This has always been a difficult time of year for us and 2021 is no different. We could ignore the holidays and keep cranking out story comics. That would be the easy thing. The straightforward thing. The safe thing. The boring thing.

It wouldn’t be the right thing. People need hope, perhaps this year more than ever, and we aim to give it to them.

We’re road-tripping for Thanksgiving, which we suddenly discovered was next week. How did that happen? No idea. We’re off to an exotic foreign country and we don’t have the correct passports. It should be an adventure. Hope we live. We should be able to trade our pure blood for gas, so no worries there.

Codex is busy cranking out Thanksgiving comics that will run next week on Monday and Thursday. She is also starting our annual Christmas card, finishing up a book cover, completing some art for her d-a-y job, and, to top it off, we ran into a big problem with our Arkhaven venture.

Namely, these two comics:

We included them in The Churchians so new readers would know a bit of the backstory for our most important character. Codex threw them together at literally the last minute, taking six existing comics and gluing them together with layout magic and  entertaining exposition.

Much of the art in the first comic was rendered using our original process: drawing on paper, scanning it, cleaning it up, and electronically placing the bubbles and text. It had to be re-inked to make it suitable for Arkhaven. That was cheaper than redoing these from scratch, but it still wasn’t cheap. She spent as much time getting them ready to “factor” into the sequential panel structure Arkhaven wants as it takes her to do two new comics.

We still haven’t broke them out yet. We anticipate some… discussion. Fortunately, we don’t run the first one until December 4.

So… no new comics this week. We were going to have to break up the ongoing story in an awkward fashion to fit the Thanksgiving comics in, anyway. Now, we have Thanksgiving comics, four storyline comics, an extra frame to wrap up the current story arc, then… something (I have to figure it out), and finally Christmas comics to publish between December 20th and the New Year. We aren’t doing our traditional New Year’s comic this year. We have something new.

Story will resume the first week of January, although we might get a bit more the first couple weeks of December.

Meanwhile, I’ve been itching to talk about four-panel comics and why we are trying to do something few have succeeded at. If you are at all interested in making memes, comics, or writing, I hope you’ll find my posts on Wednesday and Friday interesting. Plus, you’ll get to see a bunch of comics from our archive as examples.

Later,

Codex & Q