chapter whenever he felt like it; he was often taking breaks from working in a monthly magazine and also some of the near end chapters are just 9 to 12 pages long!
 * The OVAs also followed suit in what it seems to be a staple in the franchise, the first three episodes had just a few months between each other, from the 4th and on the delays would just get longer and longer as Satelight was having a hard to time to keep producing the episodes all by themselves, after a year and half without releasing anything Satelight passed the baton to Madhouse and finally looked like they would keep up the pace, and they did... only up to the 7th episode, another year and few months (and many rumors that Madhouse just dropped the series) is what it took for the 8th episode to get a release date; only time will tell how long it will take to finish the whole thing up.
 * Hirano topped himself with the prequel, Hellsing: The Dawn, after 6 chapters he simply stopped in 2007. The Dawn didn't even had enough chapters to publish a single volume, so the series remains just a collection of 6 separate publications in 6 different Young King Ours+ issues.
 * Hunter X Hunter, from the author of Yu Yu Hakusho, was featured regularly in Shonen Jump for several years. Nowadays the series is on hiatus much more than it is not, with roughly one tankobon volume coming out every one and a half years. Delays have been attributed to illness as well the author and his wife spending time with their new child.
 * Frustrated fans created a website to start tracking the delays to show how often the delays are.
 * Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was originally started in 1982 solely to get funding for the film (as they would not back an anime movie not based on a manga when Miyazaki was still an unknown). It was 7 volumes long (about a year and half for a weekly series or two and a half for a monthly, and the volumes were shorter than most) did not finish until 1994, as Miyazaki was still directing other projects and the movie was only reflected in the first one and a half volumes.
 * The manga of Neon Genesis Evangelion has been running since just before the anime started, and finally completed in mid-2013, averaging around one 6-stage volume a year, and sometimes with years in between stages.
 * Saint Seiya Next Dimension suffered a number of these due to the creator becoming really sick, the switch to all-color, and Editors delaying it on purpose due to Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas.
 * The second season of Haruhi Suzumiya: Announced back in 2007, said to be released fall 2007/spring 2008, eventually released summer 2009.
 * There was a four year gap between the ninth and ten volumes of the light novel.
 * The Yami no Matsuei manga began in 1997 and updated fairly regularly until the release of volume 11 in 2003. Then there was a full seven years between volume 11 and volume 12- it wasn't released until 2010 (apparently due to problems with author/artist Yoko Matsushita's health)
 * Due to Too Soon issues related to the big Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, the penultimate episode of Puella Magi Madoka Magica was postponed. Word of God expressed relief at the delay, as the earthquake cost the staff precious time that would otherwise have been used to make the episode. Eventually it was announced that the last episodes of the anime would air together about a month later (although this was apparently well after the episodes were completed). The last volume of the manga adaptation and the Prequel manga Oriko Magica were also delayed, the latter being moved from April to May.
 * Studio Shaft is notorious for this, really; Bakemonogatari's last few episodes being delayed caused a fair amount of Internet Backdraft. At least Madoka was delayed for understandable reasons.
 * The Five Star Stories
 * From the We-Couldn't-Make-This-Up department: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, one of the most popular, memorable, distinctive shonen mangas ever, had its mega-popular 3rd arc licensed by Viz. It was scheduled to run over 16 volumes, which should've been a layup. The 11th volume was delayed eight months and nearly derailed the entire run. Reason? Viz was dealing with protests about one panel in volume 10, Dio reading a book...which showed absolutely zero legible text. And why was this a problem? Because in the anime adaptation, this page contains Arabic text. Yeah. That's it. Eight months lost to this.
 * Note that the actual manga series itself is from the We-Couldn't-Make-This-Up department but because of another reason. Araki Hirohiko, the writer and artist, has never missed a deadline in all 23 years of drawing Jojo (over 100 volumes and counting).
 * Negima's author, Ken Akamatsu, takes breaks lasting from a week to upwards of three weeks every now and then, claiming to be doing research. While he's almost as famous for his Shown Their Work moments as he is for inducing trope overdose, a lot of fans joke that his "research time" is spent researching his wife.
 * Akamatsu's wife demands HIATUS!

Comic Books
"In summary, our tale makes clear That Patience is a virtue dear. So, gentle reader, know your place, And don't get on our ****ing case.""
 * All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder started in 2005 and took until 2008 to reach issue ten. A new six-issue mini-series would be done by the team to wrap it up, but even that is running late.
 * Circles originally began four issues per year. Now the rate of issue appearance is akin to Berserk's.
 * Happened to Ambush Bug: Year None, with a several month long gap between issue five and the finale. AB being the Meta Guy he is, this was thoroughly lampshaded in the issue itself, which was actually called issue 7 (with six being nonexistent) to further make fun of its lateness.
 * The print comic Battle Chasers was intended to be Joe Madureira's big break, and fans were extremely eager for it. Unfortunately, Joe also bragged in a magazine article about all the fun stuff he and his staff could do in their offices that were not in the slightest bit connected to getting a comic on shelves; the series was eventually abandoned altogether, along with the majority of Madureira's career. Battle Chasers has practically become a phrase meaning "comic that cannot meet its schedule" in the comics industry.
 * This has been going on almost since the comic book miniseries took off. Camelot 3000, a 12 issue monthly series, started in December 1982 and ended in April 1985, with nine months between the last two issues.
 * And then God invented the "Buy the Deluxe hard-cover and Archive Binge the whole thing in one night" and there were much rejoicing.
 * Due to scheduling conflicts, Dave Gibbons' reboot of Rogue Trooper ended up being told in groups of 3-4 six-page installments over 37 weeks.
 * Comics written by Allan Heinberg tended to be horribly delayed.
 * Young Avengers had to be bi-monthly and still had problems.
 * During his run on Wonder Woman, his lateness was a problem in the making of Amazons Attack.
 * In The Nineties Image Comics was known primarily for four things: Schedule Slips, Rob Liefeld's inability to draw figures even remotely approximating human anatomy, nearly every team having a Wolverine duplicate, and Schedule Slips. Did I mention Schedule Slips?
 * This seemed to be a recurring thing with Grant Morrison. Both Batman & Robin and Return of Bruce Wayne faced numerous delays from the summer of 2010. It got to the point where neither series had an issue released in August. This had also led to comics taking place after Bruce's return (The Road Home one-shots) being released before the Return was complete.
 * Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassady released 27 issues in TEN YEARS. The script of the final issue was apparently written over two years before it was published. This was in large part due to both creators working on other titles for other companies at the same time; Ellis was by far the worst offender, as during Planetary's run, he worked on at least twenty other books.
 * It wasn't just work: at one point, a delay began because Ellis was ill. Cassaday, not unreasonably, took on another job to keep earning a crust. By the time Ellis was well, Cassaday was ill. By the time Cassaday was well again, Ellis was too busy with the other work he'd taken on to keep earning. Rinse and repeat.
 * Platinum Grit is a bimonthly comic, the first issue released in 1994. They gave up on bimonthly a while ago - issue twenty came out in 2009. Or you can just say it's twelve years behind schedule.
 * Fans of Sasmira have been waiting for the release of the second episode since 1997. And by the look of it they aren't done waiting yet.
 * In the now-canceled Star Wars Rebellion comic series, the very first arc was plagued by a number of schedule slips. Issue four was released in late July, ending on a cliffhanger going into the final issue of the story arc. The conclusion to the arc was released in December of that year.
 * Ultimate Wolverine Vs Hulk #3. Scheduled for April 2006. Published in March 2009.
 * The Ultimates. The first 13 issue volume took 26 months from start to finish, the second equally long volume (for which Marvel promised that they had learned their lesson about keeping it on schedule) took 25 months.
 * The Astonishing X-Men ongoing series took full four years to complete a 25-issue storyline. As the result, Shadowcat's death was spoiled by Messiah Complex: since its events couldn't take place before it, Kitty was nowhere in sight. The series was written by Joss Whedon and then Warren Ellis continued the trend. The reason is the same.
 * Occurred for nearly a decade with writer Kurt Busiek due to mercury poisoning; this mainly affected his work on Astro City, and eventually caused the title to go from a regular monthly schedule to periodic limited series.
 * The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has been prone to this at times. One issue included a rhymed "Cautionary Tale" in the style of Struwwelpeter, wherein a fan who continually complained about next issue's lateness is murdered by the authors.


 * 19 issues of The Red Star comic have been published since 2000, and the storyline is not finished by a long shot as of this writing. The latest three issues came out in roughly one-year intervals in 2006-2008, and who knows when the next one arrives.
 * Every single issue of CLiNT has been delayed due to the artistic team on Kick-Ass 2 having to prioritise The Avengers. It got so bad that in issue 10, it was announced the comic would be shifting from a monthly to six-weekly schedule.
 * Civil War. Issue #4 was pushed back a month and #5 wasn't released until two months after that. Apparently this was to give Steve McNiven more time to finish the artwork. That doesn't seem so bad, but remember, this was a Crisis Crossover. A number of tie-in issues (either other minis or regular titles) that were completed on-time were held back so as not to spoil developments in the main mini-series.
 * J. Michael Straczynski's run on Amazing Spider-Man also suffered from a few delays due to JMS' involvement in other projects (such as the TV series Jeremiah).
 * David Lapham managed to produce only 40 issues of Stray Bullets over the course of ten years. Towards the latter part of that time the slip had gotten so bad that the comic was coming out roughly annually or biannually. It has since been declared an Orphaned Series despite Lapham's insistence on eventually returning to finish it.

