It’s been a good week. Got the comic up on Monday, and the vote incentive up on Tuesday. Wednesday my guest strip at GWS went up and garnered a lot of positive comments, which I appreciate, I read them all! That guest strip is only slightly less dirty than the previous one I did, which borders on NSFW depending on the sensibilities of your workplace. (it has a big vibrator in it).
Today, known locally as Quatro de Mayo – I say locally when really I mean that I say that and no one else does, is also known as “May the 4th be with you,” which slowly seems to be turning into an internet geek holiday. That suits me fine cause it’s also my birthday. I only mention it cause I turned 40 this year, and I only mention that, not because I want you all to have the image of me in a wheelchair with an IV drip and an oxygen tank, but because I randomly realized I’m only a few years younger than Sydney’s dad, which is… weird. I guess because I’ve never had adult hobbies like watching sports and… I don’t know… drinking beer, I’ve never felt like an adult, but realizing that I could have a kid that’s old enough to drink is a little jarring.
Don’t worry though, I’m not a decrepit old man quite yet. In fact if I can find the time I’m going to try and get into the 1,000lb club, (combined bench, squat, and deadlift)
Saturday is free comic book day, swing by and support your local retailer.
Today is also The Avengers day, at least for Americans. Mostly I’m posting this because I thought it’d be fun to have an Avengers thread. Don’t spoil anything! You can hide spoilery comments by using the spoilers tag: <spoiler>Spoilers go here</spoiler> It will look like this The Hulk is Bruce Banner Click to read it.

Here’s the vote incentive for May – Sydney by Fred Perry of Gold Digger fame. Normally I’d prefer to do my own art but I had a few other projects relating to the comic take up some of what little spare time I have, and Gold Digger has been hugely influential on both the art and writing for my own comic. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that for a stretch of time, Gold Digger was the only thing that kept me coming back to comic stores. I don’t know if I ever would have done Grrl Power without it.
I was going to try and do a Monday + Thursday post this week to get to the reveal a little faster but just didn’t have the time for two full pages, so this page becomes the vote incentive since there’s nothing necessarily critical on it story wise. (So don’t worry if you read page 85 first.) The finished version of this page will appear in the eventual book.
Click here to throw me a vote and check out the page.
The previous one is up at the somewhat neglected DevianArt page.
New vote incentive/bonus art is up over at topwebcomics.com. Check it out.
I couldn’t think of a shiny hero from DC, at least not one that a lot of people would recognize, otherwise I would have crossed the streams a bit. There’s one guy, I think his name is Captain Atom, but I only know of him due to a handful of supporting role appearances on the Justice League cartoon, I don’t think he’s ever had his own book.
Those guys ought to be careful not to tick her off too much, she’s out of their league. Iron Man could probably take his suit to a body shop. Maybe Colossus could use those plungers things you use to get the dents out of cars on himself. I was thinking of putting Silver Surfer in place of Iron Man, at least he’d have a fighting chance against her.
This week I’m on The Webcomic Beacon. Hopefully less rambly this time, the podcast focuses on writing for an open ended story, so it’s not all retread from last week’s podcast (TGT Media).
Also, if you haven’t checked it out, regular commenter and webcomic enthusiast Marscaleb made a rather well produced video detailing his top 10 webcomics, and does a good job of selling each one on its merits. It’s long but I suggest you check it out, especially if you’re looking for a new comic to archive dive while waiting for the next installment of Grrl Power.
First off, thanks for all the topwebcomics.com votes, (vote link) we got the comic into the top 10, which is amazing since the guys who usually dominate that position offer a post incentive with every comic that goes up, usually nudie pics of their female characters. Especially Spying with Lana, which you should check out if you’re not at work and enjoy well drawn naked people.
I saw some other webcomicers on twitter post some year over year stats, so I thought I’d do the same. I’ve got roughly 5X the traffic since this time last year, so thanks for sticking around everyone. Still, a year ago the comic was only a few months old so while my current traffic level isn’t bad for a relatively young comic, it’s not something I’m going to be making a living off any time soon. So my goal for this year is to get another 5x increase in traffic. I don’t know how realistic that is, but I really would like to escape the cube farm and do this for a living, which of course means more comics each week, so at some point I’ll probably add some ad banners to the page (I know, ads suck but I won’t allow any annoying flash ads or any epilepsy inducing gifs) and that’s not going to pay my mortgage, but at some point my host will probably say “Hey I know we said ‘unlimited’ bandwidth, but… here’s a bill anyway” so the ads might defray that cost and maybe even pay for some advertising of my own.
I don’t have a donate button or any other source of income off the page yet, except for a few T-shirt sales… I should really link the store at some point… but if you enjoy the comic and want to help out, for now the best thing you can do is share it with your friends, facebook, twitter, whatever, and hopefully people will find it and decide to stick around.
Edit: I went with the 910CMX forum. I was just asking around in case they weren’t adding new comics. Thanks for the suggestions.
So I’ve been getting a ton of comments on each page for a while now, after a day or two it gets a little hard to scroll through them all and track a conversation. It’s a nice problem to have but it might be time to look into adding a forum. I’ll keep the comments of course, but I’d like to minimize the number of additional usernames and passwords people have to deal with and try and get into an existing webcomic forum (assuming they’re even accepting new comics.) I know of the 910CMX forums, but that’s it off the top of my head. Any other good ones I should check out?
08/17 – From Dust
08/23 – Deus Ex: Human Revolution
08/30 – Serious Sam: Double D
09/06 – Blood Rayne Betrayal
09/06 – Dead Island
09/06 – Warhammer 40K:SM
09/13 – Hard Reset
10/04 – Rage
10/18 – Batman: Arkham City
10/18 – Serious Sam 3
11/11 – Skyrim
11/15 – Saints Row 3
Given that I only have a few hours a week for games now, I think I’m set through about 2015. Blizzard says they’re still shooting for a ’11 release for Diablo 3, but honestly, I wouldn’t be too upset if it got pushed back to early ’12, cause I’m going to play a looooooooot of Diablo 3.
#FirstWorldProblems
No not like that.* I’m going to be at STRIP, the Dallas Webcomic Expo, on Saturday, August 6th. I’ll have a table and everything. I’m… not 100% sure why, since I don’t have any merch or anything, but it’s a small, local show so I figured it’d be good practice. I can hand out some postcards… and maybe I’ll bring some of the misspelled ones I guess. I don’t really plan on doing commissions or anything since I’m such a slow artist, and it’s been years since I’ve drawn non-digitally but you never know.
*Unless you’re a cute exhibitionist lady bodybuilder










