Thursday, July 3, 2008

June 29, 2008: Artwork auction encore

Thanks to everyone who bid in the artwork auctions I did a few weeks ago--partly due to demand and partly due to the success of the last round, I've decided to auction off three more pieces of art.

1. The strip from June 19th. I honestly wish I could sell it to everyone who's asked. Auction is here.

2. The strip from October 18, 1999. The famous "look, I'm a waffle!" strip. One of my personal favorites...been meaning to auction it for ages. Auction is here.

3. A watercolor piece, based on one of my attempts at poignancy within the strip. Auction is here.

May 19, 2008: I win!

I've won the 2008 Ursa Major Award for best anthropomorphic comic strip. It's my second straight win in that category, and having been in attendance at Morphicon, where the awards were announced, I got to accept in person. (In my acceptance speech, I thanked Satan.)

May 13, 2008: Cons and commissions

I'll be a guest of honor, this weekend, at Morphicon, in Columbus, Ohio. If you're near there, come by and say hello and buy things from me, please!

Also, recently I've been doing a lot of experimentation with style, recently, and what I've been having the most fun with is a sort of digitally-colored pencil-sketch style, like the image that's on display here right now. (You can see a bunch more examples on my deviantART page.) In an attempt to actually get paid for this experimentation, I'm going to open up next week for some commissions n that style--$50 for simpler ones and $100 for more complex, multicharacter ones (we can decide on an individual basis what costs what). If you want some art, drop me an e-mail!

Finally, yes, there will be new O&M content next week. The funny thing about getting this close to the end is, you really become a perfectionist, because every strip really seems to count more.

April 24, 2008: Why the posting has slowed down: a bit of an announcement

I guess I do owe you, my audience, an apology and an explanation for why things have gotten slow around here!

The fact is, it's been ten years since the strip began as a semi-daily project of mine, and longer than that since I first started working with the characters. I created them when I was 19 years old. I'm 31, now; the characters have been daily features of my life for more than a third of it.

And, I'm a different person and a different artist than I was at the start of it all. It's been an amazing adventure, being a web cartoonist, and it's been an honor and privilege getting to write and draw for an audience of tens of thousands for so long. But I do have other things I want to do, and I've begun doing some of them, both on and offline.

Quite simply, I've been posting strips as often as I'm able to deliver good ones that are up to my standards. The fact that that's become less often is quite significant.

I don't think comic strips, or creative projects in general, ought to continue long after the creator has mentally moved on, and it's always tragic when they do ("Peanuts," "The Simpsons"). I always said I'd know when it was time for me to move on. I'm afraid that time is fast approaching.

I want to get out while I can still give the characters the ending I feel they deserve, and I'm going to do the best one I possibly can. That's going to be this year, and there'll be a final book collection to go with it, and after that the daily strip will come to a close.

After that, I strongly suspect I'll revisit the characters from time to time, perhaps in longer-form comic stories, which I'll also post here. (I still want to see what the characters will be like in high school. There are still avenues I think would be fun to explore.)

My goals in life and art have evolved over time. "Ozy and Millie" has been like a graduate level course in cartooning. I look forward to applying the things I've learned from it to other projects. Of course, even after this ends, you will not have heard the last of me.