Fan Works

 * Subverted Trope with You Got Haruhi Rolled. In its first year there were 81 chapters written (that's one update every four days or so, for the curious) and since only three chapters have been released in its second year one could be forgiven for thinking that a major Schedule Slip has occurred. But in fact, the creator hasn't stopped writing; he has simply updated all of his short and mid-length chapters in a Spin-Off fic while reserving HaruhiRolled itself for his longest work. Taken together, he still averages one chapter per week.
 * This happened to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Around Christmas 2011, nearly four months after Chapter 77 was published, Chapter 78 was finally done, but to spare the readers the nerve-wracking wait between its cliffhanger and Chapter 79, the author decided to finish Chapter 79 first. When that one was finished three days later he then decided to finish the whole arc first because his speed had improved so much.
 * But three weeks later, he was already finishing chapter 81 and explaining that he was still making backwards edits to all the unposted chapters. So most of the complainers have stopped complaining and asked him to just post more often on his progress :).

Film

 * Eraserhead: David Lynch spent the first half of the 70's working on the film, which slowly expanded from the twenty-one page script to the final product. Admittedly, most of this was due to running out of money multiple times.

Literature

 * Occurred and was even lampshaded in Charlotte Bronte's somewhat-unknown earlier work Caroline Vernon, making this Older Than Radio.
 * The main reason for the backlash against George R. R. Martin.The first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire were released in 1996, 1998 and 2000.The less-than-well-received fourth book was released in 2005 and the fifth was released in July 2011.
 * Abarat fans were told that Absolute Midnight would come out in 2004 and are still waiting.
 * The date has been set; September 2011. Seven years after the second book.
 * Seven years separated the first book of The Unicorn Chronicles from the second, and seven more years separated the second from the third. Some of the children it was initially marketed to have now graduated from college. Fortunately, the fourth book took only two years to come out.
 * The fourth book in The War Against the Chtorr came out in 1993, the fifth is scheduled for 2011. That's an eighteen year wait in case we just broke your brain.
 * Isobelle Carmody: A DECADE BETWEEN SEQUEL BOOKS IS TOO LONG! Many of her younger fans have gone through highschool and finished a degree in the intervening time when waiting.
 * JK Rowling intended to release a new Harry Potter book once a year, and was successful for the first few years in keeping this up, but ended up with a four-year gap between books 4 and 5. The so-called "three-year summer" is considered to be a factor in the massive boom in Harry Potter Fanfic that began around this time.
 * Referenced somewhat in the early part of the fifth book, when the titular character feels like summer has been dragging on forever, and is eager for something to actually, finally, happen.
 * Anthony Horowitz is awful for this. The first Groosham Grange book came out in 1988, the second in 1999, and there was a twelve year gap between books 3 and 4 of The Diamond Brothers. Thankfully, he seems to have got is under control with his more recently started series.
 * In fairness to Horowitz, the first Groosham Grange book was pretty much a standalone novel when he wrote it and the first three Diamond Brothers books were a self-contained trilogy; the fourth, fifth and sixth books in the series formed a second trilogy of novellas.
 * Scott Lynch, author of the Gentleman Bastard Sequence series, falls into this. The third book's release date has been pushed back multiple times. To give a sense of scale, the second book was released in July 2007, and the third book has slid to the end of 2012.
 * The ever changing release date of Ben Aaronovitch's third Rivers of London book, Whispers Underground is a case of this, giving fans a wonderful chance to rehash all those old Duke Nukem Forever jokes.
 * The first book in Nikolai Tolstoy's Books of Merlin trilogy, The Coming Of The King, was released in 1988. The sequels have been delayed since 1989 and are still not out.

Live Action TV

 * The first two seasons of Beyond The Break aired on The N in the US in summer 2006 and winter 2007, respectively, with season 3 due to air in winter of 2008. It then got pushed back repeatedly, with The N neither showing promos for a new season nor rerunning the first two seasons, only bothering to acknowledge it when they needed to defuse cancellation rumors, and season 3 got its initial airing on the Canadian TV station then known as Razer. It finally aired in the US in June 2009, with the entire season being shoved into the span of three weeks.
 * Nickelodeon is bad with this as a rule, but the fourth season of iCarly takes the cake. Season 3 managed to air 18 or so episodes (with some double length episodes) in about 6 months. Season 4's season opener was aired in July 2010, and did not finish until almost a year later in mid-July 2011. The season has 9 episodes only, with one double length episode and a 3 part crossover.
 * The show was budgeted for 13 episodes (which ended up as 8 single and 1 two-part episode that makes up 9 episodes, but the 11th, 12th and 13th were made into a Crossover with Victorious, and basically have the iCarly characters become guest stars on their own show.
 * And the final episode of Season 4, is a cliffhanger of a sudden Shocking Swerve from one of the characters, and clearly has rushed characterisation due to not having those extra 3 episodes, nor are the fans happy they'll have to wait another 5 months for the first episode of the next season in August to resolve the cliffhanger.
 * Part of why it's so ridiculous is that, instead of having regular episodes, each individual new episode is treated like a major event, as though it was a special, because new episodes have become so rare!
 * The Sopranos: The first three seasons arrived one per year three years in a row but things changed dramatically after this:
 * Season 4 was released about a year and half after season 3 which was the earliest example of the fans being annoyed with David Chase's slow plotting pace. Surprise, surprise when season 5 was released a year and a half later. David Chase not being one to settling for that decided he needed nearly two years to plot the sixth and final season. When the damn thing finally premiered it was announced that nine more episodes were added and fans almost had a heart attack when the season actually premiered only ten months later. Say what you will about the controversial ending, most people who had been following the show from day one were probably just relieved it had ended at all.
 * The Writer's Strike of 2007-2008 caused this for several network TV shows. However, unlike HBO and their fancy-schmancy accommodations and lack of restrictions, network TV is far more strictly regulated in terms of production, airtimes, and the like, so to compensate for the slippage and finish a season up by May Sweeps, many shows had to be cut down from typical 22-24 episode runs (for example, Thirty Rock's second season was 15 episodes stretched out from October to May). This had the dual effect of long, frustrating hiatuses during first-run airing and rushed storylines in the actual episode sequence (which are even more noticeable in syndication).

Magazines

 * Brazilian magazine SET had a terrible 2009. First, the publisher closed and decided to sell the title - the four issues before the sale ran normally, though the last one was released really late into April. The new team skipped May, and started in June three months of pure Magazine Decay. Then the title went to another publisher, but with the editor-in-chief until April. September was skipped, October had an issue, but the one planned for November came out only in December. And in 2010, only four issues came out (March, May, June, November but arriving a month later), prompting fans to call SET "the Chinese Democracy of magazines".
 * Cracked slipped into this under the management of Dick Kulpa. He first cut the magazine to a six-issues-a-year schedule, but slipped greatly from this after an anthrax attack on the offices. It then got worse when the mag switched from Mad-styled parody to being a "lad mag" like Maxim: the Retool began in August 2006 and ended in February 2007... on the third issue.

Manhwa

 * Priest. The first ten volumes were released within a few months of each other, then the gap between volume releases got longer and longer, and now it's been three years without any sign of Volume 17.

Miscellaneous

 * Renowned computer expert Donald Knuth began work on The Art of Computer Programming in 1962, expecting to finish later that year. His publisher convinced him to divide the book into seven volumes, the first of which was published in 1968, six years later. Two more volumes followed in '69 and '73. The fourth volume proved to be so lengthy as to necessitate being further split into a projected three subvolumes, the first of which, 4A, was released in 2011. For those of you keeping score, that's a 38 year schedule slip, in a project that has been ongoing for nearly half a century.
 * A semi-famous Sports Statistics page (Doug Stats) has had this happen because the sole webmaster works fifty hour workweeks at a different job, and also happened to have been raising a family on top of that. He does regularly get stat upgrades, but when things become severe at the start of the season, people start complaining.

Newspaper Comics

 * Dilbert: Though never happening with the comic itself, this trope is invoked with the 'Dilbert Newsletter' readers can sign up for, which author Scott Adams describes as 'coming out approximately whenever I feel like it'.

Video Games
"Valve time for Episode 3: Announcement: Christmas of 2007 Actual: Coincident with the Rapture (no, not that one)"
 * Duke Nukem Forever is the epitome of this trope, as it was "coming soon" for 14 years before finally being released in June 2011 (and even then that was a setback of one month, a fact the developers readily lampshaded).
 * All Blizzard Entertainment products have a release time of "Soon" (TM). As of early 2010, Diablo III has been pushed at least to 2011 and is not yet in beta and the long-promised 1.13 patch for Diablo II is still in testing.
 * Averted with World of Warcraft: Cataclysm when it was released prior to 2011 on December 7, 2010. It was an Obvious Beta compared to other expansions, but after Burning Crusade had to be pushed back to 2007 (Original release date was sometime in November 2006) and the game was playable, that they could launch it.
 * Valve, the developers of Half-Life, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead are particularly infamous for continued delays on their release dates - so much so that their fandom has coined the term "Valve Time" to refer to the manner in which they can single-handedly dilate time around themselves. This is probably mostly thanks to Valve's loose internal corporate structure, where no-one has a single, set-in-stone role to play in the company. They claim it is due to their attempts to produce high-quality games that are fun, and the developer commentary often mentions features that were not fun that had to be discarded, which certainly consumes time.


