i wrote a first draft of this comic in 2009, which means that "maybe there's some downsides to this here internet thing" thing would've been WILDLY PRESCIENT, if only i'd published it then! but i NEVER DID

January 29th, 2025: So I mentioned last time how Jan let me know that we had a new character in Dinosaur Comics - and they have gone WONDERFULLY FURTHER and produced a timeline of new characters in Dinosaur Comics! And HERE IT IS:

2003: the standard crew of upper- and lowercase ASCII letters and digits (except 7), some classic punctuation: .,!?:;-"%()'* as well as some less obvious: &\+/=>[]‘’_®— including two sizes of middle dots: ·• and two extra letters: ligature æ and accented é. Also some Chinese characters in #70!
2004: 7 makes a late appearance, as well as some math symbols: π²ˣ, more punctuation: <| including fancy double quotes “” and another diacritic: ï
2005: more diacritics: çêñù and the ™ symbol
2006: two "special characters": #$ (as the password people call them), and new diacritics, including the first uppercase ones: ÉÜâ
2007: @ and ¡
2009: °
2010: ^× for scientific notation, and more Greek letters (we've already seen π): ίαειμοσ
2011: ±
2012: èó
2013: more Greek! άβγθκλνρςυω
2014: Áá ♪♫
2015: ~Æ
2016: ü and ╣
2017: à
2018: Ö and some emoji in #3326
2019: «» and Ê
2020: û
2021: ♯ aka "musical hash"
2022: Ç, the first Cyrillic letter И, and the set-theoretic symbol ∩
2024: ö and some emoji in #4174
2025: È (so far!)

I find it fascinating that with two exceptions, there's been a regular cadence of new characters every year. Who knows what the future will bring?? (SPOILER: New characters, ideally)

– Ryan