Introducing a new character

The following was asked in the Private Forum, and I thought the potential for discussion was so interesting that I wanted to pull it out front as a Site Post.

We're gearing up to introduce a new main character to [our strip]. We've introduced new characters in the past, but they've all been secondary characters, and as such, there wasn't much pressure to introduce them gradually or carefully because they could pop in and out the story without a ton of explanation. After all, it could be a few weeks or a month before you'd see them again, and they're by and large just gag engines.

So here's where things get a little complicated. We feel like introducing a new main character should be significant so that they're set apart from the secondary characters. The trouble is, we left story arcing behind last fall in favor of doing more self contained gags. We post once a week, and doing long-ish story lines is taxing on the readers' collective attention span and tedious for us. When we do a multi-part "story," it's usually two or three strips long, but absolutely no more than that. That said, my gut feeling with this new character thing is to do it gradually, have her pop up here and there at first, and slowly see more and more of her, but that's getting too far into story territory. It's a conundrum! So if you were working under these conditions, how would you go about introducing an important new main character?

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