 * Averted with Left 4 Dead 2. Valve intentionally released the game on a fixed schedule (literally a year after the first game was released) to prove they can release on time. Fans to this day still argue whether or not this was a good thing, due to several issues the game brought up.
 * In some cases like the above, there's also "Reverse Valve Time".
 * Due to the (relatively) long time between the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the Mod API for said game, and the fact that the hold up seems to be due to problems with incorporating Steamworks support, its become a minor meme to say that Bethesda is running on Valve Time.
 * Krin, the guy responsible for the Sonny games has no definite release date for Sonny 3. Members on the Armor Games forums frequently speculate when Sonny 3 will come out. For a time, people actually thought the guy was dead.
 * "Come hell or high water, the game will be done on February 15, 1999." Well, it wasn't. (It finally was in April 14, 2000.)
 * Super Smash Bros. Brawl was announced in 2006 and set for a 2007 release. But because they already had one third-party character in the game (Snake), and fans demanded another third-party character to be added to the game (Sonic the Hedgehog), the game had to be delayed until Feb. 2008. Then when February was near, the game was delayed until March because they wanted to work out some bugs in the online system, and so the game finally saw a release in March.
 * Kid Icarus Uprising also went through several delays too. It was initially announced in 2010 as a launch title for the Nintendo 3DS, but when the 3DS's launch neared, it was delayed until August of that year. August came around, and the game was delayed until November or December. Then it was delayed until early 2012, which was when it was finally released.
 * Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. A 2006 trailer announced it would be released in 2007, but it wasn't released until 2008.
 * Working Designs was notorious for this. ADV Films delayed the Arc the Lad anime to come out the same time as the game; at that point they had already been late so often that the Genre Savvy could have predicted that wouldn't work.  Magic Knight Rayearth also ended up being the last game for the Sega Saturn because of various delays.

