Since discovering it last week I have caught up with Branson Reese’s Swan Boy webcomic, chomping through eight years of daily strips.

I knew going in that the most recent episodes have a much different tone from the earliest ones, and it was fun to discover that this seems to have really only happened within the last year or so. Recent strips have rolled out full storylines with real resolutions, as opposed to anarchic gags that happen to cross multiple days. There are still anarchic gags aplenty; they’re just more engagingly framed, now.

It’s also a fun coincidence that Swan Boy presents a cohort of main characters all growing up together in real time—somewhat belatedly, starting at age 30—right after I noted how rare the phenomenon is in typical American comic strips. Fittingly, the longer storylines have allowed the strip to put more focus on the title character’s chosen family, one believable in its growth and change despite the violent absurdities that surround it.

Beyond everything else I’ve said about it, Swan Boy has a clean website, a prominent RSS feed, and lovingly unpretentious handling of themes around queerness and identity. I like this strip an awful lot and I’m gonna stick with it.