Resuming Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, and more

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This week

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Have you ever had a day where you've just been puttering around the house, doing this and that just as the fancy takes you, but at the end of the day you've gone through almost all of your to-do list? That's how the past few weekends have been for me. It's because I’m back on (temporary) arthritis meds and have more energy in the tank, for now.

The last time we spoke, I was still slowly updating what I call the mothership, my long-running and very long fantasy webcomic Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Then, for several months as I settled into a new copy-editing gig for a Dutch publisher, I was very much not doing that. But now and at least into October, I'm back on a weekly schedule, finishing, upgrading and posting pages that have existed in some form for years, but which are now finally being shared with the world in full color. Eventually I will run out of already-drawn pages and will have to draw some new ones.

When a story takes this long to produce, it changes. At one point it had a very simple ending that was going to move right on to the next story. Then the story grew longer and the simple ending didn't work anymore. Now, though, I know what to do: just let the thing run its inevitable course. And then? Well, there'll be a next story but it will be unlike anything I had expected back when I started it, and it will be unexpected for readers as well.

Until then, this comic is very bingeable! Go read it (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) if you have a bit of time!

Work on the Dutch version (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) is also continuing at a brisk pace, with about 200 comics now posted or scheduled.

Over the past few months

Greyfriar's Isle is still updating every other week on Planet Nude (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Except those two times when I missed a deadline, and that one time when the editor messed up the publication dates and I made this one-shot featuring Vandervalk and Postillon:

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Read more at Planet Nude Strips! (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

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I'm also taking part in a new initiative: Naturist Cartoons (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), a subsite of Clothes Free Life, where I've been rerunning The Daily Cass (and will maybe one day get around to drawing more - for that purpose, it's important to me to not let that comic fade into history). I'm sharing space with half a dozen other cartoonists in a range of styles and genres.

And while I'm on the topic of specifically naturist comics and art, I've contributed art to a coloring book (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) that's available from Bare Oaks in Canada. More about that on Planet Nude (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

Another place where The Daily Cass (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) has been in reruns along with my old project Aphantasia (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and my newer, but stalled, project Tess Durban, (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) is Fables (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), a newer webcomic platform that I wanted to try out. I probably won’t make that my main platform, but it’s worth checking out and I do have one other project that I want to start posting there starting in September.

There are some positives and negatives to using Fables over any other webcomic platform, which means that it’s pretty far from meeting its promise of being the only platform you’ll ever need to use (if you’re a webcomics artist who is looking for that sort of thing, Comicfury (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) is still a much better bet). One interesting thing about Fables, which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it, is that it sequesters anything that isn’t G-rated (by much more conservative standards than I’ve had to deal with in all my active life as a cartoonist, but then I avoid the big webcomics platforms like Webtoons like the plague) into Fables X, the adult area, where everything including ad provision is separate from the rest of the site. At times, that feels like everything that isn’t white-bread is shunted into a (metaphorical) ghetto where all the billboards are a bit skeevy, but in today’s free speech climate, it also feels like being in a fortress, where censorious busybodies will have a harder time getting in.

Doing a bit more work on Tess Durban has been especially inspiring. Again, bringing those works back to the forefront of my mind is essential for me to even start thinking about continuing them, and I really do want to do more work on this one.

Further back

Our regular blast from the past is a comic that doesn't lend itself to reformatting the way I've been doing for previous episodes, because of how the word balloons flow through it. This newsletter's archival episode is Blep (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). You can read an old version of this comic on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), and you can read on from there or binge-read the comic from the beginning (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), which will keep you entertained for many hours. It's kept me entertained for almost 35 years from its very crude early days to the present, somewhat less crude day.

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We're getting closer to the point where this slot will be taken up by comics posted in 2024 or 2025, but we're not quite there yet.

That's it for now! I'm not planning to leave everybody hanging for another three months! Oh, and if you have a newsletter that runs on Substack, and you want to switch to a different platform, consider EU-hosted Steady (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) as an alternative! From the look of things, it's had a bit of an update since I last posted a newsletter. Or I'm just now noticing the new embed features that were there all along.