Web Comics

 * Two Gamerz has been experiencing this due to the creator having to balance college along with two comic strips at once.
 * Achewood has been falling into this for a while, with multiple days between each update and the author repeatedly pushing back his own deadlines. Eventually, he just put it on hiatus, with strips coming out once every several months.
 * Adventures In Ninja Cookery (not to be confused with The Adventures of Dr. McNinja) never had an official schedule, but the author said he would try for once a week. Updates have taken as long as fifty days to be released.
 * Alice was last updated on July 7, 2006. There has been talk about perhaps restarting it, but it's not looking good since the update of a revival was in June 2009.
 * American Gothic Daily. It isn't.
 * A Moment of Peace experimented with a 'whenever' schedule after the author found she produced more over a Christmas break when there were no deadlines. After producing a lot of comics under this new schedule, the comic went back to a Thursday-Sunday pattern.
 * Angels 2200 has gone through periods of dormancy over the years; the current one started in July 2011 after an announcement of family health issues. One strip was posted in December, and since then, silence on all fronts.
 * Antihero for Hire still sticks to its schedule, but... back a few years ago, Mark Shallow was updating Antihero for Hire 3 days a week, and Adventurers! three days a week. Now, Adventurers is over, Anti Hero for Hire updates twice a week, and the comics are about half the size they used to be, usually only 3 panels.
 * Apple Geeks Lite updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday without fail (though it was only Wednesdays and Fridays at first, the first Monday comic being #49). The main Apple Geeks, however, updates erratically at best - and has been reduced to only a single issue per week. As a result, despite AG Lite beginning in 2006, three years after the main comic, the thousandth overall comic was AG Lite 476 (Wednesday, June 24, 2009)--almost half of the overall output. In fairness, a black-and-white comic strip is considerably easier to make than a full-color, full-page comic.
 * It Got Worse. In late 2010, updates started to become sporadic at best until Haque finally put the comic on hiatus.
 * Painful in Avalon, where the strip, meant to run on a three-year schedule corresponding to school years, suffered numerous delays in the final year, forcing the author to backdate new strips, until giving up and writing a "strip" saying in text what happened between the most recent strip and graduation. And even that was lacking, especially compared to what was given to the readers before.
 * Beyond Reality updates so erratically, schedule slip may no longer be applicable. Currently (early October 2009), it has not updated since July 20, and "regular" schedule is about once a week to once a month.
 * Blip had been going since the beginning of 2008, and only in spring 2011 fell behind due to a combination of computer ills and a probably much needed vacation for Sage. Comics still update daily, but the dates are now off by about a month.
 * And now, as of fall/winter 2011, months can pass between updates.
 * Butternut Squash once had a fairly regular weekly update schedule. But since 2007, instances of guest comics, filler art, and seemingly-endless piles of excuses and pleas for patience courtesy of the creators have become the norm rather than the exception. This has led to some fairly tense exchanges between the creators and readers in the comments section under each sporadic-at-best "update."
 * Chopping Block has had several of these throughout its run, many of which last several months. At the end of one such hiatus, there was a short set of strips involving Satan looking for Butch (the star of the comic). Another schedule slip caused that to become an Aborted Arc. One example: February 21, 2008 to January 2, 2009 - eleven months.
 * Lampshaded here at Chaospet.
 * Captain SNES went for about a year without any substantial updates, except for a few filler strips, before resuming. Some statistics, just for fun: First year: 163 story comics. Second year: 197 story comics. Third year: 90 story comics. Fourth year: 40 story comics. Fifth year: 45 story comics. Sixth year: 9 story comics. Seventh year so far: 21, with the anniversary in one month. Particularly frustrating since it has one of the most complex plots of any sprite comic around.
 * Casey and Andy had several very long hiatuses during its run, although it has now ended for good.
 * Chugworth Academy had multiple slips in its MWF update schedule before stopping to update for almost two years. A series reboot lasted three strips, never to be updated again to this day.
 * Metal Gear Solid fan comic The Cobra Days started out as a Monday/Wednesday/Friday comic with occasional misses, slipped to three or four comics a month... then one or two... August 2008 saw the posting of the fourth new comic of the year.
 * Officially cancelled as of January 2011 after almost 11 months of sitting stagnant.
 * CRFH had a strong seven-day schedule for several years, then dropped off to five per week, then three, and now the last schedule has become unreliable as well.
 * Clay Yount's Cosmobear, despite still proclaiming that it updates on Fridays, has been more known for going on hiatuses either announced or unannounced, then posting one or two pages before falling silent again. The last update was in late 2007, and the news box is still promising an update "next Friday".
 * Clay Yount's other webcomic, Rob and Elliot, was originally running twice a week, then knocked back to once a week one the launch of Cosmobear. Despite the latter not having updated in over two years, it still stays at once a week and has grown increasingly sporadic about whether it updates each week or not.
 * Cosmic Hero, Ace Sparks -the author- on his last updated promised he would keep on updating soon... that day was the 20 of november of 2008.
 * One member of a similar contest to the Daily Grind mentioned below which had previously had a really bad history of schedule slips was Elf Only Inn. When it finally slipped after a rather good showing, the Lazy Grind runners were a bit slow to mark it off on the page, while some people mused in the shoutbox on the Lazy Grind page that, now that there had been a single slip, the comic creator (Sortelli) would probably not update for months. The shoutbox was removed and replaced by a temper tantrum by one of the Lazy Grind staff. In the end, Sortelli proceeded to not update Elf Only Inn for months immediately after his slip, and continues to post an average of one comic every three months or so.
 * To make matters worse, apparently the Grind itself has had a bit of a schedule slip. Kell Hound apparently won the contest when its last fellow competitor missed an update... back in April of '08. (Example added in August of the same year.)
 * Lazy Grind itself has finally been taken down, but it exists (somewhat) on the Wayback Machine.
 * Dragon Tails. The original run of 2000 comics never had a late one. Then the author ended it, then restarted it, and ever since the update schedule has become entirely random and unpredictable.
 * Dresden Codak is exceptionally bad at this. The update schedule was completely random until the author promised weekly updates as part of making the comic his full-time job... upon which the update schedule continued to be completely random. Following the announcement, the next comic took six weeks to arrive, and since then the strip has been updated about once every twenty days. The fact that the author was in an accident that has left him unable to draw and broke his computer, erasing the sketches he had in progress, putting the series on temporary hiatus. Few noticed.
 * Lately the comic has reached epic proportions of slow updates. Now its a near-certainty that you'll have to wait several months or more for another comic. But when the next one comes around it's usually worth the excruciating wait.
 * Brian Clevinger generally did a solid job with Eight Bit Theater, but interruptions and delays popped up not infrequently. Hurricanes would hinder the Sprite Comic a couple times every year (Clevinger was based in Florida for the first decade of the strip's history) and there were usually a handful of personal crises that pushed back publication for a short time. Bizarrely, as the strip neared its end 8-bit Theater was increasingly erratic in its update schedule, sometimes missing entire weeks.
 * Clevinger grew defensive after one of those update-less weeks, the result of computer issues at his new home. I've given you eight years of some of the most consistent* work you've seen online. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a little patience from you here, in the final hours, when I miss an update for the simple reason that it's impossible to make one. Thank you. He did say in the asterisk footnote that "terrible work is still consistent work."
 * His other webcomic, Warbot in Accounting, however, is hit by this hard. First it was updating once a week, but quickly spiraled into "once very few months, if you are lucky." Supposedly this is because the artist has terrible luck and either loses all of his work or has severe financial problems. He seems to have learned from this however, as his other other webcomic is openly stated to have a one-month buffer, and will update on Mondays and Fridays, no exceptions.
 * Clevinger's case is somewhat amusing in the sense that the vast majority of his delays are caused by a Plague of Good Fortune. Specifically, it seems every time he makes progress on a project his various partners become too busy from other obligations (that actually provide a means of paying the rent, unlike the released-for-free Warbot and HIKYM) to actually do anything with Brian's projects. For instance, Zack Finfrock became busy with art commissions he pays for his lifestyle with and later got a job as a host of a webseries, and the co-writer/artist (can't remember which) of HIKYM got hired to work on actual print comics. Clevinger himself has his own highly popular print series to contend with, as well as the fact that Marvel Comics has thrown him at least two miniseries to write for in the last year.
 * El Goonish Shive went from updating every day, to every week day, to Monday-Wednesday-Friday to Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday to at least 2 days per week with a filler as well. There are also several occasions where months passed between updates, due to problems in Dan Shive's private life. The latest slip was from September 2007 to January 2008, while Dan Shive was learning to color his strips with his new art style. The strip had gone back to a regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, only to later revert to filler and a new schedule, which, in turn, collapsed, another abortive attempt at Monday-Wednesday-Friday was made, Dan's tablet PC (which he uses to draw) died, and we were in limbo before settling on another schedule (Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday), and NP has been revived.
 * In a reversion of this trope, he has started regular MWF updates, a promise of defeating Cerebus Syndrome, and frequent sketchpage and NP updates.
 * NP is basically dead (claiming to go on a one-week hiatus, but still not updating after over a year), but everything else is still good.
 * Starting in April '11, Shive started inverting schedule slip. He Inverted Trope Schedule Slip. Yes, he has missed a couple days due to tech problems, and people demanding a sketch of a certain panel, but he's still holding strong as of this writing (23 June '11).
 * So far his only real delay have come from unavoidable computer failures or power outages, which he has rectified by the next day or two at the latest.
 * And now he's back in Schedule Slip territory, missing an update per week on average, sometimes missing up to 3 updates a week.
 * The End of Things last updated June 16, 2010. After being on hiatus since November 18, 2009. And it was rather sporadic before then too.
 * Prior to getting its own site, Erfworld claimed to update three times a week on their comic page, but actually updated three times a month. It's an Egregious example because it started out being hosted on the same website as The Order of the Stick and was originally brought in to compensate for its Schedule Slips.
 * The webcomic adaptation of Erikas New Perfume just sort of updates when it will, though it generally updates every eight days. There have been slips in this though, which wouldn't be too bad except it's only 9 strips in. Still, it so far seems more reliable than most.
 * Eversummer Eve started out as a free comic, eventually moved new updates and its entire archive to Wirepop, updated once a week on a regular schedule, then fell into a hole without warning. The comic finally quietly departed Wirepop in early 2008 and the author has stated that updates will be irregular at best due to attempts to focus on more lucrative endeavors. The comic has not updated since the move. Notes from the author on deviant Art have indicated that it's on Series Hiatus until she can either reboot/remake the story instead. In mid-2011, the entire site vanished, with the archives disappearing into the ether.
 * Everlasting Wanderers started in 2002 with a 2-per-week schedule. It kept this for nearly a year, then slipped into once per week, then once a month... then once every few months. Then the website it was hosted on disappeared and it seemed to vanish from the web, only for the author to have reposted it on his deviantart. The longest break between comics has been 3 years. It's more or less considered an Orphaned Series, although it a new comic seems to have come out once in a blue moon. The author lampshaded this with his latest update: "see you next year!"
 * Exterminatus Now has suffered this steadily. Now it updates weekly at the weekend, though it's still spotty at times.
 * The Foxfire Chronicles is lucky to have two updates a month. As of this December 2011 edit; the last update to Foxfire Chronicles was March 6, 2011.
 * Girly had a regular schedule once upon a time, but (as of the final chapter) updates as pages are finished. The author, Josh, acknowledges this and often apologizes on his Twitter, and took a stab at himself in this update. https://web.archive.org/web/20130613093652/http://girlyyy.com/go/760
 * Goblins has run a bit late pretty much since the creator refined his art style back in Book One, but four days late was considered unheard-of and newsworthy when most of the party came to Brassmoon. Two years and eleven months later, the Brassmoon story arc finally came to a close. Updates a week late were practically the norm for most of that time, until Thunt made the comic his full-time job.
 * In March 2009, in response to emails requesting him to just post what he has instead of trying to make it perfect, Thunt published a series of blank panels.
 * It's now stabilised at a page Tuesday and a page Friday. But the donation-bar comic, Tempts Fate, has been stalled for more than two months as of Nov 3 2010, and is almost invariably late otherwise.
 * Gone to Ground is notoriously bad at updating on a schedule, mostly because of its extremely detailed art style. On the other hand, the author is a good sport about it, with a banner on the site cheerfully proclaiming "updated bi-monthly."
 * Hanna Is Not a Boys Name has gone on short hiatuses a couple times, and the author often apologizes for being late or worries her readers will get spoiled when she does stick to her schedule. There were a couple long gaps in between September and October due to illness and relocating to a new state, but updates seem to have picked back up.
 * ...Aaand have slowed down again to about one or two comics (or related drawings, like the Valentine's cards) per month since December 2010.
 * There has, as of December 2011, been no updates to the site since mid-February, and no actual comic updates since the end of January.
 * Andrew Hussie has an extremely ambitious update schedule with Homestuck. (There's a reason why MS Paint Adventures is the longest-running webcomic ever despite only being a few years old.) However, there have been many cases of flashes and important events coming out much later than they were planned - of course, these almost always happen because he realises he wants to write a lot more in between, and almost invariably the webcomic still update in the meantime. However, straighter examples have happened a few times: the whole comic was put on hold for over a month to create Cascade (it should be noted that the general fandom reaction is that it was worth it), and a couple of times in 2012 Andrew has halted updates for a couple of days to work on merchandise and the official books.
