A little help?

Yes, I know, I haven't updated the comic in forever. Well, I have been a bit too busy and otherwise preoccupied: I recently became unemployed. I was working on a 10-page comic for an OCAD anthology book. I was doing all sorts of things.

To be honest, I'm kind of in a tight spot, financially, and until the time comes when this comic is paying my bills (even part of my bills - right now, it's paying nothing), it has to be kind of low on the totem pole.

But what I will do is give you the opportunity to buy Official Nixon t-shirts. Go to the Store page on the website, and you'll find out how to order the shirts, and you can plaster Dart, Taxi and Sevens across your chest proudly, like, uh, someone who's proud of that sort of thing. Or, on the same page you'll find a donation button if you'd like to give me money without getting a shirt, because I know some of you are way too damn cool for t-shirts.

Sorry, no new pages yet...

...but, I have just posted a new column to the Shocktrauma Studios site. This may be of some interest, if you like Nixon, because the column is mostly about Nixon - me musing about starting the comic, how I create the art, some other related thoughts. A lot of it is stuff I already have touched on in this news page and my LiveJournal, but a column makes it all sound like I thought deeply about it or something.

Click here to go to the column.

Also: I've finally figured out how to get Blogger to provide a RSS feed for this news page, if you're into that wacky far-out trendy feed stuff. This is a link for the feed. I'll be placing a permanent link for the feed on the right-side menu.

Page 13 and 14 Appear.

Well, that took longer than I thought it would, but here they are, the other two pages I was talking about.

I've got a binder with all the completed pages printed out; now I've accumulated enough that I can actually start seeing it bound up as a print comic (or graphic novel, or whatever). I wonder how many pages would make a good first issue. There's no way I could afford a bonafide offset press print-run of the comic at this time, so I'd most likely be going through some sort of POD publishing.

That's all off in the future, though.

In other news, I wish I understood RSS or XML enough that I could set up a feed for this news page, or even maybe the comic itself. I hear that's The Cool Thing these days, you know, feeds and stuff. I get the principle behind the concept, but anytime I see something that supposedly instructs people as to how to do it, it's all incomprehensible gibberish to me.

I'm beginning to think it's all some sort of elaborate prank. XML doesn't actually exist, it's all in my head...

Page 12 is up.

Yep, like the title says: I've just put up page 12. Pages 13 and 14 are being colored, and should appear in the next couple of days.

Don't everyone freak out.

Yes, I'm working.

Just finished inking 3 more pages, and will begin coloring soon. And the crowd goes wild.

I am at an awkward point. On the one hand, I hear a lot of people with popular webcomics talk about how it's vital that you produce output on a constant and regular basis. On the other hand, nobody's paying me for this work. I imagine I might feel less bad about being so slow at producing these pages if Nixon actually had any kind of activity that supported me, but I don't even get all that much in the way of "hey, dude, nice comic" let alone anyone shelling out a few bucks in appreciation. When I get comments, it's because I've pimped the site somewhere, and that's when and where I get comments. Over where I pimp the thing. Not here. Not in my email.

I'm not terribly surprised or disappointed, honestly - Nixon is fairly new and the page count isn't so high, and people are lazy and cheap. These are things I've expected. Still, it's a formidable hurdle to get up in the morning and say, "all right, today I'm gonna guts out a fresh new trio of Nixon pages" when all you can expect is a cavernous, hollow indifference.

The up-side to this is that I am not susceptible to fan complaints ('cuz I don't get any, ho ho!) - you know, the "I'm a fan and I support you so you, the creator, should do what I say" kind of routine that some web comics (and some print comics) endure from their fans. I don't believe comic creators should be subject to those types of things, anyway, but in my case, well, there's virtually no support, so how could any fan hope to assert a claim over me? Nyah, nyah, no support, no argument...

...uh, wait.

I suppose this sounds like a whiny pity-party on my part, but I think it's a good idea to document the low times so that when I'm rolling in money and hot young honeys are showing up on my doorstep to worship my middle-aged heavyset comic-scribbling self, I can look back on entries like this and laugh, laugh like a fiend...

Ha.

Poking the Monster with a Sharp Stick (to see if it is made of Play-Doh)

Well, after talking about how it was so easy for me to alter Blogger, turns out the damn "NavBar" wouldn't go away - unless I gave up publishing this page through BlogSpot and did it by FTP (meaning, through my own actual website). Obviously I am not a complete moron, because it seems to be working, it's folded into my website, the NavBar is gone, hoo-rah.

All that's left is to pick up some of the things mentioned in the old "by hand" news page and drop them in here. To the right side of this page you should see three buttons - these are voting buttons for three of those webcomics lists you hear about, so if you are my friend, you will vote for Nixon, often. Every day.

A while ago I sent an "audio letter" to Digital Strips, who'd asked for such letters early on in their podcast show. I plugged Nixon, and talked about one of the host's attitudes towards "manga". That was show #34, so if you want to hear my real-life voice, you could go download the show. (For archive readers: I'm not sure how long they keep shows on the site.)

It's interesting now that I've got a working way to track stats to see traffic jump. Mentioning the comic on Digital Strips gave it a boost - so did registering it with the webcomic lists - and more recently, so did mentioning it on The Engine, Warren Ellis' new message board site, um, thing.

So I know you're looking - but does anyone say anything? Of course not. Well, it can't get any more convenient than posting some comments here in this page, so if silence continues, that'll mean something, and boy won't I be happy to find it out.

Welcome to my Horrible Comic.

Not horrible in the sense that it's poorly executed (you'll have to decide that yourself), but that as this comic progresses, it will depict and describe Horrible Things. Sure, only a bit of gratuitous cussing and some violence as I write this, but, I assure you, Horrible Things are coming.

I mention this not to warn you (the front page should have done that), but because it provides me with an excuse to type something up to test this blog which I am attempting to kludge into shape as my new "news" page. Yeah, I could maybe have done the same thing with LiveJournal, but significantly altering a free LJ account is a bitch and I don't feel like paying. I am poor, and even if I had money, I'm cheap.