Feel Like Cheapening Your Webcomic?

Well, good news, all you have to do is decide to do guest strips! You all know what I'm talking about, right? You have an awesome webcomic, then if you decide to take a vacation or something, rather than simply taking a break, you get other artists to write the comic for you, using your carefully created characters, settings, and plot points. My new favorite comic (www.questionablecontent.net) is the reason I bring this up. It is basically a 100% continuity strip with incredibly well thought out characters, snappy dialogue, and fantastic plot lines. This, however, makes for a not fun time when the continuity is broken. The artist (Jeph Jacques) occasionally does panels at cons and the like and rather than taking a week long break, institutes "QC guest week". These are the bane of my existence. I hate them about as much as I hate genocide.
When you have characters that have as dynamic personalities as the cast of QC it is dangerous to ever relinquish control (even though the guest strips don't have any bearing on the current plot line) because the bottom line is that no one but the creator will be able to write them well. Instead they are demoted to 2 dimensional caricatures of what some other hack seems to think the characters should be. The strips simply devolve into nonsense as everything familiar that we know and love about it is burned to a charred husk right before our eyes and the individual comics start to look like the schlock that appears all over the internet. The vast graveyard of shitty comics that nobody reads anyway. Real Life Comics is also guilty of this from time to time, and what's worse is that the artist (Greg Dean) decides that, in an effort to reach out to his readers, he will take their submissions. This seems like a fun and inclusive idea, but ignores the crucial fact that lots of people have an IQ with a shoe size to match and no real sense of how to write, particularly anything funny. I love webcomics, but have no desire to start my own until I feel that my writing is at a good level and I have a concept that will work and grab readers. Most people recognize this, that's why we read comics instead of make them: We rely on other, better people, to be funny FOR us.
Mr. Jacques and Mr. Dean, if this ever comes to your attention I beg of you: PLEASE stop letting 2-bit "artists" mangle your creation that so many people have come to love. Penny Arcade, Least I Could Do, Control Alt Delete, and Nothing Nice To Say (as well as a host of other comics) don't do guest strips and simply choose to let the strip lie dormant until they can man the helm once more. I certainly wouldn't care if the strips had to take a week or two hiatus while your batteries recharged or you reached out to your fanbases. Nothing saddens me more than these pitiful wastes of space. If I may steal a line from Penny Arcade (originally used to describe the games Sega has released in the last decade, but just as applicable here), Guest Strips "are like the videos terrorists release. The characters you love draped in rags and humiliated." Need something shorter? "[Guest Strips] are MURDER PORN. Their legendary properties are getting fucked and murdered."