 * A completely unavoidable example happened with the second intermission - it, as an appropriately creepy flash, was supposed to come out on Halloween, but a freak snowstorm blew into Andrew's city, cutting out all power for him for a few days. He was not happy about it.
 * Instant Classic and Genrezvous Point alternate between 10 strips per week (seven IC, three GP) and posting nothing for months at a time. To be fair, the artist is a filmmaker and his bursts of "inactivity" are usually when he's working on a project.
 * As of November 2009, Carroll seems to have jumped back on the comics bandwagon for good, though only time will tell.
 * Lackadaisy Cats update schedule is probably the only legitimate criticism that can be directed towards the comic. Rolling in at a little under 100 strips in 4 years (2006-2010) in the form of sporadic updates every few months, Lackadaisy's periods of inactivity drove some fans to declare the comic legally dead only to be proven wrong time and again. Luckily the comic has been updating with something resembling regularity since 2010, presumably when the comic was picked up by a publisher and became a meaningful financial venture rather than a pastime. Many fans agree that the new update schedule (roughly 4/p/month) is perfectly acceptable given the jaw-dropping quality of the art and writing remains the same, which it has. Squee.
 * LeveL updates as infrequently as once a year. The readers keep assuming it's finally become an Orphaned Series before being proven wrong.
 * The Life of Nob T. Mouse had a major bout of this when the series went on an unannounced hiatus between the final part of the Nasties! storyline in 1999 and the first episode of Pie Noon' in 2007, i.e. eight years'' later.
 * This will hopefully not happen anymore however, since the comic reportedly now has a Strip Buffer.
 * Lewis Lovhaug's webcomic [Lightbringer (web comic)|[Lightbringer]] was always sort of erratic in its update schedule, often posting filler strips and missing the Wednesday update, and in December 2011, posted its first update in over a year.
 *  Life on Forbez updated once a day for a long time before updating less and less before going on long hiatus. It took almost 10 years to finish the first big story arc. The fans (and the author) know that updates can be fleeting. Since then the updates have become more regular.
 * Little Worlds updated twice a week for the first few months, then lapsed to once a week, then went a multi-month hiatus (without warning or explanation). It has since returned and begun posting once a week again. The head writer, Peter Chiykowski, claims that University got in the way.
 * After some slip ups, earlier this year Living With Insanity took a two week long break while Herbert was away and Salvi was working on another project. It was supposed to return February 8, but didn't come back until early March, this time at two updates a week, which can be hours late. They did an arc on Herbert's frustration over this. But other than that, it hasn't missed an update since the schedule change.
 * The Longest Sojourn fell into a year of non updates in April 2006 before finally getting sporadic updates in 2007, and getting slightly less sporadic updates from April 2008 onwards.
 * Lampshaded in this Loserz strip, among others like this one.
 * Much like the Pokémon-X example from later on the page, John Joseco also insists on having The Lounge pages appear on the days they were supposed to. The last page (Which has been up for months) was February 16, 2009.
 * Ls Empire is a strange example of this trope. Why? Because the authors weaponized it!
 * They were already suffering from this, which was lampshaded in both the first and third anniversary specials.
 * The Meek: Author announced a new job just before the comic stopped updating. No word since
 * One of the major criticisms of Megatokyo is its erratic update schedule. On a good month there might be two of twelve scheduled comics produced. This is particularly grating to critics who claim that the "simpler" artistic style - light pencil drawings - suggest a sacrifice in artistic quality for the sake of regularity... which means it fails on both accounts. Naturally, there's a lot of detail in those pencils, so it can be argued either way.
 * Also worth noting is that Fred Gallagher, artist of Megatokyo, decided to quit his job and make the comic itself his profession. (Way before Dresden Codak did it.) However, unlike Dresden Codak, the update schedule didn't remain the way it was after Fred started devoting all his attention to it... it got worse.
 * Since the birth of Gallagher's son, updates have become even more infrequent and unpredictable, with the average as of the end of 2008 hovering somewhere around one comic per week. The creator even changed the schedule to a two-per-week Tuesday/Friday schedule, and he can't even keep that up.
 * It Got Worse—as of 2010, a quick peek at the archives page shows the update schedule is down to 2-4 a month or worse, with frequent 1-3 week delays. This, combined with Webcomic Time means that a casual reader can check in on it once or twice a year and not miss much.
 * And worse. Piro's most recent rant reveals one of the reasons for the most recent horrible schedule slips—Sarah, the real life Seraphim and Fred's wife, was diagnosed with lymphoma. What this means for the update schedule is yet to be seen.
 * Modus Operandi, a fairly new comic that began in mid-November 2010, managed to post seven updates before stalling out in mid-February. A four-month gap has finally been ended by a new comic posted in mid-June. Subsequent deadlines have been missed. No word on when (if) they'll go back to regular updates.
 * MSF High has suffered from this a good few times, and has actually orphaned the previous version, HSCM, twice.
 * Neglected Mario Characters from 1997 until around 2004 updated regularly on a generally weekly basis. But after the creator graduated highschool he got less and less time for the site, and eventually vanished completely without any signs of what happened to him. The last six years or so have basically been nothing but comics made by fans wanting to continue all of the many stories he left hanging.
 * Will Never Never ever ever continue?
 * Not likely. Its main page has been declaring a temporary hiatus since July 10 of 2008.
 * Starting in October 2010, the site saw a flurry of updates that were scheduled to bring about the conclusion of the story in January. Schedule Slip happened again, more than once, and the final page wasn't posted until March 17 of 2011.
 * My Afternoon: A Dramatization doesn't even bother pretending to have a schedule -- the 2009 update (yes, the) comes with a note calculating the mean time between updates as 484 days.
 * No Pink Ponies still claims to update 4 times a week, but there hasn't been a new strip since mid-January (2008). The author announced in mid-April that he was "bogged down by multiple other jobs", which were to be done by the end of May (Marry Me only finished in late June).
 * NPP was going again for a while, with the author promising to post a strip a day to make up for the break. The revival so far (as of Sept 2008) has consisted of 9 regular strips plus one "Sunday" strip, a news post from the author promising not to take a planned month's break, then an 8 week (and counting) hiatus...
 * No Rest for The Wicked has repeatedly fallen into long, unannounced hiatuses since 2008, each one long enough to make it appear to be abandoned...right before it comes back from the dead again.
 * Not in My Backyard! started off on a schedule that, while somewhat irregular at times, averaged out to a reasonable number of strips per week. However, there were no new strips between June 16 and July 3, 2000, and from then until January 2001, there were only 17 updates (including only one strip between August 7 and October 3). The strip finally got back on something resembling a schedule in 2001, but abruptly ended that August.
 * The Order of the Stick once had a fairly strict three-times-a-week schedule. The author reportedly has a chronic illness, which lead to an "updates without warning" schedule hoping to average out to three times a week.
 * Before his "unspecified chronic but non-life-threatening" illness progressed to the point where it could randomly leave him bedridden for weeks at a time, he was extremely consistent, to the point of occasionally apologizing for being an hour or so late.
 * Ozy and Millie once updated every weekday, Monday through Friday, with minimal interruption. Towards the end, the comic updated irregularly; creator DC Simpson attributed this to waning interest. The series has now semi-officially ended: the main storyline has met a satisfying conclusion, but occasionally Simpson updates the site with a new drawing, and she has left open the possibility of more stories in the future.
 * Fans of Pawn had to wait 2 friggin years and for a site move before Anderson finally posted some new pages.
 * Peter Is the Wolf has a once-a-week schedule; due to the writer and artist working on the pages separately, both of them having other projects to work on, and the comic itself generating little to any revenue for the creators, it's a pretty frequent occurrence to find out that a page is being delayed for the week.
 * Planet Zebeth had a fairly regular MWF updating schedule, along with several bonus strips celebrating anniversaries and the like. Activity has dropped off, mostly due to Real Life, especially when the author gets new video games, which is often explicitly stated by Kabutroid himself to the other characters. It also doesn't help that he's had to re-install Linux several times throughout the run, which actually drove a few story arcs.
 * Pokémon-X insists on dating the comics on the days they should've come out (M-W-F update schedule)...which means that on March 20, 2009, the next comic to have gone up was dated December 1, 2008. Yeah.
 * To make things worse, the author has also begun writing the newsposts to go with when the comic should've come out. As of March 2010, the newsposts are anticipating the author's return to school in August 2009. This is especially ineffective in regards to announcing the author's appearances at conventions that happened half a year ago.
 * Lampshaded in the strip for August 17, 2009, which was posted on April 2, 2010.
 * Pokey the Penguin didn't see a single update in 2009. As of July 2010, the comic is updated daily again.
 * Post Nuke hasn't updated since New Year's Eve 2010. The author's still sending us "news" type updates, though.
 * "Punch an Pie" has it so bad that there was practically a revolt in the journal comments section. New strips were originally promised in November, after delays ongoing since May. In December 2011 it was announced that the artist would be taking over writing duties as well. In January the artist announced he was working on the strips and would restart once a buffer had been built up.
 * The Saga of Earthsong started out at two days a week before running into occasional hiatuses. It now painfully creeps ahead at about one page a week, made only the more excruciating because two years into the comic's storyline, a publishing deal led the author to decide to * completely* reboot the entire comic...publishing at an even slower pace then it originally started. So despite cutting a tremendous amount of filler and excess exposition, the update schedule means the comic has actually taken * longer* to get to the exact same point in the storyline that it was at when the story was rebooted.
 * Scandal Sheet! seems to alternate between periods where Troy Smith swears he's turned over a new leaf, has a Strip Buffer going, and sticks hard to a thrice-weekly schedule for a few months...then declines...leading to month-long (or longer) gaps in the archives - and then he's back, "No really, I mean it this time!" This would be far less frustrating if Smith didn't like to write enormous, extended story arcs that take months of real time to complete even with regular updates.
 * Although lately it seems the comic is more-or-less dead, with the last installment being dated Feb 16th 2009 and nothing since (despite posts from Troy claiming an imminent comic in April, then May, then late June, with very little heard from him since)
 * Secret of Mana Theater has had this happen a lot in the last few years. Heck, one of the bouts lasted almost three years before the series updates again. Now there seems to be another snag that's been hit, as the series hasn't updated again for the last four months.
 * Shadownova has missed a couple of updates in its MWF schedule so far but this is always followed by an apology, explanation and several pages uploaded at once to cover the missed updates.
 * Similarly, Something Positive's header used to read "Updated Five days a week Seven days a week A lot!"
 * Sort of. It said that because he sometimes updated more than once a day.
 * Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki, always erratic at best, has gotten even worse now that the artist has shifted her attention to her paywalled erotic comics site, not that you can blame someone for prioritizing something that helps pay the rent.
 * Unwinder's Tall Comics at one point promised updates every Saturday, but the gaps between comics are usually several weeks.
 * Venus Envy has had this. It hasn't updated since March 2010. Given the last strip posted, it may *never* update again...
 * Stage Select When Robot Masters Attack, suffers greatly of this.
 * Cheerfully acknowledged and lampshaded in this strip of VG Cats.
 * Hell, he's even altered the banner so that instead of saying "Updates Monday" the text after the VG Cats part changes to things randomly selected things like "Error 404, Update does not exist", "I can't believe it's not Updated" and "Probably Not Updated Today" and quite a few more. His girlfriend has claimed on her website that Scott actually does write around a comic per week, but is often dissatisfied and discards them.
 * Pretty much every comic on Wirepop slips into this, most of them never recovering. The schedule slip is all the more frustrating because it's a pay site, yet the paying subscriber gets the same varying commitments to a series as they'd get anywhere else for free. The site displays an update schedule on the front page, but its safe to say most of them will not update on the day given, if at all.
 * Fantasy Realms started off as a free comic, turned into a Wirepop launch series, gave a few months of regular updates, then fell into a black hole. It departed the site and has rarely updated despite multiple promises of new regular updates. A few notable mentions:
 * Similarly, Directions of Destiny ran three chapters, moved to Wirepop and started a reboot, then left Wirepop and stopped updating for two years before finally updating a few times in 2008. Yet another promised relaunch date has come and gone in January 2010.
 * In fact, the only comic that was there when the site launched that is still regularly updating and has done so without a single unannounced hiatus is Dan Hess' Realms of Ishikaze.
 * There was also a short series named Xamra that did at least complete its storyline, but not until after it had been rebooted into a completely different series and it still suffered from this the entire time it ran.
 * Both The Wotch and its spinoff Cheer! had a highly erratic schedule that could drop out for months at a time without notice, and even in normal times easily missed half their updates on a poor week. Then The Wotch crashed entirely, due to Creator Breakdown. It returned after more than a year with a new artist, if only to complete the orphaned story arc. In the meantime, Cheer! stopped updating only returning for one strip after more than a year before finally fading away
 * WTF Comics has, at times, gone for months without an update.
 * Xylia Tales. Classic example – regular updates gave way to irregular but frequent, then to less frequent, then a two-month pause, and then an official "hopefully" one-month hiatus... which never actually ended. The site is still very much alive, and BL Jacobs blogs, posts "concept art" (sketches) occasionally and keeps personal contact with her fans. But the last actual story page was posted on 12 January 2010.
 * This has happened to Zebra Girl so often that author Joe England changed the comic's header from reading "Updated Fridays" to "Updated Unpredictably".
 * Question Duck slipped for a month. Then, it then had the duck and main character show up with WildHair. For the third time in the comic's run, someone other than the duck speaks: Where have you been?

