The Far Side of Utopia

Well. We’re back?

I don’t want to overpromise. Things are not going to pick right up; this is a bit of an awkward time to restart, since in the second half of November I take my ‘yearly vacation’ of sorts to visit family; long time readers will know there’s a break every year at that time in the update schedule (except for the olden days when I had a real buffer).

I will try to do one more comic at least before I go, so tentatively November 10th.

Admittedly I haven’t drawn literally anything since the last comic, so this was the first time I’ve drawn in months. It was a bit rough and rusty. I have no idea why I decided to have my first comic back take place mostly as reflections on a window. It’s just how I envisioned the scene when I wrote it, so its what I tried to draw.

I apologize for the long break and uncertain schedule. To make a long story short, the shit hit the fan a little bit in my ‘day job’ (D&D 3rd party publishing). After playing chicken with the tariffs for a few months, the books finally got to the country just to be promptly seized by US Customs for some real bullshit. It all got sorted out in the end, though it cost a lot of money to get the books back out of their claws. But the whole thing was pretty stressful and time consuming, since I live nowhere near the port the books landed in, and was stuck trying to figure out how to sort things away from the better part of 3,000 miles away. And the stakes were pretty high, since ultimately too much my business was tied up in that one shipment–it was 13 tons of books. That’s a lot of books for a single bloke company like mine.

This meant I got behind on everything, so even once I had that resolved, it was a bit of double time on that side of things to account for that I had gotten effectively no real work done for several months, and it all cost me a lot of money, so I needed to, you know, make money. Which–while I appreciate the folks that chip in all the years–the comic doesn’t really. On that note, I did pause the patreon for this comic while it wasn’t updating, so no one should have been charged there.

Anyway, I’m caught up on things over there, though I wouldn’t say the situation is really fixed, since I still need to figure out what to do going forward there. But that’s problem for future me. So I figured I’d at least get a comic up for now. As I get more time (if I get more time), we’ll get more comics over here.