The awesome webcomic collective I belong to, SpiderForest, is Kickstarting a 100+ page comic anthology! It includes a 4-page Cooties story by yours truly, and the $40.00 tier comes with a sketch card by me of a character of your choice! Go back this project here.
You can also contribute a small amount to show support even if you don’t want the book. Thanks!
I love participating in the Webcomic Secret Santa every year. This awesome piece of Nate & Carmen comes from Melissa Massey! You can see my contribution over at Lewi by Fluffy.
On June 23, 2006, Cooties officially began its online life.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, I’m offering everyone 25% off of my first book collection. Get the 222-page manga-sized book for $15.00 from now until June 23! It’s a great gift for your grade school age kids, or for anyone who loves fun action sci-fi!
Now, on to the harshing of mellows, although probably just mine.
TMI alert.
I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching over the last little while. I’ve been divorced for a year and a half now, living with family so I can still support my kids. As my financial situation continues to worsen, I have to face reality. I want to move out of this basement and find a home closer to my kids, one they can also feel at home in. To do that, I am going to have to either get a second job working for someone else, or maximize the financial viability of my freelance illustration gig.
I have chosen the latter.
I am going to start focusing all of my artistic energy into what will give me the most return for my efforts, and while Cooties has been a labor of love for me, it has essentially been a decade long hobby into which I can no longer afford to pour my energy full time. I know the comic has a few followers; trying to sell a book collection of something that people can read online for free, however, has shown me that followers don’t necessarily translate into fans. So there are two or three of you who are probably genuinely disappointed that I won’t be updating with any set frequency, but the rest of you will read this and move on. I thank you for taking the time over the last ten years to encourage me in this comic. I have learned a lot, mostly about what not to do in the future, so this has been valuable and fun. This site will remain active, but if any of you are interested in keeping tabs on my work, just follow me on social media or my blog.
Thanks for the memories. While I may post the occasional update here and there, it will be in the cracks between freelance jobs, so I won’t continue with a set schedule.
From now until Halloween, you can download a PDF version of my spooky short story The Classroom Curses for free over on my Patron page. YOU ARE WELCOME.
You can also purchase a print copy here!
I have to apologize for the lack of updates lately. I’ve been busy preparing to table at Salt Lake Comic Con this week. The majority of my free time for the past month has been devoted to creating a print of almost 40 Marvel characters from the Marvel Studios movies, as well as a bit of freelance work, and Cooties unfortunately took a backseat. I thought I’d be able to have a comic up for tomorrow; however, there are a lot of little things I still need to do to prepare. And frankly, I’m just exhausted.
After this next week, though, Cooties will be the only thing on my plate. I’ve got just about 20 pages left to finish Infestation, and I want to have the whole thing done and posted before the holidays. I will therefore be updating the comic twice a week in order to do this, starting a week from tomorrow! A nine-year effort will finally be coming to fruition for me.
This started out as a silly experiment in creating comics for the web, and the scope of the story ended up being a lot more than I thought it would. I have learned a lot from the many, many mistakes I have made through the process of creating this, and I plan to make some changes. But that’s a topic I will come back to at the end of the year. 🙂
In the meantime, if any of you are in the Salt Lake area, I hope to see you this Thursday, Friday or Saturday! I will be selling print editions of issues 1 & 2 of Cooties; these are re-colored, re-lettered versions from what you see on the site, along with a few reworked punchlines and such! I will be doing original art commissions, and selling 11″ x 17″ prints of my Marvel Cinematic Universe pic, seen below. I’ll be at booth Light Blue 28 in Artist Alley!
