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... and this one time, at band camp, we totally shattered our bandwidth ceiling

You guys are bandwidth devouring animals! We broke 20 gigs of transfer already this month, and the month isn't over yet! I guess telling you that we updated our gallery page with a bunch of fanart that we've gotten from readers and that you should go check them out won't really help (since they're some pretty awesome pieces).

Oh! A bunch of you probably already know about this, but I recently found out about The Black Mages. Yeah, they're 6 musicians that play rock versions of Final Fantasy music, but what makes the l33t is that Uematsu is one of them! I don't know... I always pictured him as this fairly traditional dude who sat behind a computer and a synth to compose his kick-ass music. But after listening to some of their tracks, it was obvious that he was really grooving on the keys, and the thought of him busting those riffs and rocking out on stage just blows my mind. I wonder if one of the US anime cons can book them for a performace. I'm definately going to pick up their CD at the first chance that I get.

Finally, for those of you who for unknown reasons want to know where I get inspiration from (yeah right... I'm really deluding myself to think that anyone would really be interested); it's really strange for me, as someone who writes, to watch "Read or Die: The TV (series)". The entire concept must have been written by a repressed skitzo meglomaniacal author, but it works. Who else could come up with a story where the bad guy is out to brainwash a talented but blocked author to re-write the story of the world to create a facist utopia. The story is awesome, but if you write at all, you pick up on a lot more writer and writing related things. Also, there's a dove name John Woo in it (which totally rocks as an omage).

Eh, sorry about the later than usual page. I forgot that I was going to a friend's bridal shower this week. 0_o Oh well.

For some strange reason, in the past week or so, a lot of people have asked me about my art process on the comic. I don't know what caused all these questions to emerge at once, maybe some kind of cosmic alignment. But I thought I'd just sort of summarize it here for anyone else who's curious.

Now, up until the Christmas piece I did in 2002, I hand drew all the comics with a 2H pencil on bristol board. For like the first couple pages of the comic, I inked the pencils with a ball point pen, but later decided that it just took too much time, so I cut out that step. Instead, I just cleaned up the art in Photoshop when I scanned it in. Then I would color the comic in Photoshop, save the file and bring it into Illustrator where I would lay out all the type. Then I would bring the image back into Photoshop, tweak it or make any changes or fixes, and save it for the web.

Then, when I got my Wacom tablet and the Painter program a little over a year ago, I basically just started drawing the comic right on the computer. I find it saves some time and let's me create cleaner looking images. I've also started to do some of the coloring in Painter, mostly backgrounds, and then I bring the file into Photoshop and resume from there.

So, I hope that satisfies anyone else who might've been curious. I'm always open to questions about it, so feel free to e-mail me. But I can't give out any almighty art secrets. It's just the same with everyone, practice and hard work.