@$$hole! – WTF?!?

Nope, not a comic update. It’s more of an apology for the lack of comic updates. Or the lack of any real insight into the goings on of my life in general lately. Allow me to explain a bit….

I had been updating the photo story comics (which typically take a little less time to produce) on a semi-regular basis, but kept getting side tracked earlier this year with putting Junkyard Chase together. Although it’s only a short story, it was a rather large under taking – but also a very rewarding one. Putting a book together is a lot of work, as my blog series about it pointed out.

In addition to Junkyard Chase, I’ve also been plugging away at the next adventure of Albert the Alien (the short story I did for Reading with Pictures) with Gabriel Bautista. We have some big plans for this character, and they’re starting to come together right now.

Outside of the all-ages comics, I’m also developing a few older-reader books that I want to pitch to some publishers. This takes up a little time, as I’m not pursuing them as strongly as I could be or should be. That’s my fault, but I like to focus on a few things at a time.

On top of that, when not working on comics, there are two additional distractions in my life at the moment. The first is work.

I work as a strategist (planner) at one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, working on a global brand that has pretty high demands on the people who work on it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy this work a lot – but it is VERY time consuming.

During the time before moving to Chicago, I used to have time to work on comics while a movie played in the background. Now, I typically leave the office anywhere from 6-9pm, and don’t get home until an hour later. Assuming I don’t go to the gym (which I’ve also kind of given up on since working these hours), this means the first thing on my mind when I get home is typically dinner. After prepping food, eating it, and cleaning up, it’s about time to take a shower and go to bed.

No real time for comics during the week, which leaves the weekends. But the other distraction comes into play there: the girlfriend.

All of last year I was pretty invested in the online dating scene, finally taking the leap (plunge?) from free sites to the pay sites such as Match.com and eharmony.com. Basically, these sites lent themselves more to ridicule than actual positive results. Match was a complete waste of my time, and eharmony was too…until the last week.

I eventually met a girl on there that I’ve been seeing for a few months now, and she’s pretty damn awesome. I mean, when you read a profile that says one of the six things she can’t live without are “the teenage mutant ninja turtles,” you know you’ve found a girl you want to meet.

And meet we did. And so far, so good. She even made an appearance at the table during C2E2 briefly on Saturday. She’s slowly getting into the comics scene, but so far she’s digging them.

So this all begs the question: where are the comics?

So Temple is on hiatus until I can get another artist attached to it. And @$$Hole! is still being worked on. I need to finish the illustrated pages before I take pictures for the photo fight, and it’s all just taking a little longer than I anticipated – but they’re going to look awesome.

If I don’t have the photo fight pages ready to go by May 6, then I’m going to work in parallel on those while doing regular updates. So in May, expect new pages!

So there’s my quick apology and recap. Hope all’s well with you, and I appreciate your continued support.