So, let's talk about today's comic. Like I said, I've been rethinking what I'm doing. I inked this one mostly with a brush for one thing. I continued with working the original in blue before photoshopping it into black. It's weird how well that works. Normally trying to turn the "black" truly black, I end up with all this speckled noise that's amplified or lose some of the grays I actually want. Now I can just grab everything that's a certain darkness of blue and turn it straight black, and convert the rest to grays. The noise doesn'tget picked up because that's mostly gray pencilmarks or other blemishes on the paperor specks that have crept into myscanner. Overall, that is one experiment that Iwas fairly skeptical about, but it turned out to bea big success. Less time spent fiddling in photoshop,and I get to workin a color I like to.

I'm also trying out using regular word bubbles, since while I like having the text and background merge a little more, when too much talking is going on, it can be confusing to try and see where one line starts and another ends. I'm continuing with the hand lettering, though using my light board to make the lines for that rather than some of the more arduous methods I've come up with. Tried using a zoom out shot for once to give a feel for where they are. Backgrounds have been an important part of Peace on Earth since the start, but I think I'll have to be smarter about how I work them going forward.

So, going back to taking some time off, this is the last strip in what would be the first series "Setting Out". After this comes a new story line in a new city, we meet the two other major character of Peace on Earth, who might be labeled the villains though they befriend one, so possibly that's inaccurate. All this has taken me far too long to get around to doing.

If I'm going to get through all that I've planned for Peace on Earth, this is going to mean doing a couple things. One is that I'm going to have to start working faster, updating once a week whenever something isn't interfering isn't going to cut it. Two, I'm going to have to start working on my motivation, which in my mind is going to be putting a little bit more on the line and actually aspiring to have an audience of some size. The former is going to take some practice on drawing faster, and redoing some of the early strips seems like a good place to practice that. Drawing an audience in my mind is going to involve a lot of work on the site, both in makingit workbetter for users, making it sothat itcan actually foster a community with commentsand such, and also doing the work toget connected with the rest of the world. People being able to find this site would not be a bad thing any longer.

So I'd like to apologize to the few people that do follow this. Ifyou'd like to shoot me an email, I can add you to a listof people to notify when I've gotten allthese projects in hand and things start moving forward again. I'm reallylooking forwardto being able to make this all better than ever.