Web Original

 * The Bionicle web serials are affected by this heavily. Understandable, since Greg Farshtey only writes them in his free time, and doesn't even get paid to do it, but the story has many shortcomings because of this. Some serials were meant to last only for half a year, but then ran through the whole year, a lead-in to a Direct to Video movie came out after the film, and many, many, many plot lines are left hanging, with seemingly new ones introduced in each chapter. At times, other media, including on-line comics suffer through the same deal. What more, the last comic still hasn't been uploaded, even though the Bionicle toy line has ended!
 * When the serials first began in '07, each week regularly had one or two chapters to offer. As of this edit (Dec 2011), the last update is half a year old (and even that was originally planned to be posted around April '10), and the stories are nowhere near finished. The situation might seem salvageable, until you realize that this is the deadline LEGO set for Bionicle's story to conclude.
 * Seeing as both the writer and the former webmaster (who used to upload the written chapters and podcasts) have been moved onto other projects, and a new law keeps them from getting in touch with the fanbase on-line, fans have by now stopped waiting for updates. The writer also leads a busy family life, and while not exactly worthy of a Creator Breakdown designation, he has expressed grief over the toyline ending, and even held off from watching the final Bio-movie. These are no conditions for creative writing. Suspiciously, LEGO still hasn't deleted the website, so there's that for a glimmer of hope.
 * Alice and Kev, the Sims 3 Reality Webcomic Thing, was updated regularly until the proprietor admitted a Creator Breakdown and abolished his schedule... at which time, posts ceased entirely. After about a month or two, he continued updating up to the blog concluded its story.
 * Avatar the Abridged Series has come to a grinding halt, four episodes short of completing the first season. The last episode was sometime in 2009. The author GanXingba put out a small clip of a scene from the second season, and hinted at possibly doings shorts like that instead of full episodes. That is a bit of a letdown.
 * The Best Page in The Universe! Initially, Maddox would update his site on a weekly to monthly basis. Now, it's almost a running joke, with updates coming biannually at best. As of January 2010, there has only been one update for the whole year of 2009. Maddox himself is well aware of this, often teasing his readers with comments like, "Now that my book has been published, I can get back to regularly not updating my site".
 * Team Four Star's Dragonball Z The Abridged Series normally has no set schedule but has flirted with this trope in the past. The team announced that episodes 7 through 9 would all be uploaded before the end of 2008, but only episode 7 was released during the last week of the year, with episode 8 coming a month later and episode 9 a month after that. Later, it was announced that episode 10 would be split into separate videos to be uploaded over the course of a week. Episode 10 Part 2 (of 3) was uploaded about two weeks after Part 1, and the prior announcement made by Team Four Star was "mysteriously" deleted in the interim. Since then, the team has made no promises regarding release dates, presumably having learned their lesson from these instances.
 * Eric Conveys an Emotion's last update was on April 1, 2008. But the last time he updated with an emotion was August 10, 2004.
 * Gaia Online's Evolving Items are notorious for this. Since the site never officially releases a schedule or declares when the next evolution of any given item will occur, they're free to ignore complaints about the lack of updates. This causes TONS of Internet Backdraft when users (who pay real, actual money for the items in question) express their outrage on the site. The most egregious of these are probably "The Case of Pietro", jokingly named "The Cold Case of Pietro" by its own creator due to lack of updates, and the Kottan Bell, which saw a 75% drop in its marketplace value because of the several months-long wait between evolutions, stuck on phases with dull items. The Catastrophe! item has evolved twice, with the latest evolution having happened in September of '09.
 * Justified in the last case, in that Catastrophe is a $0.99 EI that is specifically billed as a side-project with occasional unannounced updates (there have been four 'evolutions' thus far, only one advertised) and, unlike most E Is, has no Generations. The update schedule for most items is "once the art is finished." The update schedule for Catastrophe is "when I feel like it/when I've got absolutely nothing else to do except eat and sleep."
 * Happy Tree Friends has also taken this to ridiculous extremes. The third "season" started in 2007 and has only had 15 episodes, with three in 2010. The only uploads since October have been mini-episodes or compilations.
 * Originally, the Homestar Runner website was updated with new material twice a week. However, the creators gradually dropped back to every Monday, then to once a week as their schedule dictated, to "if we're putting up anything new we'll let you know three days in advance". This eventually led to an unannounced hiatus of several months in late spring/early summer 2006 (possibly new baby related, like a similar break in 2007), after which they went back on a mostly-weekly schedule.
 * As of April 12, 2010, they haven't properly updated since November. They didn't even do a Christmas toon, but they did add and subsequently remove more links to their store, and celebrated Trogday (Trogdor's anniversary) and April Fools' with a parody intro and a new main page based on it.
 * They did announce in December that one of The Brothers had a new baby (explaining the lack of Decemberween toon). Presumably the ongoing hiatus is similarly related to their growing family concerns.
 * Chris Bores, aka The Irate Gamer, took this to ridiculous extremes, in part due to his Attention Deficit Creator Disorder. In 2009, he only released two retro reviews, three videos on "video game history", and five "Neo" reviews. In 2010, he's released even fewer.
 * In 2011, things are slightly looking up. Though attention seems to have shifted away from his video game content towards a series covering the 80s. Confusing since he's boasted about an "epic storyline" for his retro reviews yet he only put out three videos involving it.
 * Merlin's Revenge: The first game was released around 2000, and the sequel a couple of years later. The members were told that the release date for Merlin's Revenge 3 would be Christmas 2005. This got pushed back a couple of years, to the point of fanbase revolt. In 2007, the developer took an indefinite break from the series, and we still don't have the fourth game. Even though in 2006 there were strictly weekly updates, they too vanished in mid-2007.
 * The "weekly" Muggle Net Caption Contest has run for months a few times.
 * Super. Mario. Bros. Z. The creator initially made a new episode every 2 1/2 months or so. Then he wound up taking a year and a half to release Episode 7. It took another year or so for Episode 8 to come out.
 * And there was that incident where a troll harassed him to the point where he temporarily canceled the series. The troll went on to brag about it... to his dismay.
 * Part of this is because the quality and length of the episodes have both increased drastically since the beginning. When the creator is packing in roughly six times the material per episode and spending time doing custom sprites, artwork, 3-D models, etc., it's going to take more time. Still doesn't account for that year-and-a-half break, though.
 * After a long 2-year hiatus between episodes 8 and 9, episode 9 is finally back in production.
 * Many of the contributors to That Guy With The Glasses have trouble keeping to a schedule.
 * Marz Gurl can be erratic with her output. Though she has escaped this and is putting out weekly content.
 * The Nostalgia Chick for a while didn't put much out because she was filming and editing her graduate thesis.
 * The Nostalgia Critic himself used to have increasingly erratic updates due to his computer. After the first donation drive, he got a new one and had no problems until December 2011, when he had a computer virus.
 * The most notorious example is That Chick with the Goggles, who has put out only two videos since January 2009 (and only five videos before then, since joining in September 2008). Some of it was justified by computer problems, but she eventually left the site in 2011.
 * Spoony started suffering some slippage late in 2010, affecting his regular output as well as Wrestle! Wrestle!. After a while he revealed that it was because he was seeking treatment for a rather nasty heart condition, and viewers were willing to forgive. Well, most viewers, anyway.
 * There she is! step 2 took 2 years to come out, then step 3 took 3 years, where it ended as the next step only took a few months to come out, and the last step was even shorter as it only took 2 months to come out.
 * Vote Up a Campaign Setting once promised to be released in "Spring 2009." Over a year later... it may not be Vaporware yet, but that's probably due to fan dedication to the discussion threads.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series has slowly reduced in updates. When the third season started, several episodes were supposed to be released over a month's period, only for the season's first episode to be followed by a two-month break. Little Kuriboh has started taking shots at himself for his slow update speed.
 * Word of God was that LK's frequent tours of various anime-cons across the United States and the UK caused him to fall behind on production. In a radio interview, Billany's promised that there will be a lot more updates in 2011 as he's not planning on such a tour for the foreseeable future.
 * StarFox008's Let's Play of Super Mario World Chaos CompleXX ended up lying dormant for five months between the semi-final and final episodes, but that was because he was gathering the requisite beverage ingredients.
 * The third episode of Mr. Mendo's Hack Attack came about eight months after the second.
 * The Yogscast and Total Biscuit had promised to release a pair of episodes of their Magicka co-op Let's Play on YouTube each Friday and Saturday, or Saturday and Sunday if they were slightly delayed; the three had increasingly busy schedules starting after Part 8, and they slowed down release to the point that some weeks had no episodes or only a single episode. Total Biscuit explained that he had to do the editing and that Part 14 had severe audio issues, which still weren't fixed when the episode was released two months after recording.
 * The Sims 2 Machinomic Strangetown, Here we Come hasn't been updated since March 2010.
 * Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Abridgerty was progressively moving towards this trope. It has currently not been updated since April.
 * True Capitalist tends to stop broadcasting for a few days after especially trollish episodes, usually as a sort of prolonged Rage Quit, although sometimes it's for other reasons.
 * Tends to happen in Chaos Fighters as the creator would stop working on main series installments during August and November because of working on Web Series Writing Month and National Novel Writing Month entries. In addition, the main series suffered from this trope twice. First is from August 2010 to July 2011 and the second is December 2011 until February 2012.

Western Animation

 * All Grown Up!!: The fourth season took two years to air. Not just that, but there was 11 months between the airing of that seasons premiere and the next episode, and a year between the second and third episode of that season. As well as a 9 month gap between the seventh and eight episodes of the fifth (and final) season.
 * Ankama, the producers of Wakfu have serious deadline issues. Firstly, the show was meant to be the The Cartoon Of The Game only the game itself has been in closed beta for years. Secondly, the first season aired with significant gaps between episodes, sometimes as long as three months, because Ankama couldn't get it ready on time. Their deadline issues seem to be motivated by perfectionism rather than laziness, given the consistent quality when they do release something.
 * While true reasons for John Kricfalusi's firing from the production of The Ren and Stimpy Show remain vague, there are rumours going around that he would purposefully slow down the process of making episodes, so the censors would have less time to go over them. This is also supported by the fact that the Adult Party Cartoon spinoff was cancelled by Spike TV after a month of airtime because he only managed to produce 3 out of 9 episodes on time.
 * FWIW, Ren and Stimpy's first season ended with only 6 episodes, while the first seasons of Doug and Rugrats before it and Rocko's Modern Life after ended with the standard 13.
 * Parodied by The Simpsons when one of the nominees for "Outstanding Writing in a Cartoon Series" is the season premiere of Ren and Stimpy. The clip isn't done yet.
 * The Fairly OddParents seems to have been the victim of this. 2011 was supposed to be a year long celebration of its tenth anniversary, with "specials every month and new episodes". By April, nothing of the sort had happened. In addition, FOP was very rarely aired in 2010 and a number of episodes from the seventh season have yet to be aired despite the fact that the season premiere for the eighth season has been aired. In fact, it could be argued that in addition to the Schedule Slip The Fairly OddParents is now being Screwed by the Network.
 * Hey Arnold!'s last season took 3 years to finish.

