“I’ve been told it translates as the ‘grieving soul’. Very few angels will tell me about it, and there is something of a stiff sadness in those that do, a heaviness they cannot help but bear.”
– Manual of Hands and Feet
Hi ya’ll, next update will be 6/26.
To offer some clarity about the update schedule, I’ve had really shortened work weeks recently due to my (very young) kids being out of childcare a lot for public holidays or school development days. This week, for example, it’s Juneteenth (no childcare) and we’re also doing emergency childcare for a friend. I’ve also been working on finishing the recent edition of my role playing game magazine (which is available now!) and didn’t expect it to consume so much of my time this week.
At the start of the year, I grappled with insane burnout. Part of this was trying to pace myself to finish the comic by next year (I figured with around a hundred pages left, it would take me a year and a bit with two updates a week, minus holidays, etc). Every time I’ve pushed myself to do a double page update a week at this time in my life, it’s been very hard to hit the mark without exhausting myself. Being a parent means I’m often up at 6am with the kids (who are both under 5), at work by 8:30/9, cooking at 4, hanging out with the kids until bedtime at 8:30, then having my only time to myself from around 8:30-10. If I have any doctors appointments, errands, personal time, time to eat, or chores to do, they have to fit in my working time from 9-4. Trying to fit what could be 20 hours of ass in the chair drawing in that time was extremely tight and often led to me working late. I was put in an extremely bad mental health state for around a month or so and decided to pull back to 1 page a week, which immediately improved things. That has left me a little time in the start of my week which I’ve used to resume RPG work (which I can work on at a more flexible pace), or take on client work (for professional tv/video game studios most recently) but I’m still trying to find a good balance. If you ever see me doing illustration or role playing games work, that’s because it is (piecemeal) much easier to fit into my week than comics.
I’m also trying to wrap this comic of 13+ years. The pacing has been extremely hard for weekly readers to follow I think, due to this being a prolonged action scene with a lot of movement, that requires specific page pacing that’s going to suck reading week to week. The work has therefore been a little brutal for me at times, especially with the level of detail on some of these pages. I trust the outline and work that I’ve done to carry these part of the comic to its conclusion but I’d ask you to bear with me.
I could take a prolonged break of a month or two, then release 4-8 pages at once (like I did last year), which would help the pacing issues, but does not match how people mostly engage with and consume media content nowadays (as fast as possible and on a regular schedule). When I last did this, it was also intensely stressful to stretch my work over so long a period, so I think that’s a no go for now.
Anyway, I just wanted to be clear about the situation. I would rather consistently update at a pace that’s healthy for me and finish strong rather than self destruct trying to sprint for the finish. There’s a reason not many long running comic series get finished (and not many web comics), and that’s because they are a tremendous, overwhelming amount of work that is an intensely heavy burden for one person. I think that’s partly why they are so unique and beautiful though.
Thanks for reading – we’ll be back next week strong and we will continue until it is done – likely next year or early 2028.
Cheers,
Tom