Emergency comics alert

My testing personal period continues, but somehow the business of government has continued. I've completed writing the mystery print project which should come out early next year. Regular Patreon readers will recognise it by name when it emerges, although it has changed considerably in moving from a webcomic to consideration by one publisher to finally finding a home at another. It has been the most technically tricky thing I've had to write, expanding and contracting in size at various points, with the protagonist changing completely (as it turned out, very much for the better in narrative terms). An old favourite has been brought off the sub's bench and I think you will be pleased to see her after an absence of a few years.

All being well, it will reunite me with some very gifted art collaborators - star names have been signed up - I look forward to sharing more when the process begins in earnest.

I've plotted a new Solver story ("The Urn") but after nearly two months of script writing and thumbnailing on the project above, I have to take a break from scripting 22-page comic books - I think it would suffer, and it's a good tale. I'm going to dial back to a comic strip lifestyle for a little while and build my backlog of material back up. My drawing is rusty and Solver has to be A1 or there's no point doing it. I could just do nothing for a few weeks, but I don't enjoy that, so I'll have a go at some bobbins.horse strips. It has a sort of internal momentum once I get going at it that keeps work light and fun, good when I'm tired but want to draw something.

If you've not read bobbins.horse, it's a comic that revisits the setting of my earliest webcomics and builds around it, using those comics as a stylistic foundation. At a certain point I stopped looking at the original Bobbins (1998-2002) strips - it became, instead, a creative exercise that I have undertaken at points of spiritual weakness, a road to recovery paved with familiar faces and hopefully some good comedy writing.

I did think about doing more of the small Steeple strips but they feel like a one-time thing. I like the broad strokes and big physical stuff drawing that series. It wasn't so much fun adapting it to a strip format.

I sometimes feel like these posts read like an apology: they're not. But the author-reader relationship is a delicate one and I never want you to think I'm going into terminal decline. For me, creative energy is like a sine wave that goes up and down, it always goes back up. The important thing is managing the troughs.

ANOTHER MATTER:

Alex Toth wrote a great note in his career that I wanted to share with you (I found it here). I came to the understanding detailed below early on as a comics reader, it has always felt to me that this stuff is the currency of the comics, worth more than any explosion - the luxury of the exploration of a frozen moment, a connection between two people. Little things mean a lot!