Well, if we were printing, this might well be the last page of the first issue. And it only took me a month to find time to finish the colors on this one.

BUT - don’t despair!

This weekend we’ll be at Archon in Collinsville, IL. Next week I’ll have time to wrap up the Big Things I’ve been working on in addition to convention prep. New pages will follow.

-WesT

my muse is back

Still - perpetually, it seem - monkeying with my workflow.

It doesn’t help that my life still hasn’t settled down, really. The job is great, the commute is awful, my daughter’s living with me full-time again finally, and Maya’s here and we’re all settling in and I’ve got a family again. Which is wonderful news, and I couldn’t be happier.

However, it’s a big adjustment.

It seems like every day there’s something else - enrolling Arcadia in school, finding a new watch strap to fix mine (it broke), moving furniture around, making doctor appointments, investigating my insurance benefits for said appointments, diagnosing pet turtle health, and the million typical things that make up an American home life. At the end of the day, I’m lucky to be able to spend any time with my family at all.

Right now it’s seriously tempting to put HEX’D on hold indefinitely. Lord knows I have enough to do in my life that “free time” is really something other people have, and I’m chronically short of sleep. I’m also finding myself ever more lost in the art of making sequential illustrations. I’ve only really been doing this for a little over a year, if you think about it. Kind of jumped in at the deep end, really. I’ve been learning workflow, panel organization, and so on, and doing is a great way to learn quickly. Unfortunately I’m also suffering from burnout - I need to find some people who’ve been doing this longer than I have, and talk shop with them for awhile. I have too many unanswered questions, too many “what’s the best way to _____” concerns.

However, I’m betting that if I put the comic on hold completely, I’d never come back to it. So I’m going to take a few weeks off from updating in order to experiment a little more and take some of the pressure off. We’ll be back in early September, hopefully with a buffer. In the mean time, enjoy the rest of the summer. If you want to know when I relaunch, keep an eye on this page starting September 1st, or follow me on Twitter.

Cheers,

-WesT

but it was a close thing for a minute. A message to all Illinois commuters in the Chicago area:

DECAF.

After attempting to pass a Jeep driver today who was apparently trying his damnedest to ensure that a semi-truck merged into my car, the man took offense and elected to retaliate against my will to live by repeatedly accelerating, then braking suddenly, in what I can only surmise was an attempt to cause me to hit him.

Which I managed not to do. Later, at a light, he rocketed past me, screaming obscenities.

I do so love commuting.

-WesT