In This Corner: By way of explanation

I love print. I'm so happy to be working at a newspaper. It's a daily miracle. All that work and all those raw materials formed into the events of the day, portable, high-rez, multi-function, information-rich -- a thing of usefulness and beauty.

But, it's a complicated process. A lot has to go right to make that newspaper. All the pieces need to fall into place at the right time -- or . . . well, the paper always gets printed and almost always gets delivered, but it sometimes, little bits of it aren't quite perfect.

This morning, for example. My comic has been in the paper every week for coming up on seven years. I've missed a few times and the comic has been inadvertently left out a few times, but mostly it's been in there. And I think at least one other time the electronic preview has been printed instead of the actual document.

Resulting in the poor quality result shown here (by all means, click for a closer view).

There are good excuses -- really good excuses this time. The paper is putting in a new production system involving software products from a couple different companies. And, while there have been bumps during the transition (which started in Features this week and will move to the rest of the paper before the end of next month), the new system seems to be working well.

But with my comic today, something happened. Don't know what. Don't know if it will happen again. But I'm sure that top people are working on the problem.

And if this happens again, I probably will write another excuse/explanation/apology like this one.