After a moderate amount of soul-searching and a brief flirtation with bigger drawing paper, nothing is changing. I’m keeping the update schedule, I’m keeping the strip size, and I’m trying not to go crazy pursuing grand plans, yet.

There are times I would appreciate more space, but they are few and far between. They would also be more likely used to say little to nothing, because the problem is with story telling, not art size. So that’s what we’ll be focusing on for now, and leave the rest for later.

Later being this August, because that’s the one-year anniversary, and who doesn’t like to celebrate small milestones? I just went and bought my first pad of full size comic-book paper in over a year last week. 11×17, with a 9×14 live area. No which direction you looks at it, it’s larger than the 13×4 I’m drawing on now. And it’s much more intimidating. But instead of using bigger paper, to show a bigger story, I’ll be showcasing a much smaller story, and a much smaller Merunga. Possibly a 6-8 year old Merunga.

It won’t preempt our regularly scheduled stories, which is all I can say about it’s release. There are about three or four ways I can think of to do it, but I haven’t got a clue which one I’ll pick. There’s this whole other technical/business side to this thing that I’m still figuring out (like Patreon, a thing I’ve heard of, and am considering dabbling in.) So we’ll see what’s up when August rolls around. I still have to draw the damn thing after all.

But for now, no big site and style shake ups (there will be shake-ups in the Caravan, some of them not too far away at all.) So we’ll keep out attention on Merunga, and she where she’s taking us for awhile.

A long time ago, on April 19th, 2010, I dipped a first toe into the webcomic pool with ‘Buster Drake.’ The tagline was ‘Rayguns! Rockets! Adventure!’ and was conceived as a love letter to Buck Rogers, 30’s adventure serials, and of course, a daily comic strip.

‘Buster’ was an idea that I had been kicking around for a long time. I’d first wanted to attempt it as a cartoon back in 2004, 2005? But holy crap are cartoons a ton of work! And I wanted to do it as a traditionally drawn cartoon in the same style as the old Fleischer Superman cartoons (by which standard I measure all other cartoons and find them sorely lacking.) Cartoon ‘Buster’ eventually happened in 2007 as final project in a special studies class for a degree I have, but have never used. I hesitate to share the cartoon even now, because truly it is terrible, but I am still proud of it in an odd way. Start to finish, I made that thing! And I’m not typically a guy who finishes things. I found a program, Blender, learned how to use it, with plenty of help from forums and tutorials, and put together a four minute short over the course of a year. So for better or worse, here it is.

After that Buster lay fallow for a few years. Every six months or so I’d dust off the idea, doodle around the edges of it, and then move on. I’d recently started my career as a stay-at-home-parent, and a three-year old was a lot of work. Creatively I wasn’t real sure what I wanted to do with anything at the time, so I did nothing, until I met my friend Sheldon and I began to accomplish things again.

Working on a thing, and suffering along with the ups and downs of it, whatever the final fate of it may yet turn out to be, was a powerful feeling, very motivating, and I started to work on Buster in earnest again, writing out stories, setting goals and deadlines, just kind of getting my ass in gear. And on schedule that first strip went up Monday the 19th. It felt amazing.

Anyway, a few years later, after some starts and stops and changes for the better, changes for the worse, it finally died semi-permanently (which I say only because I would like to resurrect it someday,) on September 29th, 2013, on strip number 203. Which at the time felt like a lot, but now feels tiny! Here we are at 203 and it hasn’t even been a year, and I’ve got stuffed planned out to 400 and beyond at this point.

I would like to revisit Buster again someday, but I don’t know if the original run will ever return to the public eye. I was lucky enough to learn the basics of comicking on a small unlit stage without an audience, there’s not much call to re-enact those painful formative times now that you’re benefiting from the lessons learned. But I do occasionally read through the body of work, and it only reminds me how much more fun, and how much better Merunga is, not in spite of those early strips, but because of them.

*As measured in number of strips posted online, not in terms of amount of art produced, or time in existence.

For my day job I’m a stay-at-home parent. It’s immensely rewarding, easily my favorite job ever, but it does only come with nine months of vacation. Of which there are only three weeks left. My how the time flies.

The next three weeks then are  mad-cap scramble to complete all of the many projects I’ve started over vacation, but haven’t completed. If pressed, I’d say my favorite hobby is to start projects. One of my wife’s hobbies then, is forcing me to complete projects. It’s a system that took many years to develop and formalize, and neither of us are really happy with it, but it’s workable, which is the important part.

So then I’m looking forward to paving a patio, some rudimentary landscaping, finishing a Tongo board, finally posting last fall’s garage sale leftovers on Craiglist, mowing my lawn for the first time, buying a mower to mow the lawn with, volunteering at the school’s Field Day, and getting as far ahead on Merunga as I can because this will be the first summer with a kid and a strip and I’m not sure how that balance is going to work.

I’m always a little sad to see vacation time winding down, however the excitement for the work season to start is that much more. The kiddo and I have a pretty good summer schedule, lots of playing, hanging out, taking dogs for walks, scrambing to clean up the house the last five minutes of everyday, wouldn’t change it for anything. It’s easily the best time of the year.