These pages have been updated this week:

• Cast
• Q&A
• Story Guide
• Links

Additionally, you can also check out the new wiki for more in-depth information!

Thanks for reading, and check back Monday for the next comic page! (Did you know that you can have comic updates delivered straight to your email inbox?)

A few other new things this week:

New fanart from Chu of Slightly Damned!

I helped her put together a few things for her comic’s new website-in-the-works, so she drew me some art. It’s double awesome because no one ever draws my human characters, so Luke is finally getting some love. Thanks, Chu! :D

I’ve cleaned up my Links page because the disorganization finally got to me. This includes a couple of new link exchanges, some new Messenger banners for linking out, and general cleanup.

There’s also a new vote incentive minicomic that’s going to run for the next six weeks! I had some things I wanted to experiment with and decided to do a short comic based on a “deleted scene” from Chapter One. It’s short and uncomplicated, and I wanted to get back into the swing of drawing Aki and some others to mentally prepare for Chapter Eight. Voting will take you to the page, and all the archive pages will be posted for registered members on the forum the following week.

Other than that, I finally got in a handful of new supplies I ordered for general comic work and work on the new Chapter Two pages for Book 2! Exciting. Especially considering the brief moment of panic I had when I couldn’t remember which address I used for shipping. Whoops. At any rate, I’m glad to be coloring Eldora without feeling like I’m grinding my markers to dust, again, so hooray! Stuff like this is where reader donations go! Even a little bit helps me keep my supplies stocked, since the entire comic is drawn using real media – and when you donate, you get an exclusive wallpaper! Also, every time $25 is collected in donations or shop purchases, a new regular comic page is posted! Everyone wins!

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for this update. Thanks for reading! See you next Monday!

In addition to that, I’ve been doing a little general maintenance in my spare time and the following pages have been updated:

• Q & A: Old answers updated, new questions added, and added a form for quick and easy question asking!
• Links: New links added, as well as a new link section for comics and art resources.
• Feeds: a new page for all things feedy. Quick RSS links for Google, Yahoo!, AOL and other popular feed readers, as well as Twitter and E-mail updates!
• Sketchblog! Back before I moved, I started up a little sketchblog for miscellaneous drawings. Then I moved, and never had time to do anything with it. Now I do have time, and I’m back to posting once in a while!

I’ve been playing around with offering advertising on the site in order to help make it more self-sufficient. The ad provider I have chosen will display some graphic ads in addition to text ads. If at any point, the ads become too obnoxious or if they are offensive, please do not hesistate to contact me so I can take care of the problem immediately! Although the ads are important to help keep the site running, my readers are more important and your opinion matters. I’ve also added a page about buying ads on the site, should anyone run across this who wants to or something.

I also wanted to thank the batch of new followers I’ve acquired this week on Twitter! It’s been Follow Bug Week or something, I swear. Might I point you in the direction of Messenger’s facebook fan page as well?

Don’t forget the offer for extra pages that’s going on this month, and the new donation wallpaper that’s now available!

Now, to blow off the rest of my weekend playing Pokemon Platinum… Anyone up for trades? ;D

There are new previews up in the members-only section of the forum for next week’s page.

The new incentive isn’t up because I’m just not ready. It’ll be up soon. I’ll twitter about it when it’s ready. In unrelated and pointless news, I drew some little link icons for the top of the right-side column so you can quickly link to stuff like Messenger at twitter and facebook. How useful!

Here’s hoping that everyone (who is an American) has a delicious Thanksgiving this week! I know I’m looking forward to it. :9

I would like to take a second to thank Philip of Frumph.net and Webcomicplanet.com for both pointing out (and subsequently helping me fix) several glaring errors I’ve been making using ComicPress. I never even realized I was doing it wrong in the first place since it looked like it was working! But now everything runs so much slicker. It is fantastic. Thank you!

I thought it might be worthwhile to mention that I have one extra copy of the new chapter one book floating around that I would like to get rid of, if anyone is interested in having their very own copy. I can sell it to you for $12 (+$3 shipping anywhere in the US/Canada) and I will even sign it and sketch the character of your choice in it before I mail it off. It’s a bit cheaper than buying it from lulu, so if you’re interested, drop me an email at bug [at] messenger-comic.com!

In other news this week, I have a couple of links to put up:

Messenger at TVTropes: This is a really neat site that’s just fun to dig through, so I shamelessly stole the idea from Chu and added Messenger to it. Anyone is welcome to change and add to it.

I’ve been doing a lot of outlining and scripting for upcoming storylines in the comic, and so I’ve been spending a lot of time using Tiddlywiki, which is basically a little wiki notebook thing you can run on your local machine. It’s great for keeping track of all kinds of things going on at once, and it’s free, which is awesome. I used to use this to take notes in in college, since it was easy to cross-reference ideas from entry to entry. It is super handy for comic-writing, anyway.

I’ve added a couple of link exchanges to my links page, hooray! It also occurred to me that I made a tumblr account for art/comic related stuff quite some time ago and never bothered using it. There is also a plurk page now, too, which kind of seems like a twitter ripoff, so I’m not sure how long that will last. I did a whole research thing on social networking in college, but I never much had a reason to play around with it. The comic is now my excuse. I just find it interesting. :D

That’s all I’ve got for now!

My proof copy of the book should be here any day now. I hate waiting for things to come in the mail.

I’m thinking about doing a second comic update this week. Maybe tomorrow?