To tide y’all over a little until chapter two is ready, here’s a couple sketches of an upcoming character I did today.

Reminds me a bit of a cross between Kurt Russell and Peter Lorre (visually, at least). He’ll be introduced in the second chapter, but expect to see more of him in later stories too.

”...so what happens next!?”

So, I admit: this first chapter was a bit of a tease. But with the introductory chapter out of the way, we’re ready to begin the first proper story, which will span the next three chapters. Questions will be answered, others will be raised, and spooky things will happen. We’ll learn a little more about our travellers, the valley they’ve stumbled into, and the people that live there.

While I work on the next chapter and reclaim my “buffer”, I’ll periodically post extras, hints of things to come, and work on filling out the web site content. I think that beats “filler strips”.

If you’re using FireFox or Internet Explorer 7, feel free to take advantage of the RSS feed to monitor the site for new material.

If you’re subscribing to the site via email (courtesy of RssFwd), I’d recommend avoiding the text-only email option.

At the moment HTML emails (since they’re just an extract of the HTML from the site) come with an embedded <img> referencing the image on this server (mi bandwidth es tu bandwidth).

By contrast, in text-only form you’d just see one of my mildly incoherent headlines and not much else. So, if you do subscribe via email, stick with HTML. I won’t pull any gaudy HTML tricks, I promise.

At this point, I’ve posted all twenty pages of issue one. Now I’ll focus on working on the website until I have enough done to start posting from issue two. I’m not quite sure how long that will be yet, but my hope is to buffer enough to avoid delays between subsequent issues.

For those of you coming from SPX and wondering what’s going on, the short answer is that the first issue hasn’t been run online yet. I’m posting it now while I work on the site design. Then I’ll start on the second issue as time permits.

I’ve added a feedback form which can be used to contact me.

Well, I’m back from SPX 2006! It was great seeing everyone, and thanks to everybody who bought the first issue!

Now, I guess it’s time to do some work on the website: first, add a feedback form. It’s rather important to have some way of contacting me, after all. :)

And… that’s all the work on the website I’ve got time for tonight. I will see you all tomorrow at SPX 2006, table E14-15b!

Once I get back, I’ll finish posting the rest of the first issue on the website, do a real design for the website (you’re still basically looking at the default Hobix template), and then try and finish up issue two so I can start posting that as well.

I’ve finished printing and binding the copies I planned on having for SPX, so now all that remains is (time permitting) making up a banner or something for the table, and perhaps putting in some work on the final website design.

From here on, I’ll try to stick to the major milestones for progress reports, for the sake of those who may be subscribing, particularly via email. Most future posts should be event- or update- related.

Aaaand, that’s page 20. Modulo some cleanups, the art portion of Issue One is now complete. I guess the main thing remaining is to write up something for the back cover, then it’s on to printing and binding the minicomic.

That’s page nineteen down. Just one more to go.

Man, I really wish I hadn’t saved the only ten-panel page for next to last. I’m exhausted and totally losing my edge at this point. Fortunately, page twenty is a bit more straightforward—only two panels all together. I’ll tackle it tonight if I feel up to it after a break; otherwise, I’ll be finishing tomorrow.

That’s page 18 done. Two more to go.

Combining yesterday and today, I’ve inked pages 15 through 17. That leaves three more to go!

Well, that’s page 14 done. Took me two days, and I’ve not got time to start page 15 tonight. Still, this does mean I’ve only got six pages left to do. If I do 15 tomorrow (later today), then I should only have to knock out five more pages, and I should be able to do most of that on Saturday.

I’ve spent the past couple days primarily doing cleanup and fixing continuity snafus on the existing pages. Even working from a script, the first ten pages or so were spread across a long enough period of time there’s a lot of stuff that needed visual correction to be consistent. However, I did start inking page fourteen tonight. Almost halfway through this last batch of pages. Hopefully I’ll only have four or so pages left by Saturday, when I plan to finish inking this first issue.

Well, that’s page 13 inked. Just seven more pages to go.

There, just finished inking page twelve. Didn’t go as quickly as I’d hoped; there still appear to be some crashes related to node editing and incremental updates in Inkscape trunk, so I lost a bit of work and had to redo. The perils of doing production work with pre-release software I guess.

(Hopefully there will be a real 0.45 release of Inkscape soon; I’ve become very attached to some of the calligraphy tool enhancements.)

I’ve learned from good buddy and fellow comician John Bintz that we’ve got our table assignments for SPX!

Look for us at table E14-15b; I’ll be there hawking The Last Bus; he’ll be there with with his comic A Moment of Clarity.

Just finished inking the panel borders for all ten of the remaining pages. I’ve still got to do all the artwork, speech balloons, and lettering (not necessarily in that order), but the panel borders are pretty brainless work so I decided to get them out of the way.

I am finding that I’m more effective when I do tasks in batches. That is, sequentially penciling ten pages, inking ten pages, and pasting up ten pages into the Scribus document I generate PDFs from seems to go a lot faster than making the penciling/inking/pasteup transition ten times. For one, I’m not losing as much time and energy to “context switches” between the different kinds of tasks. Secondly, it’s better psychologically. “I bordered ten pages today!” feels way better than “I penciled and inked a page today!” It’s the same amount of work either way in the end, but bigger numbers sure help out the ‘ol sense of accomplishment.