I'm gonna go ahead now and just say that the next few updates are gonna run late. The stuff I have coming up is just going to take longer than normal.

On the plus side, it's gonna look really nice :)

Looks like a lot of people coming in from Questionable Content today. Hi all, hope you get a kick out of this little "Elseworlds" type storyline. It started more or less here if you're looking for any of this to make sense.

Not that it will :)

"Hmm, I just put off this weeks strip on account of having lost a day to paperwork. Why don't I use the extra day to make the next strip extra-detailed, make up for the lost update?"

You know those weeks where you suddenly realize you've scheduled every appointment you can think of for very nearly the same time? Two seperate dentist visits, one eye exam, a person in from out of town, and attending the late-night opening of a friends small french restaraunt. Not to mention a pile of projects for San Diego, half-finished and time-sensitive. And for the love of god, a haircut already.

The opening of the small french restaurant was an evening of unrivaled disaster, in which I learned just exactly how underdressed and ill-prepared it is actually possible for one or more people to be.

Murphy, I salute you and your law. Well played.

Color by Monday evening, barring any furthur unremembered schedulings.

Alright so here's the pencils for Monday's strip.

They're pretty rough, since I tend to leave a lot of details to the inking. If this were left as pencils it'd be a lot more textured.

This particular strip went through about 3 differant versions, as there's a couple characters I want to deal with, and I couldn't decide what order introduce them in. I think I have it worked out now. Part of the problem was I really wanted to do an establishing shot, and show the sky again. This area of the ring is a bit more tech-y, but I wanted to show that it's still outside the city proper. A fun shot to do, but it really limited how much space I had left to work with.

Oh, and sorry to all the folks coming here from Sam & Fuzzy. I picked a hellava week to miss an update :P I'll have something for you guys in particular soon enough, so don't go away.

And I have to add, Half-Life: Episode 1 is utterly fantastic. The commentary mode is the best addition I could have ever wanted in a game. I wound up spending another 6 hours of early AM time blowing through the game again with those little snippets on. I'm a sucker for commentary though, so if it's not your thing you should know that the game itself is just simply amazing. It doesn't have much in the way of completely new stuff, but it presents the familier in new and interesting ways. The addition of Alyx as an almost constant partner is a ton of fun, and it really changes the way you play. And the commentary goes into some detail on why she works better than a lot of "companions" we've seen in other games. Funny thing is, this is actually a "better" game than HL2 was. Smaller, shorter, yes. But it's also an extremely polished game. A lot of HL2 involved covering large and sometimes empty areas. This game has very little dead space, and you seem to use the environment a bit more than I remember. Plus a lot of random context specific dialogue from Alyx adds a feeling of teamwork that's rarely seen in a FPS. At least from what I've seen anyway.

I am heading out the door now to ship the preordered panda shirts. Anyone who ordered a book or shirt this morning should be going out today as well. Thanks again to all of you.

No new comic this week. But you do get a fleshed out sketch of one of the characters that'll be appearing in the next update. Which I can assure you will go up on time next monday.

The reason there is no update this week is that I am *spectacularly* bad when it comes to my finances. Spectacular to the point where early last week I suddently realized that the reason one of my credit card bills seemed to be fluctuating in balance each month was not due to spending. It was due to the fact that it was actually TWO differant cards. They're on a weird schedule that makes it so I rarely have both in hand at the same time before one of them gets payed and goes into the "file later" pile.

Folks, I just about had a heart attack. This was not in any way a small bill. I spent almost the entire day on thursday going through the enormous piles of filing I've generated over the past year and a half since last I tried to organize. By early evening it became neccesary to go out to Staples and buy a filing cabinet. Which once I wrestled up 3 flights of stairs and opened, I realized it was heavily damaged inside. Another trip down, out, back up later and I was able to actually start filling it with folders.

Tax time should have prepared me for this. But I'd actually kept most of the receipt stuff seperate, and so I didn't have to dig too deeply into bills and such at the time.

As of a year and a half ago, I owed about a third of my yearly income to various credit cards. The number hadn't changed much in many years. Credit cards have a way of standing still. However after buying a car, printing a book, and the various comic production purchases I've made, that number slowly grew.

At some point in the last six months, I raised that number above my annual income. And I didn't notice.

I'm not bankrupt, this is not a cry for cash. I just needed to spend a couple days reorganizing. Lots of people out there have climbed out of worse, and so will I. A good chunk of that money went towards stuff like printing books and upgrading my computer/drawing equipment, so it's stuff that will generate a return given time. I just really lost track of where everything was going and how fast.

If you want to help take a book or a shirt off my hands, by all means go ahead. The store is open. I've got about 700 copies of Random Stitching left, and they're giving me puppy-book eyes. We've got a new Panda shirt too, just in from the printers, and it looks adorable.

I'll try to have something extra for you here next week, to make up for the lost update today.