So I finished the thumbnails for Chapter 5 of my comic. That may not sound like much, but this is actually a first for me. For the previous chapters, I never had a complete script and never more than a few pages thumbnailed in advance. Also my thumbnails were tiny two-inch high doodle blobs with no dialogue. When drawing the actual pages I had a lot of delays where I would get stuck on a scene or piece of dialogue or a layout. Now for this chapter I drew each thumbnail the size of a half sheet of printer paper — big enough to write all the dialogue in. So this serves as the script as well. You can see a blurry photo on my my tumblr post, including the page that was partially eaten by my cat.

I had thought this was going to be an absolute monster of a chapter. There was a lot to fit in, and I wondered if I'd have to split it into two chapters to keep it from getting too ridiculously long. But after thumbnailing everything it came down to around 66 pages, more than 10 pages shorter than Chapter 3 (the longest chapter so far).

I have to say, I'm super excited for this chapter. My hope is that with the whole thing more or less laid out in advance I can be a bit more efficient when drawing the actual pages. My plan right now is to start updating before the end of February.

A lot of people have been commenting lately about the comic. I really appreciate it. I figured a status update was in order.