No, seriously. All this week I’ve been busting my hump studying. This leaves me precious little time for other things, and since I have yet to advance to the point where I can rattle off a comic in a couple of hours I decided I had to sacrifice your comic-reading pleasure for the sake of my getting into school.

Next weekend is my first exam, though. I think I’ll do fine: it’s on Algebra & Geometry, which I am pretty good at. The Calculus will be more difficult, but I don’t forsee it being too much of a challenge.

Oh, in other news, I’m starting physiotherapy tomorrow. This will be weird.

See, I live in Canada. And in Canada there are really only two things that consistently make our blood boil: politics and Hockey. But the question remains: which one is more important? Well, perhaps this photo of the front page of today’s Gazette will clarify things:

See, we just had an election. The Conservative Party, out of office for twelve years or so, made it back in. This is big news. But Mario Lemieux, the hockey star from Ville Emard, owner of the Pittsburg Penguins, has just announced that, due to illness, he has hung up his gloves for the last time. This is also big news, as evidenced by the fact that although the election got the headline, Lemieux’ story got the above-the-fold photo and more space on page 1 (follow the image link to the Flickr page for real-estate comparison).

And finally, from the stylus of R Stevens, here is an insight into a typical reaction to Monday night’s happenings.

This is a sketch of a character who may turn up in future WIP strips. I’ve been considering a story arc based on the Ravenloft game that Julien runs, and Ephraim is the character I play.

He has a lot of depth of character to explore and lots of internal conflict, which is why I thought a series of strips about him might be interesting. I’ve mocked one up already, but I have yet to decide whether the strips will simply chronicle what goes on in the game or give more insight into Ephraim’s past.

Update: Ephraim’s hood was looking way too much like hair. I fixed that. Also, NO HE IS NOT AN ARMLESS MIDGET!

Yes, the comic is late again. It’s called authenticity. All the big web-comicers do it.

It’s late. I know. Like, two days. That sucks, but it really was because I was busy doing medical stuff last week. I had three appointments in as many days, and I got injected with so many different substances that I <think up funny college-related joke here>!

So I’m really getting the hang of this whole comic thing, and the whole drawing thing. I really like my roommate’s tablet; as soon as I have some disposable income I’m buying myself one. If for no other reason then so I don’t feel guilty when I drool on it.

I was playing around a lot with layers on this strip. I had one layer for outlines, another for fill, another for backgrounds and another for details like eyes — for each panel. I will gradually refine my technique and improve over time, but I think I got off to a pretty decent start. I tell you, the hardest part is getting a strip out every week. On the up side, it’s getting me blogging again. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do once I go back to work, but I’ll figure something out.

Oh, and I need to create a separate website — or at least a category template — for the comic.

It’s really late, I know, but WIP 2 is in the process of being finished off. Believe me, it’ll be worth the wait. Damnit, it was supposed to be out on Saturday.

Well, I have all sorts of excuses. Like getting my wisdom teeth out and having to study my math stuff. Bah, I’ll just shut up now and go back to finishing off the comic.

update: It’s looking good, but it’s still not finished. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish it by the end of the night…

I finally got around to finishing off the first installment of my new comic strip. It’s an experiment, a way to get me to create content regularly. The idea is that by forcing myself to upload something, anything, once a week I will increase my creativity and thence my overall satisfaction with my life. Let’s see if this works.

I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do about site design — am I going to just slap all the comics on the front page like this, or will I create a second site or what? Hey, how’s about giving me your suggestion in the comments? Yeah, fob off the work on my readers. W00t.