Exceptions

 * 1/0 never missed a day in its 1,000 comic run, and Tailsteak tells the characters that he does not take breaks.
 * The Abominable Charles Christopher updates once a week, every week, Wednesdays, and has never missed an update.
 * And Shine Heaven Now has remained pretty much consistent since it started seven years ago (started five days a week, later expanded to six), delays only happening when the host site, Comic Genesis, goes crack.
 * Which got pointed out by Jon Stewart here.
 * Angband Tales From the Pit started with the plan to update three days a week. During its five-year run, the only deviation from that came when the author decided his Strip Buffer was too big; for the next year or so, it updated five days a week instead.
 * Arthur, King of Time and Space has updated seven days a week, without missing a strip, since May 21, 2004. There are trade-offs involved; the art style varies wildly depending on how much the deadline is looming when the artist starts work.
 * HC Bailly updates every day, taking a day off on occasion (Usually after episode 50 or a massive turn in plot, whichever comes first), but even then he at least updates his side LP.
 * For the last three years Better Days has only ever missed one of the Monday/Friday updates due to a server crash, probably due to its own buffer. It also possibly has to do with the fact that most of the pornographic art folios that the writer sells are based on the Better Days universe, thus making it more lucrative to keep regular.
 * In its entire seven-plus year run (a little more than 2500 days) of daily strips, Bob and George had only had two real scheduling lapses. One was when David Anez announced a hiatus to relaunch the comic early in its run, which lasted only nineteen days. The other was a gag where the comic was intentionally not updated for one day, and the characters immediately complained about it in the next strip. Any other schedule slips (usually caused by server issues), would result in a double update next time, meaning you still got a total of seven strips out of a week.
 * And with the server problems he constantly had over the years, Dave sometimes had to do those triple updates just so that he could make up for a meltdown.
 * It should be noted that the way the strip turned out was itself the result of a schedule slip to launching his original comic plan, but the Mega Man filler strips ended up being more popular so transposed the titular characters into them.
 * Brat-Halla has yet to miss an update.
 * Brawl in the Family tends to avoid this for the most part, too. Creator Matthew Taranto often slows down during holidays, but only because he likes to make enormous elaborate comics that have musical accompaniment. Leading up to Christmas 2010, he produced three.
 * Chuggaaconroy's Let's Plays avoid Schedule Slip very well, updating once every day consistently. When he does fall behind, he always says so in the videos before he takes a break, but other than the occasional unforeseen problem, breaks between LPs, and his temporary YouTube ban in July 2010, he never misses a day.
 * Happens some in Collar 6, but not to a ridiculous extent. Since the comic began, every month has had between 7 and 16 strips, averaging about 10.
 * Commissioned started with a three-times-a-week schedule, but slowly evolved to the now strip-per-day schedule. With art evolution. And multiple storylines.
 * Say what you want about Ctrl Alt Del, it hasn't missed an update in years. That said, Chef Brian was invented entirely due to an almost-schedule-slip.
 * CAD Sillies, on the other hand... Lets just say that asking when they're updated is a touchy subject on the forums.
 * Cinema Bums updates regularly without fail, but benefits from a slightly less taxing Monday/Thursday schedule.
 * Cyanide & Happiness updates every single day. This probably because it's a Dead Baby Comedy Stick Figure Comic. Written by four different guys.
 * The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge is an ongoing contest to see whose webcomic can go the longest without missing an update (required updates are Mondays through Fridays). Out of 56 original contestants on February 28, 2005, four are left. (Arthur, King of Time and Space was eliminated in June 2008, but not for missing an update; it was for having two single-panel strips too close together.)
 * Darths and Droids stays on schedule no matter what. Probably because the author set things up so it auto-updates and just takes the appropriate comic from the buffer. Hence, he could (and did) go on vacation for a few weeks and not have any problems.
 * The Descendants started with a schedule listed as "whenever the hell I feel like it", which included anything from two pages a week to two five-page chapters in a week. It later changed to "Weekly" before the site was redesigned with a rather groveling newspost from the author saying the fans "deserved better". Since then, the site gone through two years with a banner proclaiming "Updated Mondays with at least 5 pages" and has stuck to it.
 * The Devils Panties updates every day with very few exceptions since late 2001.
 * Dominic Deegan keeps a rigorous seven-days-a-week schedule, even after switching from four panels to eight at one point and introducing colored Sunday strips. That said, the only time this is broken is when creator Mookie announces his plans to attend an anime convention or two. And even then, he announces his plans - and any alterations to his updating schedule - several weeks in advance.
 * With the start of 2009, Mookie has adopted a Monday-through-Friday schedule instead, likewise kept updated on time.
 * Double-U Tea F used to be updated sporadically, as in "once a month if you're lucky" sporadically. That changed at the beginning of 2010, as the comic has stuck to a consistent Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday update schedule, without a slip, ever since. The author's other comic, Inner Fire, was created during this time, and has never missed its scheduled update on Friday.
 * The original run of Dragon Tails had 2000 consecutive daily comics before the author ended the strip. Perhaps ironic, given that since its reboot, it has suffered a great deal from this trope.
 * Drowtales has kept on schedule in airing one page a day since the reorganising, and has missed on this schedule EXACTLY once, when the artists left home before posting the strip. The strip in question was up by the end of the day.
 * Both of Sarah Ellerton's narrative comics, Inverloch and The Phoenix Requiem, have been known for updating consistently to completion on the days promised. The author keeps a steady buffer of strips to ensure that real life never intrudes on her update schedule. Inverloch ran from 2003 to 2007, and The Phoenix Requiem began in 2007 a few months after the end of Inverloch and completed in 2011. The author's next project isn't yet known, though in the middle of The Phoenix Requiem, she also worked as the artist on Bobby Crosby's Dreamless.
 * Ryan Smith successfully completed the entire nine-year run of Funny Farm (another Daily Grind contender), taking the story from gag-based beginnings to densely-plotted conclusion while keeping to the published M-F or 7-day schedule throughout.
 * Girl Genius updates precisely at midnight, three days a week, without fail. The art doesn't seem to suffer much for it, either. It probably helps that the Foglios had been professional artists for 20 years before taking their comic to the web.
 * No, seriously - WITHOUT FAIL. Their colourist had a freaking heart attack, and the only noticeable change was that the comic was in grayscale until he was better. Then he went back to colour what he missed, without missing a beat on the new material, either. When these folks make a schedule, they damn well KEEP that schedule!
 * Tom Siddell built up a three-month Strip Buffer prior to launching Gunnerkrigg Court and has maintained it to this day. Even after switching from a twice-a-week schedule to a three-times-a-week schedule (in early 2007), the comic still hasn't missed an update.
 * TL Welker's Heartcore has maintained a very consistent schedule for as long as it has run, with only very few slips (and plenty of forewarning ahead of those slips).
 * And let's give a big hand to Bill Holbrook, who currently writes three separate comics (Safe Havens, On The Fast Track, and Kevin and Kell) and has yet to miss an update. The first two are both print comics, complete with editors, which probably help keep him disciplined, but the third was purely on the web when it started in 1995 (but now features in the Atlanta Journal Constitution), and upped from five-a-week to daily around 2000. Needless to say, though, Bill is a professional cartoonist of the first order, and was back when he launched Kevin and Kell.
 * Jayden and Crusader has updated every monday at precisely midnight GMT since September 8, and used to update every Monday and Friday since May. One slip up occurred when the artist missed the update by 8 hours in December.
 * This comic suffered a slip of 2 days on 30 March 09, when a problem with the comic uploader delayed the comic, ruining what was a pretty good run. Most ironic was that this was a comic that the creator had put up in his buffer 3 weeks ago, proving that a strip buffer does not always help
 * As far as most of us recall, Keychain of Creation hasn't significantly missed any updates.
 * It's having a 2 week break for Christmas 2010, though. Announced in advance.
 * But sadly, Jukashi started slipping heavily - almost every comic is late and sometimes the problem escalates to entirely missed strips.
 * Irregular Webcomic is an inversion. It started on an irregular schedule, hence the name... but quickly settled into daily updates.
 * The updates to Juathuur went from 5 to 3 a week thanks to every panel now being in color rather than occasional special panels. However, the updates are still very punctual in this regard, and by no means below average by most web comic updates rates.
 * Last Res0rt, despite having a significantly slower once-a-week schedule to compensate, is notorious for keeping buffers several-months long in order to cover updates during college semesters (when considerably less time can be spent on the comic for obvious reasons).
 * However, it did have one heck of a hiatus / slew of guest strips in early 2010.
 * Legostar Galactica never misses an update and even has time to run a second-string expanded universe comic on weekends due to its one year's worth of buffer.
 * Least I Could Do and Looking for Group, made by Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza, miss their updates by an hour tops, and if they do, the artist makes a thread on the forums to apologise.
 * They also upped LICD to daily from six times a week.
 * Seven, with Sunday's strip being a 'special' one, with Rayne as a kid, called Least I Could Do Beginnings. The quality of both strips is consistently high.
 * Sohmer seems to think of webcomic-makers without his skill of in-timeness pretty negatively, as seen in the Author Tract here.
 * Loading Ready Run can be counted on to maintain their schedule(s). Since they began in 2003, the number of late updates has been vanishingly small, and not a week has gone by that a video hasn't been posted.
 * In addition, the move to The Escapist means that LRR content is submitted, then posted by the Escapist staff per an actual contract. Add in Unskippable and ENN, and the LRR crew are now - reliably - posting video content as often as many webcomics post cartoons.
