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Fanart Friday (and some other stuff)

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First off, some new fanart I meant to post earlier! Thanks so much, everyone! Remember that you can always submit fanart on the forum, on the MonsterHive deviantart group, or straight to me at bug@messenger-comic.com!

In other notes, Messenger will be updating on Sunday this weekend due to some personal weekend holiday shenanigans.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, MonsterHive has its own podcast called The HiveCast which goes live every other Friday. I appeared on a recent episode to talk about fictional creatures like the Chios, so be sure to check that out.

This weekend, my comic-making bros out west will be taking over Phoenix Comicon at tables 1947 and 1949! If you’re attending the event, be sure to stop by and grab some free zines, a Messenger card, and check out their stuff. At the table will be Arborwin from Grayling and Chu from Slightly Damned. Find out more over on Monsterhive.net.

Thanks for reading!

Comic Feature: Star Cross’d Destiny (and other news!)

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Star Cross’d Destiny Creator Blair (@junobean) and I agreed to swap blog posts about our respective comics, which I was rather excited about since I remember reading it “back in the day,” not too long after I started Messenger. She’s taken a long break from working on her comic to do some other awesome things like, oh, I dunno, be part of a band, go on tour, and release a couple of albums. But now that she’s back, SCD is more epic than ever, with new art, a new look, and lots to look forward to.

Star Cross'd Destiny

SCD is a sci-fi/action comic started in 2003 as a black and white, manga-styled webcomic. The story follows Juno and a band of her misfit companions, each of whom has a hidden power based on a particular element – Air, Water, Fire, and so on – in a dark future New Orleans. The comics were later colorized and updated with fresh art, which really brought a new dimension to the story. Blair often works in bits of photography as part of the background, which lends a really slick, authentic look and feel to the comic, especially since many of them are from real locations in and around New Orleans. The comic’s art has a really neat grungy-yet-stylized aesthetic, and many of the elemental visual effects are simply gorgeous to look at on their own. One of my favorite parts of reading any webcomic is watching the evolution of an artist as it happens, and SCD is no exception. Blair’s art has really matured over the years, and I personally am looking forward to watching the rest of the story as it unfolds.

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I can really only recommend checking it out for yourself, as you certainly won’t be disappointed. Read the whole comic at starcrossd.net, or check out Blair on Twitter and DeviantArt. I wish her tons of luck in getting her comic started up again!  (And thanks again for the opportunity to swap posts! If there are any other comics out there interested in doing a news swap, drop me a line at bug@messenger-comic.com!)

In other news, I’m still working toward my goal of making it into the top 100 comics on TopWebComics! If you vote for Messenger, you’ll be able to view the latest page of a short minicomic I’ve been posting as an incentive for voters – it’s a short story about a Chio named Teir from the same village Eldora and Finn came from. Teir is a very curious Chio, and is about to discover something not seen by her village before. If we can get into the top 100, I’ll post an archive of all the previous pages (4 so far!) of the minicomic for everyone to see. Let’s do this!

Other than that, Chapter 12 of Messenger begins today. Stuff is gonna happen. I’m excited.

Thanks for reading! 

Schedule Change

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So if you read my last news post, you’ll know that I’ve been working like crazy lately on uh. A lot of things. This is still the case.

I wanted to have Follower live and updating last fall (oops) and due to my real job, I fell way behind on making pages for it. I’m currently working to catch up on them, which will hopefully be a bit quicker and easier when my shiny new tablet arrives sometime next week (?) to replace my 10-year-old Wacom. She lived a good life and traveled basically everywhere with me, which is certainly a testament to how sturdy the old Graphires were, but I’m starting to feel the strain in my wrist from working so much on such a small device. Doing Messenger on paper has basically spoiled me, since I’m free to draw big sweeping lines without worrying about an edge. After some research I decided to invest in one of these 10×6″ Huion tablets. Word is they perform just as well as some of the more recent Intuos tablets (which are kinda spendy if you have a budget of essentially nothing like me) and are nearly double the size of my current device, so it seems worth a shot. I’ll definitely be posting up with some kind of review once I get it, but I have pretty high hopes for it.

