....Maybe.

A friendly user today informed me that she had donated! Yay!

I appreciate donations very much.  Except that I had a problem: The paypal button was pointing to my old Paypal email address, which no longer exists! Oops.

So on the off chance that you have donated in the recent past or even distant (and I never accepted your money), that is why!

Vote for us at TopWebComics.Com to see a picture of Lara battling an Atomic Kitten! This was drawn by Ryan Estrada, who has been drawing art for free as part of an effort to draw attention to his comic at Zuda, while aiming for a job at Marvel!  If you like it, hop over there and vote for him!

Last night my home computer began its death throws, throwing a Stop 0xD1 BSOD when trying to boot into regular (aka not safe mode) windows XP, so whatever driver blew up wasn't something loaded in safe mode.

Only the problem was that I couldn't figure out what was blowing up. I had just done a restart after a windows update, so I rolled back to an earlier restore point... same problem. I rolled back a whole month (and I've restarted before in that month) and it still crapped the bed.  Finally during one of my safe mode boots, I plugged in my external hard drive and grabbed all the comic files (all the high res masters, etc) and other data I considered important from my computer.  This morning, I couldn't get past the BIOS. The BIOS would run in its own magical safe mode, then when I fixed the stuff and it went to restart... nothing. Black screen.  I can hear the relays clicking when I initially power it on, but they don't click when it goes to restart.  So I'm very very glad I grabbed all the comic stuff, because only once in about 30 minutes of trying did I mangaed to get it to actually boot (into safe mode).

Looks like my scanner plays well with my work laptop, so I'll be able to scan, color, and upload things, but Monday's comic may be delayed.

Now I just need some way to afford to buy a new computer because I have no clue what's wrong with mine now. (Motherboard? Power Supply?  RAM seems okay.)

Yay hats

2108 seems about right. I've lost some of the questions, so I guess it's not happening now.

Maybe in the future I'll run a similar contest and not get distracted by life and such immediately afterwards.

Monday's comic ties up the Cheese Conspiracy storyline.

On Tuesday my wife and I leave on a three day trip so she can have surgery (not for anything life-threatening). I've currently got Monday and Wednesday's comic in the buffer and should add Friday's tomorrow so your comics won't be interrupted. I would appreciate it if you could throw some prayers our way for the surgery in exchange for my comics benevolence.

Next week I'll have a business trip all week (leaving Monday night, but with luck I'll have the buffer stocked for that too, since I plan to draw while my wife is in surgery. (I've been told that this surgery takes about 7+ levels of Starcraft to complete, so I should hopefully be able to get a few drawn and inked in that time).

Starting on Monday (pacific time) if you vote for us a Top Webcomics you'll get a sketch of Dee Dee to view instead of the Linda art that's been up forever and that I did not like very much. So yay for that.


Added 1/11/2009: Also, apparently our forum was set to require us to approve you.  It's still set that way but now that I know, feel free to log in and/or sign up. I approved everyone that was not obviously a spam bot.  Not a lot going on there right now, but nobody was able to get it.  Really, I just thought you all hated me. S'cool.

Added 1/11/2009 by Steve (abusing godlike forum permissons): Register for the forums, and post in the new forum section for site suggestions/ideas! Feel free to suggest that we upgrade the forum to something more modern.


Added 1/13/2009 by Matt: My wife's surgery went well, though anesthesia decided to strike her a bit heavily with nausea afterwords they are making her stay the night. Thanks for your well-wishing and prayers.

My new update schedule for 2010 (two thousand ten, no ands!) is as follows: Randomly thrice weekly.

To put it more clearly, but less awesomely, I will post three comics per week, but I will not guarantee my update days.  I won't post comics on weekdays (unless to post a Friday comic late or something) so in the span of Monday through Friday, expect to see comics on three of those days!

This isn't a ploy to have you check the site everyday, but rather the brutal nature of the fact that sometimes I will manage to leave all my drawing implements somewhere I am not and/or totally forget we have to go spelunking with the Smiths in the evening, immediately after our full-contact basket weaving classes and thus not be able to color it at all after work.

Something like that.

So I am really digging the new Space Police LEGO sets that debuted last year.  For the most part they are well done and hearken back to the old space days.

I went to Toys R Us today to pick up 5980 Squidman's Pitstop today, since TRU is pretty much the only place that seems to carry it (and without the usual TRU price markup too!), and discovered that they also had the Star Wars Home One Mon Calamari Star Cruiser discounted by $30 so I picked that up too.

I dropped a lot of money on LEGO sets today. Yeouch! But hey. LEGO Admiral Ackbar and Lando and Mon Mothma? Awesome.

Squidman's Pitstop oozes that bad guy repair shop feel.  Secret missile launchers and a tool rack that flips over to reveal a weapons rack and tons of other stuff.  The little ships somewhat leave things to be desired (except Snake's little ship, which is pretty awesome), but overall this is a fantastic play set. I wish I were a kid again (or I wish I had kids so that I wouldn't look silly actually playing with the sets), because this would be completely supercool to play with.

Now I just need to get around to getting the last two Space Police sets I need, Space Truck Getaway (aka Container Heist) and Smash & Grab.  And maybe one of the new Atlantis series's Manta Warrior mini sets to use as an extra bad guy to put in the Galactic Enforcer's prison pods.

I am debating going back and redrawing the "classic" Fodi strips.  I was reading through the classic archive a bit and realized that some of the story there is really not too bad, and since it forms the backstory of the current archive, it'd be really nice if it all looked more like the Fodi of today.

This would naturally be a gradual process, with the goal being eventually to recombine the archives again to form one whole cohesive story.

I'm not sure if I should keep the old versions around somewhere or just let them go by the wayside, however. What do you all think?

So I'm getting back into the comics groove. It feels good. I hope you'll all enjoy this series and the next.  Beyond new comics though, we'll have some additional things of interest.

1. Twitter! There's a twitter feed on the sidebar now. you should follow it. *nods Sagely*  Most of the time it'll probably be me tweeting, but you may occasionally see a Steve tweet. They are rare and magical.
2. RSS feed works again.  It'll always contain the last five comics and last five news posts.  It updates 2 minutes after midnight.

Steve is plotting a grand update on the backend site code. This should allow for some nice features later on. We'll keep you posted.

While I hesitate to definitively say that I'm back, in the past few days I've posted two new comics (two in the same week, wow!), colored a few comics in the archives that were not yet colored, fixed a typo in another (and a word balloon tail!), and did some retconjuration on one comic.

The retconjuration can be found in the Shambling Zombie, Captured Angel series. Let's see if you can't figure out which one it is (Dialogue in one comic ran totally counter to future plot plans. Dunno why I wrote it like it had been, but it's fixed now.

In any case, for the first time in awhile, I feel motivated to work on drawing comics and such.  We currently have the rest of the current series written (barring a few tweaks) and half of the next one (which needs more tweaks), so the prospect of you seeing many more comics in the future is pretty good.

Besides, I already have more comics this year than last year

Just gotta find time to color it now...

We have this whole story arc planned out. Someone fetch me a time machine or something so that I can do it all.

...but my hand keeps cramping up.  Good grief, why must I slack off so much? D:

You'd think I never used my hand muscles, they way they're complaining.  Bunch whiny muscles.  Why don't you go off and watch your emo vampire movies and drink your... whatever emo people drink drink!

I have June 19ths inked, I just haven't had time since then to actually scan and color it.

:X

I'm trying though!