Man, I love the first day or two of the month, when, for a brief, shining moment, 6-Commando is in the top 100.  Then the floods of votes come in for the usual top ten, and things normalize.  But just so’s you know, there’s another new voting incentive up, now.  So keep on voting, folks!

Finally she wakes up.  I bet you were just WAITING for this.

There’s an interesting story behind this page, and why I wrote it into the comic.  About three years ago, I contracted pneumonia.  Although the sickness itself wasn’t critical, its side effects were – I was coughing so violently, mostly in my sleep, that I hemorrhaged – tore open the right side of my abdominal cavity.  Imagine a really horrible hernia – it was like that, only higher, larger and much more painful.  My surgeon called it one of the worst he’d ever seen.

After a month of increasing pain, which finally got so bad I couldn’t walk properly, I underwent abdominal surgery to get put back together.  All in all, in the greater scheme of things, it was a quick fix: laproscopic surgery is the best.  But to do it, they had to basically paralyze my entire chest temporarily, and put me on a breathing machine.  It was all over in a few hours, and I only remember the last couple of minutes, when I was just coming out of the anesthesia.  But one thing I had a distinct memory of was the doctors removing the breathing tube they put in my throat, and having the distinct impression, only for a moment, that someone was strangling me.

Which is pretty much what Sarah is experiencing here.  Having a tube in your throat controlling your breathing is not pleasant, and if you start struggling against it, your throat muscles clutch the tube, and it feels a lot like being strangled.  And so this page caws one that I had in mind very much from the start – I’m glad I finally got to it.  It’s one of the most visceral I’ve attempted so far.

And now a little “housekeeping.”  At reader suggestion, I have added a much more visible RSS link to the site – check the top right, and by all means, subscribe, if that’s how you prefer to receive your updates.  It’s all there.  The feed’s been going right along, it’s just a littl

e easier to get to now.  Second, many super-duper special thanks to Jason Brubaker of reMIND, who was kind enough to plug my comic on his site remindblog.com.  I have been recommending reMIND right along, and am a big fan of his work – he was really kind in returning the favor so generously.  And to all the reMIND readers checking out 6-Commando, thanks for stopping by!  It’s a very different kind of comic, but of a kindred artistic spirit, I like to think.

And lastly, there’s a new voting incentive now!  Vote at topwebcomics.com by clicking on the banner above or at the right.  And I have more and so will be updating the incentive at irregular intervals over the next few weeks.  When?  Well, keep voting, because you never know when a neat little extra will come up!  One might even be a full-color desktop background for you to put on your computer!  So vote away, folks, and thanks for the support!

And until next week, be well, everyone.