Hey everyone, it’s been a while! There’s a lot to go over, so I’m going to keep things as simple as I can going forwards. 

Last winter, we made the decision to leave Hiveworks, who had been our publisher and host for almost the entire run of our comic. I won’t get into the multitude of reasons why we left, but you will get a more detailed account of why we left mid-January. Setting that aside, it took a really long time to get this website up and functional; it’s been more than ten years since I’ve had to design anything, and it turns out that wordpress is extremely different now, so there’s that. 

It also took a long time because we made the decision that, if we were having to remake this website from scratch, we may as well take the opportunity to upscale older pages in size, colour correct pages that were too dark and other major and minor changes. Browsers and phones can handle a lot more than they could 15 years ago and the internet is much faster than it was back then, so it seemed silly to tie ourselves down to a page size that we chose based purely on the year our first pages were made. 

UPDATE SCHEDULE IS CHANGING!

Previously we were updating once a week, which amounted to between four and five pages a month. When we started, I was absolutely making pages one at a time and uploading them the second they finished, but now that I’ve got 15 years of experience under my belt, I’ve been working in batches for the past decade or so just to streamline things and keep lighting consistent.

Way back, posting multiple updates on the same day was unthinkable–common wisdom was to keep people coming back every week so you could make those sweet, sweet ad dollars. You will note, as you are reading this, that as of this iteration, our website has NO ads! This is because ads have been tanking for years, and while the good old days before ad blockers were really good, the present state of ads essentially boils down to making your site ugly and slow for peanuts. 

Now that we are no longer beholden to Hiveworks, we are no longer beholden to ads, and now that there’s no need to encourage checking back multiple times a week for ad revenue, we can update in batches!

We will now be updating once every month, on the 15th, with a full batch of pages. A batch is generally a scene, and a scene is anywhere from three to seven pages–if it runs longer than that, it usually gets split into two five page batches for my sanity’s sake.

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

Oh boy, what hasn’t! So, I went through the entire archive and colour corrected things, lightened up pages that were too dark, fixed some visual inconsistencies, did some minor re-writes and also uh…redrew large parts of our earliest chapters. And all of chapter three. Here are some side-by-sides!

While it is true that some people really like to watch the evolution of a comic over the years, it is also true that the longer a narrative comic goes on, the wider the gap between past and present day art gets. You get stuck in a place where your earliest pages are still going to be a new reader’s first impression of your work, and if the art is so different from recent pages that it’s basically unrecognizable, then people aren’t necessarily going to stick around. That’s why what I did with chapters one and two was more of a compromise– I drew directly on top of the original pages and kept as many elements of the originals as I could after accounting for weird perspective and background decisions that made location unclear.

Chapter three had to be completely re-drawn and largely re-written for a lot of reasons, and most of them were the fact that I’d decided, now that I knew that Raine and Noh were going to be permanent additions to the cast, that Noh’s outfit was absolutely not something she would ever wear, and that Raine’s tattoos had made her really difficult to draw consistently for the entire time I’ve been drawing her, and I wanted to…not do that anymore. Making decisions now that will make things easier for me in the future is pretty high on my priority list!! It helps that it let me draw some really fun panels and some better characterization between Kait and Jack that made what was going on much easier to follow. 

Bonus, it also let me draw this panel and the entire sequence before and after it:

LOOKING FORWARD!

Going forward, my plan is to also mostly redraw chapter 5 and do some major re-writes to it. Maaaybe chapter 4 will get the same treatment. But beyond that, my plan is to make new pages, move forward with the story and slowly convert the older chapters into e-books.

I won’t be posting author’s notes on new pages with how our comics reader now works, but the plan is to use this blog more frequently and purposefully. Comments are still enabled on individual pages, and if you’re reading on your desktop, you can use your keyboard’s forward and back arrow keys to move back and forth, page by page, without having to mess around with your mouse. 

THANK YOU!

I want to thank everyone for their patience. This has been frustrating for us for many, many reasons, more of which will be explained on January 12th. All we want to do is make comics, and while having to remake this site from scratch felt like a setback, it was ultimately something that had to happen and I think we are much better off for having done it. 

I am relieved to be back to making new pages, and I hope that everyone who stuck around or comes back will enjoy all of the twists and turns and payoffs we have planned going forward. The current chapter will cap off at 45 pages, and will be the end of book 4. Book 5 will not be starting with a Sam and Max chapter, BUT it will be starting with something that I hope is just as fun to read!