What’s this? It’s an end-of-the-week update!

I sort of fell off the wagon with the vote incentive comics, but they are back! Page 5 of the “Gears” minicomic is now available when you vote on TWC!

Just one page to go after this. “Gears” was just an experiment with a few ideas for me, and I can safely say “curiosity: satisfied.” But it was fun, all the same. :B As usual, the archives of the minicomic are available to registered forum members.

Shortly before I started posting pages for Chapter Eight, I took down the “Travels So Far” map I put up a few months ago so I could update it to include the most recent parts of the story. However, I realized that I’m not very good at drawing maps. I had plans for a Flash map with clickable icons and links, but I have a love-hate thing with Flash. It’s good for some things, but it’s not good for everything. Then it hit me; Google Maps! I thought it would be really interesting to build a map with links to specific comic pages and other location information. Google Maps is perfect for this. So, now there’s an embedded map on the Travels So Far page.

I’ll admit, it’s a tiny bit of a retcon on my part, but hopefully one that most people won’t even notice. In my defense, I never really had a very specific location in mind for most of the events of the comic so far; it’s kind of taken place in Generic Wasteland-land. Some events much later on are much more specific, so I wanted to tack down where things take place in the beginning of the story once and for all, and that’s what this is. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that most of my original ideas for settings and background geography were based on the area where I live, so it makes total sense to me to just give up and place it in this region. The entire story of the comic takes place in a lot of different areas, and since it’s an alternate version of the United States, it just makes sense to actually sit down and place it somewhere so that people have some idea of what’s going on. If it’s a cop-out on my part, so be it. It is what it is.

So now you might be asking, “But Bug, I always assumed the story took place somewhere in the south! There are no deserts up north!” And I’d say, “Well well, Dear Reader, you’re totally right. But I have a solution to that. And it is called Keep Reading. Sweet mustache!”

Really, I am going somewhere with this. Just much more clearly, now.

That’s all for now. Check back Monday for a new page! 😀