busybee comics: Ascent

Wow, am I at Unity #150 already? It seems like just yesterday I hit #100, but getting to #100 took forever. It’s amazing what maintaining a regular update schedule can accomplish.

I need to figure out a better way of doing backgrounds because holy hell I do not like doing them the way I’ve been doing them for the last however-many years I’ve been doing them.

UPDATE: I think I have figured out what to do. I am letting my proverbial hair down!

Update to the update: Man, Wednesday’s is probably going to be kind of surprising. I think it’s looking good though.

Lately I’ve been updating on Monday, Wednesday, and sometimes Friday and/or Saturday (this week is a rarity!). If you’re still following this comic by loading the page directly (and my tracking stats say that’s most of you), you should be aware that I do vary updates from time to time, and if you’re specifically checking only on weekdays, keep in mind that I often post stuff on Saturday and sometimes Sunday. You can always look at the calendar in the corner of nearly every page to see when posts were made (or are scheduled to be made).

Of course, you can always subscribe via RSS or LiveJournal and always see the comic the same day it gets posted, and not have to worry about me posting on multiple days between the times you checked. You also won’t miss news posts, since I know these are so incredibly interesting to read.

For what it’s worth, I try to keep my update slots consistent, when they do happen; Monday and Wednesday will usually be Unity, Saturday will usually be either a sketchbook entry or Womble, and Friday is wide open (Journal comics, fanart, a third Unity, etc.).

I draw species with females who have two sets of mammaries so much it’s starting to look completely normal and everyday to me.

I just thought I’d share.

Delos, who writes ArtPatient, was kind enough to do a nice review of Unity. Thanks, Delos!

I now have a pretty good idea of how the first major Unity story is going to end. Everything is falling into place quite nicely.

Yeah, been busy with other things, like having a social life and not getting enough sleep and having righteous indignation at other peoples' righteous indignation (PITCHFORK MOB JUSTICE for the new millennium!). Oh and last Wednesday marked the 300th busybee comic, for those who were expecting a big announcement aside from the one I posted like a week before it went up. So yay for that, I guess.

Real life (work, mostly) has me incredibly busy and tired, so updates will probably be sporadic for a while again (and crappier than usual). It’s best to subscribe via RSS or LJ instead of checking the site manually.

On the plus side, the next several strips are just exposition anyway. EDIT: I couldn’t bring myself to follow through with that plan.

Saturday night I finally got around to watching Silent Running. I can certainly forgive anyone who thought that movie was an inspiration for Unity, because it certainly would have been if Rendezvous with Rama hadn’t. I highly, highly recommend watching it. (I also find it interesting that both things came out the same year.)

Also, read Rama, while we’re at it. Although you shouldn’t bother with the sequels “coauthored with” (i.e. almost entirely written by) Gentry Lee. They start out okay but get pretty terrible pretty quickly (with thinly-veiled SOCIAL COMMENTARY and an overly-literal deus ex machina) and use cheap cliffhanger tactics to keep you reading them even though they are not at all worth the effort, and it upsets me that some part of my memory is now involuntarily devoted to them.

I could not hold my stylus steady tonight. Gah. I need to seriously cut back on the coffee and/or martinis.

Dudes, dudettes, and dudes of varying and/or indeterminate gender,

I’ve been having a resurgence of my long-standing wrist problems lately, specifically that my carpal tunnel syndrome is back once again (unlike my long-standing tendon problems which have always been fairly cyclic for the last 12 years or so), and I don’t want to leave people in a lurch again. So I would really really appreciate it if people would make guest comics and other such filler for a while while I figure out how to deal with this. I’ll post pretty much anything people send, even.

Also, if someone wants to take over guest artist duty on Unity for a while, that would be even more awesome, although I’d prefer it be someone who can draw at least as good as I can (meaning the bar is low).

Love, fluffy

For now I seem to have my wrists under control, so I’m feeling comfortable with starting up on comics again. However, I am about to go on vacation for two weeks so even though I’ll have my portable Wacom with me I don’t know if I’ll be doing much comicing.

