New year, same new year’s tradition.

Can you believe it’s been six years since my last comic update?

I certainly can’t.

A hiatus never was the plan, as it never is. Between playing video games, my schedule of shows that I watch (with the Arrowverse then ever expanding) and prepping for a move, I fell off the wagon re: regular updates. So I started to run an old archived story from a 24 hour comic, remastered, and as I rewrote parts of it to resolve/elaborate on continuity bits, I made things worse by introducing NEW story blocks and continuity snafus I hadn’t planned for.

If I’ve learned anything re: updating comics over the years, I NEED scheduled regularity to get this stuff done or it doesn’t get done. Falling off the wagon was the WORST because then a week turns to a month turns to months turns to years and so on and so forth. New shows aired, new interests came into my orbit that let me work my creativity muscles (playing in D&D campaigns!), and this went fallow.

I didn’t know if I would ever actually get back to updating, honestly. The last several years have been full of random moments where I’ve gone “you know what, this would make for a GREAT comic” followed by “but wait, no, I’ve still got a whole bunch of continuity threads I need to tie up if I ever get back to updating, and plans that I’d laid years in advance that I need to fulfill.”

Like seriously, there was stuff I’d been planning for YEARS arcwise. To properly sew that stuff up would require another 1-2 years of story stuff. And that was increasingly an impediment to updating – I felt duty bound to come back someday, to finish storyarcs I’d committed to and further arcs I’d planned for ages, but it was more an albatross than anything. I’d mused about jumping back into it but it just wasn’t a priority.

What shook me up a little bit, honestly, and worked as a kick in the pants, was the INCREDIBLY untimely passing of animation character designer/art director Derrick J Wyatt. He’s had an outsized influence on my own output, and myself along with many others had had many memorable interactions with him both on and offline. (Hell, the design for Mew’s mousey minions is directly from a Twitter doodle he drew for me way back in the day!) And he was only 49.

Life’s too short. So I started brainstorming ways to get back into writing this thing, to get back to doing just some fun one-off strips interspersed with story material here and there – and hit on this approach, which should play out over the next several weeks or so.

To anybody coming back to read this, I apologize for being away for so long. And for not properly wrapping arcs. But that doesn’t mean I won’t elaborate on what I had planned, as most all of my original plans still very much happened in continuity.

And to anybody new to the strip, thank you for popping by, and I hope you stick around! And don’t judge me too too harshly on a few of the older strips in here.