Like I said above, the comic is NOT dead. Until you actually see the words "the comic is dead", it ain't dead. But getting back to it sure ain't been easy.

As I've whined and whined about many times, there have been a lot of things happen in my and my family's lives the past several years. At first it knocked me off schedule a little bit, causing some late updates and using up the buffer. I hoped that was temporary. But then it persisted. Other issues came up. Trying to tackle these problems became a full time job, and that's when the hiatuses began happening. I hoped when things calmed down I could settle back into old patterns, getting pages out consistently and on time.

But that didn't happen.

The fact is, things in my life have changed, permanently. My real life responsibilities aren't the same as they were a few years ago, and I'm learning I simply cannot work on the comic the same way I once did. You may not know it, but from start to finish it can take me anywhere from four to six hours minimum on a page. This is sketching, drawing, inking, coloring, and adding in dialog. This is cleaning up the page and adding in little details, like shadowing. Maybe that's slow compared to other webcomic artists (based on his comments, David Willis can bang out a page in a few hours... color me jealous), but at the very least if I started as soon as I got home I was able to get the updates out on time.

But I'm not built like that anymore, and neither is my schedule, which kinda sucks. I'm not as fast as I used to be, and while in the past I could bang out a page a night, now that doesn't usually happen. This is no longer a temporary situation, but reality.

So what this means is I have to be smarter about how I work on the comic. And I'm trying to be. I have a game plan. Unfortunately I'm not ready yet to start up again, mainly thanks to ill-timed delays (this week is the perfect example... I was on vacation all week, with plans to focus 99% on comic stuff. Instead I helped someone move the contents of their office all week and BOTH of my computers broke down, which was only now fixed. In fact, I was in the process of uploading this very update Friday when it happened).

There's no point in talking about it all yet because I have no clue how close I am to doing it all. I want to say I'll be back this year, but I can't promise that. I've thought that in the past and it didn't quite work out that way. I will say if I can figure out the best way to do this, I'll be back to not only finish this comic, but to provide even more content than before.

Maybe the loyal readers are still out there. Maybe nobody is out there anymore. It's unfair to expect you to keep checking after this long. But I enjoy making comics and I promised I would see this series to the end, and dammnit that's what I'm going to do.