Well, lookie here, an UPDATE!  It has been a long time coming, I know, but I was really blocked up and it took me a while to get the rocks out of the creative stream and get the ideas flowing again.  The end of 2012/beginning of 2013 has not been especially kind to us, and it was just a matter of turtling up and getting past it.  A trip to the Comic Geek Speak Super Show last weekend really helped charge me up, too. I saw lots of old friends — Dawn Griffin of Zorphbert & Fred, Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots, Megan Lavey-Heaton of Namesake, Chris Flick of Capes & Babes, and lots of old friends I never met before (that’s a better way to think of people than “strangers” — I’m awfully strange, myself).

I have artwork for a few more pages beyond this one already shot.  I’ll work on the scenes for the next ones after that, and try to build a rhythm again.  I think I have my energy back, but with this neck of mine, I can never be sure when I’m going to feel the bag of concrete fall on it and be going “ow, Ow, OW!” and not feel like doing anything besides sitting with a heating pad and a bottle of painkillers.

Suffice to say, I’m still here, and I’m still telling the story.

A final word about the Chinese phrases in the story — I’ve done my best to make sure I’m saying what I think I’m saying, barring finding a friendly Chinese-speaker to vet it for me. I have a program that checks each symbol to verify it is at least saying what the website I got it from says it means, so I’m not getting “Mr. Kwon’s Pro Station and Penicillin Clinic, Deliveries In The Rear” when I think I’m saying “Mind your own business.”  My source is the venerable Firefly Pinyinary, which was already vetted six ways from Sunday before they aired the material in the TV show. I’m only picking what I think are phrases that fit the scene appropriately.

Not that these scenes ARE “Firefly”.  Nope, not at all.  Just a scene in a parallel universe with people who talk a mix of English and Chinese. Some of them wear long brown coats.  Some of their buildings are rustic. Not “Firefly” at all.  For one thing, they have hyperdrive, and can go to other star systems.  So it CAN’T be “Firefly”, which is stuck in one highly-terraformed and stellarformed system.  Don’t sue me, Evil Fox Executive, it’s just a coincidence.