As mentioned previously, I am rather busy with things. I just got back from Spokane the other day and now I’m on my way to Chicago. I have a few Unity strips in the pipe but I haven’t had time to finish them or anything. I am a busy bee. I would certainly appreciate guest art in the meantime.

I finally have some time (and wrist strength) to work on comics again, so that is what I’m doing. I’d like to apologize to Drake who had to put up with my vagueness in direction. I hope he still finishes the version of Unity #189 he was working on, since while it was quite different than what I intended it was still an interesting take on my little world, not to mention much better-drawn than anything I’ve ever done.

If it wasn’t painfully obvious by the fact that plot threads are getting wrapped up faster than a dead fish at a newspaper convention, Unity is coming to an end. I’m not sure how many strips there are left but a rough script for the rest of the series has finally precipitated out of my rough working outline like so much sucrose in a super-saturated sugar solution.

This chapter is maybe two thirds done, and then there is just one more (fairly brief) chapter to go. But it’s not really an ending so much as a beginning, as I have plenty of ideas for other things that can happen in Unity’s universe (although I haven’t started writing any stories around them just yet).

Also, when it does wrap up (and I’m excited to have finally managed to see a comic series all the way through to the end!), I’ll release the whole series in an easy-to-read CBZ file, maybe for a nominal fee (would $3 be reasonable?), with some of the more egregious problems cleaned up and the files saved out at full resolution. If anyone has any suggestions for a simple digital-media store that isn’t Paypal-based, I’d be willing to hear them.

I probably need to take another week off.

but manageably so, for now. We’ll see how this goes.

Why must you keep on making even the most implausible (and arguably scary) aspects of my science fiction feasible?

(Next step, programming a platypus via sparkle electroreception…)

I’ve mentioned this before, but within the next few months, Unity will be ending. I have decided that when it does, I will provide some options for a “collection” version. For various reasons that I won’t go into, it seems natural to me that it should be released initially as a DRM-free ebook of some sort. So here are the options I am thinking of:

• A .cbz of all the strips as they appeared on the website, for $1
• A .cbz of all the strips at my full working resolution, with the various text layout errors corrected, and with chapter title cards and extra “author’s notes” for $3
• A .zip of all the strips' original .PSD files, as well as the previous option, for $15. This is for the obsessives who want to see all of the Easter eggs that I (mostly accidentally) buried behind foreground elements and speech bubbles and so on, or who want to make sprites out of the characters or parody strips or whatever else people can think of that would benefit from having the separated layers. (These would require Photoshop CS3 or later to look correct, but they’ll at least be semi-functional in anything that supports layers and the PSD format, such as GIMP, Pixelmator, etc.)

If there is enough interest in a print edition I’d probably go the Lulu route, although setting that up would be a huge amount of work and, if it’s in color (which is important to the story), it would also be enormously expensive, so that seems like something of a last resort.

Just to keep things simple for me, I’d probably use Dreamhost Files Forever, although its UI kind of sucks. If anyone knows of another digital file fulfillment system that lets me just set a price on files and have them provided to people when they pay money, I’d be open to suggestions (including something that uses the Google Checkout API or whatever).

I’d appreciate any feedback.

I must say, it’s pretty amazing that Smarasderagd took the time to reverse-engineer the font I use for spoken Homin text (Blambot’s “Miskatonic”) and then used it to figure out what Juni was mumbling on this strip. Of course, it would have been a lot easier to just enter [Homin text] and have me fill it in at my discretion, but it’s the fact people are willing to take that extra little bit of effort which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Goodness, what’s this?

I have Friday’s comic written and laid out and so on, but tomorrow I will be busy with work trying to put some finishing touches on an important demo for Big Boss and I might not have a chance to finish it. If it’s late, I’ll hopefully get it up Friday evening, or worst case I’ll finish (and post) it during the CAM webcomics convention on Saturday.

Luprand was recently kind enough to review Unity. As a warning, the review does include a few things that I would consider somewhat minor spoilers (in that he straightforwardly explains things that I would have hoped a reader would figure out on their own), but still, it’s a nice review. He posts other good reviews as well, and is well worth subscribing to in your RSS aggregator of choice.