Ok, most of the work for San Diego is done. I still have to do things like figuring out how to attach certain pieces together, but on the whole the artwork phase is largely over. Mainly just cause we're essentially out of time. I'll be putting together some stuff for postcards this week, which we'll have at the table as giveaways. I was hoping to have some poster type stuff too, but it just ain't gonna happen this time around.

I'm going to sit down tonight though and finish up the last of the stickers I should have had done weeks ago. I apologize to the people waiting for them, I've had to use up so much time on the con stuff that I've fallen behind on stickers. The good news is that I've only got 5 stickers left to do, so I should be caught up tonight. I'll be mailing out all pending stickers tomorrow morning, so if you've been waiting here they come!

On that note, if you're planning to donate by ordering stickers before the con feel free to do so. I'll have some free time to do them now. We really appreciate the help too, this all goes to food right now :)

Oh and since I forgot to mention this last week.

If you don't already read Life With Leslie, you should probably get going now. The first year and change of Les McClaine's daily Journal strip is finally available in print, and should be in my impatient hands shortly.

I'm in awe of just how many online comics are coming out with compilation books this year. It's incredibly encouraging to see this artistic field growing the way it has over the past few years. I'm still a ways from having enough material to justify a book myself, but this time next year you'll most likely be able to get something along those lines.

Incidentally the moon storyline here will be wrapping up at some point soon after San Diego. After which point there will be a relatively minor relaunch of the strip as a whole. You won't see a change as drastic as the one last year when I switched to the look and characters you know now, but continuity will be somewhat reset. Basically when I started this strip in March of last year I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. The reset in October was meant to provide a solid direction for the strip, and on the whole it has. Unfortunately I've been pacing it like a daily strip, but updating it on a weekly basis. And because of that I haven't developed things as well as I'd hoped to. Certainly not as fast anyway. The moon strips have suffered from heavy story editing, there was a lot of things that were supposed to be hap penning in between the strips you've seen, but I cut them down to move things forward. That doesn't thrill me, to say the least. The next few strips are going to try to fill in some of the gaps, but I've pulled some of the other stuff out completely to be used at such point as I can do this more than once a week.

That is my plan, long term. To be able to do this strip 3-5 times a week. And seeing strips like Goats and Something Positive becoming self-sufficient is again incredibly encouraging. I'm nowhere near that level yet, and even if I were to quit my day job tomorrow I doubt I'd be ready to produce on that schedule. But it gives me hope that someday I might be able to do this full-time.

So I'll be moving towards more self-contained strips, so as not to lose so much momentum with the weekly update schedule I'm currently operating under. And since in the many months since this current incarnation started I've changed my mind about a few of the design and layout choices I made for the setting, I'll be tweaking things here and there. There's only a couple characters that're gonna get affected by the reset personality-wise. But trust me that it'll be for the best, and no it's not one of the main characters. Me, AL, and Steve are pretty much just the way we want us ;) This is more to address things I rushed into in the beginning, and designed rather half-ass. Honestly most of it is fairly behind the scenes stuff you haven't seen yet anyway. But regardless, I'll be giving the whole rug a good shaking in the coming months...

Here's to progress!

UPDATE: There's no way for me to really give you an idea yet of how cool this looks printed out in high res. It's taken weeks of my life, but I'm so glad now that I did this in Illustrator that it's all worth it :) The final standee I think came out to 15 or 16 pieces, all multi-layered so to give a 3-D effect. The head is on a different piece of foamcore than the body, the power cell on a piece behind that, etc... All in all this things' gonna be 30 inches from legtip to legtip, and should fill about half the table at the con. Next year it'll be full size for sure, there's just no room for it this year. I'll have more pics once it's actually assembled.

I'm hoping to have time for one of these featuring Steve too, but time's running out pretty quick...

Just finished up the art for the spider body standee. Took the entire weekend to get things figured out, but the result looks damned cool. I'll have some pics of the mockups when I'm awake enough to function properly.

Unfortunately working on the standee, the booth sign, and a certain Father's Day project meant I had no time to even start the new comic :(

I have it all written up and ready to go, I just need to draw it. Hopefully it should be done by the end of the week, I don't want to skip an entire week again.

In the meantime, go check out some pudding wrestling...

So the other day we finally got our confirmation info for San Diego. I was getting kinda nervous.

We'll have a table in the small press section so I should be able to afford some freebies for anyone who stops by. On that note it I had to nix the sticker idea for the time being. We were gonna have a bunch of new sticker designs printed up to hand out down there, but now I've been informed that stickers can't be given away, you have to charge for em. They're afraid of people plastering the walls with them apparently. I can't say as they're not right, I've seen what happens when stickers go wrong...

So I'm gonna try for flyers and mini-posters instead, just gotta have 'em printed quick. We'll do the stickers later. I'll still have the sketch stickers there of course, I'll just have to charge a couple bucks for 'em.

Gonna try to finish up the art for the spider body standee in the next few days. Gotta get that thing done soon or there won't be time to pack it up and ship it down, the deadline approaches...