Hooray! New strip!

[Neon Fish]

Yippee!

So glad there's a new comic! I never lost faith - well worth the wait too! Fantastic! Woo-hoo!

Neon

[Perk_daddy]

And another one today! Great strips, man! Loving it.

[Fourth Floor]

They'll be another one this month... and every month. I'm glad you like the new comics.

I'm going to go back to working ahead so this never happens again.

[Fourth Floor]

Is it too late to go back and edit my last comment?

[Perk_daddy]

Yes, but you can give a sneak peek of what you're working on to those of us still trawling your forum? You tweeted today you're working on drawing lots and lots of hair? Give your followers a snapshot!

[Fourth Floor]

You're quite right, Perk, I should show you guys something. The reason for the lack of updates is that I lost my job, pretty much just after making this post, and had to spend a lot of time finding a new one, learning my new job, adjusting to the new shift pattern and then starting work on the strips again. The story of how I came to lose my job is just too sad to post on the site and I don't want to be one of those cartoonists that spends all his time bumming his readers out with stories of how much his life sucks.

Anyway, I never did get the chance to work ahead so I ended up with no time and no buffer. But my life doesn't suck anymore and I find myself once more with enough time to work on serious updates again. So this time I've decided to draw strips in batches, which means I'm drawing up to the end of the current story arc - six comics - and doing the roughs for all six, the inks for all six, the colours for all six etc. until the batch is done. Only then will I post first one. That way even if things go wrong and I'm down to posting just one a month at least I'll have worked ahead by six months. Then I'm going to keep working ahead until I've got enough to post two every month and keep going in that fashion.

So I've just finished the roughs for six comics (with quite a lot of working ahead in some other areas) and I'm now starting on the inks. The roughs usually take the longest so hopefully we can expect the batch to be finished soon (some time this month?). At least then the updates will be consistent. So, here's the roughs for panel one of Strip 182. I ended up drawing a lot of hair yesterday evening because in the original roughs I drew all the women bald and drew their hair in afterwards in a separate layer. It's so much easier to work that way, but it means that in every panel Charlotte looks like Megamind.




If you can see a picture here it means I've managed to get the blasted link to work.
EDIT: I can't get the blasted thing to wok. I've made a post on the blog.
SECOND EDIT: It's totally working now. At any rate, I've made a blog post about it.

[Perk_daddy]

Awesome! Can't get enough of your strip, man. Sorry to hear about the job predicament!

[Fourth Floor]

Thanks, dude! The job thing is okay. It wouldn't be the first time I've lost a job, just the first time it wasn't my fault. My new job pays better anyway. I only hope that one day I can get paid for doing the strip. Some day... some day I actually update the damn thing.

Thank you for all your support, and I'm not just addressing this to Perk_daddy but everyone who's contacted me this year - you're all as awesome as you are patient.