Yeah! It’s 2014! And that means… it’s 2014. Well for me, that means some changes. Some are good, and some are… well “I” think they’re all good, because they make things better for me, but some might cause some inconvenience for your viewing, for which I apologize.
But to start with the good, I’m going to be doing a new comic! Yes, that means there will be 13 a week for all tastes, and some extras here and there. The new strip will be called 万年筆(man’nen’hitu): The 10,000 year brush. It will be about fountain pens, which I admit is a niche market, but no other strip will be removed or paired down to accommodate it. This is a straight-up addition. Also, I will be working on a comic in a large format that will be more serious, but less frequent. And don’t let the seriousness fool you, it’ll still be a lot of laughs hopefully, but no dates yet. (万年筆 Starts this friday)
Back in November I released five new books in the fifth wave of my collections. Most of them are available at the Antelope Lodge in Alpine, while a few are also available in other spots in the area. But for those of you who are not near me I also launched an online store, where you can buy my books and a few other goodies. I recommend checking it out, but of course I would.
Speaking of updates to the site, I had to move all of my video content over from Blip.tv to Youtube, I have a blog post explaining this, but it means I’m going to start placing ads on previously ads-free videos. That shouldn’t be much of a big deal with the way most online videos work now. But I will make sure that the video is at least a certain length (6 minutes or more?) before placing any ads, so as not to waste too much time. Also, I am now going to be placing (relatively few) ads on the site. You can see one in the sidebar already, and I will be putting more out to see where they are the least intrusive over the coming months. I hope you understand that I do need to pay for this site eventually somehow, and right now I’m not cutting it.
Ads might also be going up on the next place I’m going to mention, The Dragon Funnies, which I upgraded to a full site this year, but right now I need to get them up andy working. As for my content on the site, the new comic won’t be added, and some of the other comics might be removed as well, but this does not mean the site is going away. For every comic I take off I will be looking into putting comics from other talented cartoonists up. I want the site to end up like the newspaper comic section I would make, and so I intend to find the best content possible for it. It is also possible to submit a comic for the site, though if I don’t have any personal contact with you at the moment the most I can offer is exposure, which isn’t the best thing to offer right now, so, yeah. I will be working on a better way to get new comics up on the site while properly compensating their creators.
Also, come this new year I will be attempting to use more social media, posting as much content as I can on Twitter and Facebook, so if you feel the subscribe system on the site is a bit clunky, then you can follow there and get the highlights.
Now for the only bad news. Due to the high volume of content I produce, I have already stopped posting on redundant sites like the individual blogs for each of my comics. And at the end of January I will be ceasing posts on the Dragon Company wordpress site and Art Supply Critic WordPress site. All of that content is already posted on my main site, so nothing is going away, I’m just making it less of a hassle for me to post the content, and like I said, links will be posted in social media if you don’t want to subscribe.
All in all, I hope 2014 will be a good year, and it looks like it will be, so I hope to see you all there, and I hope y’all have a great time.
