April Annoyers

You're looking for an update, but I've got nothing except a rant at the moment. If nothing else, it is spell-checked.
Plenty of webcomics do something for April First. Unfortunately it ends up being a combination of stupid, boring and almost always plain annoying.

We all know that "End of Comic" announcements issued on April First are (with only 1 exception I know of) lame jokes. Any strip which features major plot changes, death of characters and/or characters acting obviously wrong are lame jokes. An April Fools joke can't even get past the boring/stupid layer unless you can actually fool someone with it.

Then there's the annoying area. Replacing your pages with a mock-up of the 404-error (let's face it, the only time this was ever funny was with Homestar Runner where they took the trouble to animate it into a short toon). The same goes for "suspended account" "page deleted" and so on. These are worse than the first group since they impair the functionality of the page. (For added annoyance, don't bother to remove the prank for days after)

I'm not saying it's all bad & I despise the 'holiday' (the preceding is not true, I do despise April Fools due to the number of fools on the prank-creating end). Elijah and Azuu was clever: the site was swapped with Halfway to Dead perfectly. The Wotch created a Dummy Comic with a perfectly believable strip. There's a significant difference between something clever or original and drawing a strip killing off your main character.

I don't mind comic-swaps. Some artists are very good at faking another's style or blending in perfectly with the story line. Gemini Bright is a good example. It was nearly a month since the last color strip so the difference in shading wasn't immediately obvious, plus the strip meshes with the previous in both story line and writing. If nothing else, a comic-swap can lead to a possible new artist to watch.