I have been a fan of Rich Burlew's webcomic Order of the Stick (OOTS) for many years. I have noticed over the past few years that I am waiting longer, on the average, between installments.

Knowing that Burlew has health problems, I decided to make this graph, which shows the counts of all installments having the same copyright year. I correlated bars on the graph with public announcements Burlew has made about his health.

The comic started out as a series of gags involving meta-humor about the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, but has evolved into an epic story with a rather intricate plot and diverse cast of characters. It is clearly approaching a climactic conclusion but still has a way to go.

I cannot say that the recent decline in productivity is a direct result of declining health, because Burlew's notifications over the past few years indicate that he has branched out into several other projects, mostly dealing with OOTS merchandise, so it may be that his health has deteriorated to a stable level and he now devotes less attention to the webcomic due to other activities going on.

Sources: (Source)

• https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html (examining the links for copyright dates)
• https://archive.org to examine prior versions of the https://giantitp comments page.

Tools used: (Tool) Web browser to gather data, Google Sheets to tabulate data and make graph, Google Slides to add callout labels to the graph.