Thursday, January 1, 2009

December 14, 2008: Guest art, last daily strips, the future, and a comic I like

Many thanks to Derrick Fish for this wonderful tribute to the Llewellyn/Mudd wedding.

The final strips in the regular run will be this week. I hope you enjoy them. It's been an amazing ride. I wanna thank you all for reading; you've made my decade. There'll be more about that when I've finished up.

I hope it will please you to know that this is not the END end. I have some ideas for longer-form, stand-alone stories that will run starting early next year. I can't imagine leaving Ozy and Millie's world behind entirely, and I hope you'll enjoy where the future takes it.

Also, for a long time I've been meaning to plug the comic strip Sheeps, drawn by my friend Sandy, who has a truly unique style and a unique brain and who will probably one day be much more famous than me.

November 29, 2008: One more

By the way, I've posted another design in the store. It's one for which there's been some demand, and anyway, even if there hadn't been, how could I not?

Ozy and Millie swag makes great gifts. Pass it on.

November 19, 2008: New calendar and other good stuff

The holidays are upon us, and I would be rather remiss if I didn't have new stuff in the store! So, if you need gifts for the online comics fan in your life (yourself probably), wander on over there. The 2009 wall calendar is out, and has a literary theme, and I think it's the best yet. And, there are new t-shirt designs, with election and holiday themes, depending on what form of joy you're basking in right now. Happy shopping and happy holidays!

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.