Now that I’ve gotten waaay off topic, basically, I’m planning to only post new Messenger pages on Saturdays until I get Follower launched. How long will this be? Probably a month or two on the short side, maybe a bit longer. The bonus is, once it’s started, I’ll have nearly a year’s worth of buffer pages for Follower which will leave me free to work on the next issue and new Messenger pages at the same time.

tl;dr Messenger is now updating only on Saturdays for a while, Follower is coming (hopefully) sooner than never.

Thanks for reading! And don’t forget to vote for Messenger to follow the new short story I’ve been posting!

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, BUG?

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Well, uh. Places. Wait, no.

I hate to sound like I’m making excuses and complaining, but I’m just going to be honest; I’ve been massively busy the past few months, to the point where it’s difficult to even want to work on comics even when I do have the time. In short, I’ve been really, really, really burned out. Woo, italics for emphasis. I work full-time all week (often more than that), and making and keeping up with a comic is a lot like having a second job on top of that. Not to mention doing stuff to help keep MonsterHive going. It’s uh, a lot to keep up with. :U

Anyway, I am by all means still working on comics, and trying to get everything back on track. I am certainly still working on Follower along with Delade, but I’ve found that these pages take so much longer to work on compared to Messenger pages…which isn’t a bad thing, but I really want to do Follower “right,” so I’m taking my time with it before I release anything at all. I’d rather take my time and make it what I want it to be than to just put something out for the sake of doing so. It’s just turning out to take a whole lot longer than I ever planned for – but what I have made so far, I’m really happy with. It’s a balance.

So, with that, I’d like to point you in the direction of the MonsterHive Community, which is basically a comic collective/forum/chat/gaming group Messenger is part of. Part of what gives me any drive at all to work on comics is hearing feedback from readers, so if you have anything to say – please make a post and say hello! I totally don’t bite.

So yeah, that’s all for now. There’ll be a new page tomorrow, and there’s also a new vote incentive up – which is the first page of a short comic story about the Chio village, which will update on Saturdays along with the regular comic. Thanks for reading!

Downtime over!

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So you might have noticed that the site was down for the past few days. That was uh, my fault. I was a little too casual with a couple of things and accidentally broke everything. That said, I took the opportunity to make a few fancy updates and needed changes. The site is now more optimized for mobile browsers, for one, which is pretty neat.

There are a handful of changes still left to be made, but the comics are browsable and the archive works, which is the important part for now.

I’ve also disabled comments, because it was just too much to keep track of. From now on, if you want to discuss the comic, please come join us over at the MonsterHive forums and IRC! Messenger has its very own section there, and there are other comics which share the community as well.

That’s it for now, and thanks for your patience.

Burnt to a Crisp

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Hey readers~ I hate making these types of posts, but I need to take this week off from Messenger. I know that as a comic reader, I like knowing when and why these things are happening to comics I enjoy reading, so here are the details:

I work full-time as a graphic designer, and my real job has been throwing crazy extra hours at me lately. This has made it nearly impossible to keep on top of Messenger, and any buffer I do come up with is used up instantly. So, I’m going to take this week “off” officially while I work on getting a buffer put back together again. I am burnt out tired all the time lately, and what I really need is time to make comics I am happy with and feel good about posting, rather than burning through them as quickly as I can just to get them done.

In the meantime, though, please enjoy a short fan-comic made by Pompolic of Lunavis! “Indulj Harder” is a 3-part comic done in the same style as Half Life 2: Full Life Consequences. (No, it’s not supposed to make sense. Even if you’ve played HL2.) I originally planned on running these pages in between chapters 11 and 12, but it seems I need them right now. So, many thanks to Pomp, and INDULJ HARDER!

I will hopefully be able to utilize this week and the few days off I get for Thanksgiving this weekend to buffer out the rest of the chapter, as well as getting Follower rolling at last. The Follower prologue will continue throughout this week as normal.

Thanks again for your continued patience, and thanks for reading! ♥

Little Delays

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Hey guys-

Just wanted to mention that the next page (which should have been last Wednesday’s page) is going to be a little bit delayed. Ten thousand excuses including a) losing power from the hurricane on the night I had set aside for working on comics (NOOOOOOOO) b) work being madness lately c) general unimportant (but time consuming) real life nonsense.

I appreciate your patience, and assure you that Messenger & Follower will both update before Wednesday of this week.

Thank you again for your continued support! In the meantime, come check out the MonsterHive forums to discuss Messenger and basically everything else.