Fred also said:
Ok, this was a FUBAR of the biggest order, getting this comic done. It's done finally. Half way into the first month of the new year.
First off, i'm hoping to not repeat the way September-December went. My schedule at work was a disaster, and one that was a huge obstacle that got in the way of making comics. That's the trouble with bidding on runs for the semester, whatever you end up with you have to do for the entire semester. For this fall, it was not conducive to making comics. I learned from that and have a much more amenable run for this Jan-May stretch. Better daytime stretch of work time, and yes it helped me get this very comic done, finally.
That said, the other problem was... this comic itself. I swear i spent three weeks doing that first frame. Yes, it's complicated, but i kept reworking it over and over again, and when i finally got it done, i still had the rest of the damn comic to draw
Thankfully, the rest of the drawings came together pretty smoothly, though the last frame took some reworking to finally get what i wanted. I'm particularly proud of Megumi's look in frame 2. Someone has had just about enough there. Then finally, frigging dialogue took me four days to work around. This is not unusual, especially when i'm trying to get across both subtle and non-subtle things. You have a large number of characters interacting like this, with two languages and multiple world views, yeah, it's like trying to set up houses of cards with cats jumping around on your table.
Then there was the disaster with Adobe sneaking in a sudden update to Illustrator and Photoshop on my age-old Mac computer here, which resulted in Illustrator no longer working at all on my hard to upgrade mac trash can. THankfully, Photoshop WILL still load, so for the first time in 22 years i had to assemble a Megatokyo comic entirely in Photoshop, which is not idea for playing with dialogue. Looks ok tho, and so i think i get by with this before i am forced to upgrade this computer, which i'm not ready to do yet.
Anyways, last year was a ... well, not the best performance from me for you guys. That needs to change, and it's one of my primary focuses for the next few months. After all, this is a seasonal job i am doing right now and i will have almost four months off this summer to do Megatokyo, and i don't want to be trying to breath life into the dessicated remains of a comic when there is so much that needs to be covered this chapter.
Thanks again for your support, i will start getting production drawings uploaded again and do what i can to kick the dust off some things here that really should never have slowed down.
Oh, and comic 1600. woot.
🥫
Ningen pity unfortunate individual.