 * Man-Man updates three times a week since 2003, and this editor has never seen a missed update.
 * In February 2009, the comic finished. As far as this editor knows, it never missed an update.
 * Minus had 130 strips and ran for just about that many weeks.
 * Misfile keeps true to the "updated every weekday" statement.
 * The only thing that can stop Chris from posting a comic is his wife having a kid.
 * MS Paint Adventures actually manages to invert this trope: Andrew Hussie once posted that he would be busy and update less than usual for the next few days. Then he posted eighty new Homestuck pages in the next seven days. Let's just say that it's quite possibly the fastest-updating webcomic in existence.
 * Homestuck's updating schedule is weird. Hussie usually updates with one to several pages at least once or twice a day. But nobody knows when, leading to people hovering around the site and others shouting "UPDATE!" on Image Boards. Homestuck fans have become so spoiled by the schedule that Hussie not posting something in a day makes people antsy (or suspect that something is about to happen).
 * By his own standards, he had a heavy schedule slip in spring '11 due to a combination of mild burnout and a series of technical problems and moving, in addition to cons. However, the site still updated more frequently than daily comics. Because of the sheer insanity of Andrew's work schedule, the site has become the largest webcomic in existence despite being only about 3 years old.
 * The end of Act 5 animation's delay played this trope straight, to the point that its release date ended up falling on an Arc Number date a month later than its original projected completion estimate. He explained quite at length why this was so. That delay, and the one following it in anticipation for the launch of Act 6, was pretty much enough to undo the fandom's spoilt approach to updates at least temporarily.
 * Narbonic. Six days a week, one weekend special, every week, six years, with rare, rare exceptions.
 * Nukees has held to three updates a week for a decade straight. Looks much the same, though.
 * Penny Arcade is put out on a schedule. While they used to be very late on it, now they might be a few minutes late, or a few minutes early, and Tycho might not get his newspost up at the same time as the strip, but they will update Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, barring everything except total computer failure while they're away from home (and they still manage to get it up the next day). This is even more remarkable when you consider that, being topical, they can't have a buffer.
 * It bears mentioning that when they suffered total computer failure when they were at home, not only did the strip go up on time it made fun of the cartoonists themselves for not keeping backups. Other minor distractions that do not affect the strip's update schedule include the births of their children.
 * They ran a series of guest strips in order to keep up their schedule—because Krahulik caught swine flu and was physically unable to lift a pen.
 * Questionable Content and Scary Go Round are renowned for updating every weekday without fail, and maintaining a consistent level of quality in art and writing.
 * Well, mostly consistent.
 * Gina Biggs, author of Red String, deserves mention for having maintained a strict MWF schedule most of the way through 37 chapters (plus two side-stories)... then upped the ante with an update every weekday (plus art/filler on Fridays).
 * As of January 2011, it returned to a MWF schedule (with the Sketch Friday from the daily schedule being retained), due to Gina becoming pregnant.
 * Rock,, Paper, Cynic, though it sometimes posts later in the day, hasn't missed an update since it started in 2008 (though it's announced a switch from 3 to 5 back to 3 weekly posts).
 * And where does Sabrina Online fall in all of this? While the output level varies, Eric W. Schwartz has kept to the same published schedule since September 1996: at least one new strip, on the first of each month. Without fail.
 * Yes. At least one four panel, black and white, low-detail strip a month. ... Probably only a very technical adherence to not schedule slipping.
 * To put this in perspective, the 500th Sabrina Online comic was posted in April 2009, twelve and a half years after the first comic appeared. The monthly updates generally include between two and, on rare occasions, five comics, working out to an average of around 0.76 comics per week.
 * Nobody's claiming that it's an impressive schedule, only that it is published and adhered to.
 * Schlock Mercenary has had a new strip posted every single day since it started on June 12, 2000, all but one of them being within the first hour or two of the day. The one time it was a few hours late? It was caused by the server farm on which it was hosted exploding, literally, with the author's blog being used to post the new strip while the hosting company was recovering.
 * Silent Hill: Promise an Interactive Comic Fan Sequel to Silent Hill 2 updates daily, and has not missed a day since it began in June 2010.
 * Shortpacked is a weird example. It used to have a regular MWF schedule. Then he started to slip. Soon he started posting every weekday with occasional misses (though he still avoided long gaps between updates). Now, as of April, 2010, he has posted one comic a day Mondy-Friday on a perfect schedule since October 2008.
 * In late 2010 he had a few guest strips fill in for him. Why? First he and his wife were going to visit family for the holidays. Then they were going on the honeymoon they should've gone on 2 years before. His other comic, Dumbing Of Age, had a fairly large buffer, so it kept a normal schedule for the whole time.
 * And before Shortpacked, he did Roomies! and It's Walky!, with Roomies! starting out in a college paper in 1997. And for a while during Shortpacked!, he did Joyce and Walky! on Tuesday/Thursday for subscribers, and Saturday for free. With rare exceptions, he's been doing at least three strips a week for the last fourteen years.
 * Slightly Damned updates once a week. If you do the math, there's actually one point two comics per week since it started in March 2004, the result of several donation drives that were rewarded with extra updates (once the author put up three pages in one day), and otherwise sticking to the schedule: it may be several days late, but bygummit, it's going to get done! And considering the size and quality of the average webcomic strip, that's particularly impressive.
 * And when there might be a slip, Chu's polite enough to let you know what's up: she announced at the end of July 2009 that the comic will be updated sporadically, if at all, during the month of August due to some life changing events.
 * Sluggy Freelance has had an update for pretty much every single day since it began in 1997, although cartoonist Pete Abrams did have some help thanks to other cartoonists. Furthermore, while much of its life had updates for 7 days a week, eventually Abrams dropped Saturdays and ran two subsequent series of guest strips. After the second series ended, Saturdays turned into "No content Saturdays", which was actually a series of one-panel gags about the lack of content. Saturdays, and now Sundays as well, finally turned into "fan art" days, dropping the number of actual story days to 5. So basically, something is always updated on the site, but the number of story-related updates has dropped over time.
 * Surviving The World: Updates daily, hasn't missed a comic since its first strip in 2008.
 * The Tao of Geek: Not an exceptional webcomic, but it's put out a strip a day six days a week for several years, and that's saying something.
 * Many of the That Guy With The Glasses talent have an admirable ability to update on a consistent schedule.
 * Two of the site's biggest draws, That Guy himself and Linkara always post at least one video a week. Nostalgia Critic on Tuesdays and Linkara on Mondays.
 * Funnily enough Linkara's History of Power Rangers retrospect, which he said at the start never had a set release schedule, had so many people asking and complaining about the series schedule that he spent the first 6 minutes of the HOPR review for Wild Force explaining in very clear terms exactly why he didn't have one. Interestingly enough a lot of explosions and violence played in the clips over this voice over (it was footage from his previous review of Time Force, similar to what he did for his reviews of Lost Galaxy and Lightspeed Rescue). In retrospect the time he spent out of previous videos to plead with the fans NOT to ask about the release schedule anymore make a lot more sense now.
 * Some of the contributors like Noah Antwiler, The Spoony One, don't have a precise "schedule" per se, but they still post regularly. Despite delaying the sequels to a couple of review series (particularly Final Fantasy VIII and X), put up at least a vlog, review, or something of interest instead. Despite no having an actual schedule he still updates regularly, and he has been doing this continuously for the last couple of years, despite the site crashing in 2009. However, during the last few months when he got sick, there have been a few weeks of understandable schedule slip (one of which concerned him going to a hospital Emergency Room), and he still got on with his vlogs and even apologized for the lack of updates on more than one occasion. However, having a slightly Bipolar Fanbase, you still have people complaining about the lack of updates.
 * User Friendly has updated daily for ten years straight. He actually calculated how many comics he'd made at that point, too.
 * Currently, the comic is on hiatus due to deaths in the author's family. It still updates daily with a strip from the archive.
 * As of this writing, it's gone straight from one to the other. Just over twelve years without missing a day, followed by a currently ten month and counting hiatus. The author has also stated that IF it comes back in November 2010, it'd likely be a much more infrequent update schedule.
 * Xkcd updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, usually within seconds (!) of midnight.
 * Sometimes it updates more often, usually during a story arc (Yes, xkcd does have occasional story arcs)
 * Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has been running since May 2006 and has only missed one of its daily updates, due to the birth of the author's first child. (He did a double update the next day.)
 * Zero Punctuation always has a new episode up on Wednesday afternoon.
 * Better than that, they're always uploaded within five minutes of noon EST.
 * The Zombie Hunters updates weekly, and has done so for several years. Also includes occasional Thursday updates. While this strip updates slower than the others mentioned here, it is notable in that only Phil Foglio's strip Girl Genius can compare in terms of strip size and quality of artwork- and Foglio himself has over 20 years' experience advantage over the artist of The Zombie Hunters.
 * They're not actually webcomics, but the fanfiction series Ultimate Sleepwalker: The New Dreams and Ultimate Spider-Woman: Change With the Light have both maintained a regular schedule of about one issue a month each since they were uploaded to Fanfiction.net.
 * SF Debris has a new episode of Star Trek every Saturday, and re-uploads at least one other day a week, along with various other properties on other days. He only misses updates when he takes pre-announced breaks, or when a tornado tears through his front yard and knocks out his power.