UPDATE/NOTICE:

Hey, folks, this is Mr. Average.  It looks as though we’re having a repeat of last year’s hurricane situation.  It’s forecast to pass about three hundred miles south of me here in New England, but I’ve lived through a LOT of hurricanes in my time (including Katrina, Wilma, Charlie, and Irene, all of which were pretty crucial), and so although I’m not panicking, I can say from experience that we’re very likely to lose power, transport, internet, and so on up here.  I also live near the coast, and there’s a storm surge predicted.  I will not in all likelihood be ordered out since I’m supposedly on high ground.

But all this is by way of saying that I’m hunkering down for a big storm here, and so if updates are sporadic, or fail to happen, I place responsibility squarely at the feet of mother nature.  Hopefully I’ll get the next page up tonight (I’ve battened down the hatches, so there’s not much ELSE for me to do but draw while I wait), but I just wanted to issue a “heads up.”

Ah!  Yes, I’m back in business after a very eventful week, one which included a very extensive visit to the New York Comic Convention and some very long days in the proverbial “studio” (the REAL studio, where I design buildings), topped off by a very wet and miserable day on a jobsite on Friday.  Let me tell you, you don’t know mud until you’re up to your shins in it in the middle of a torrential downpour.  But the show must go on!

So!  The New York Comic Convention!  This year I think I was far more able to enjoy it on its own merits, since I wasn’t making a huge attempt to do a bunch of promoting, which, let me tell you all from some years’ experience, is a fool’s errand.  To all you would-be webcomics creators out there, take my advice: you simply do not get new readers from walking around a convention floor.  However, you DO get the chance to meet new and interesting people in the trade, and that is why I keep going to NYCC.

The out-and-out leading highlight this year was a little shindig at Denny Fincke’s Artist’s Alley table, where a good crowd of fandom, including long-time 6-Commando booster and cartoonist/writer Christopher Wrann, gathered to talk shop and meet our small but adoring public.  Also awesome was meeting and chatting with Jordan Kotzebue, creator of the comic Hominids, and a truly fine human being, belying the web cartoonists’ reputation for snarky standoffishness, and S.M. Vidaurri, whose new book Iron, or The War After is one of the most gorgeous traditionally-watercolored books you could ever want to see.  I also got to speak with the Joe Staton, the current illustrator of Dick Tracy, which has long been my favorite comic ever-EVER, since the days of Chester Gould.  And of course, as I mentioned last week, I had the privilege of hosting Jason Brubaker, who came out to the East Coast to go to the convention.  Showing him around New York City was a lot of fun, mainly because I rarely have the chance to see the city from the standpoint of just enjoying it for its own sake.  It’s where I work and (to an extent) where I live, and so it’s easy to become jaded about it.  But New York is a really amazing city in its own right, and it was a really great chance to just kind of take it in on its own terms for a change, without having to rush from one place to another.

So then, I had a long work week, during which I realized that between NYCC and such I’ve basically blown my four-week lead down to one week, so I guess it’s back to panicking about my comic every weekend.  But that’s the way I likes it.

At any rate, we’re back up to normal here at the Central Committee.  Thanks to EVERYONE who’s been commenting – last week was a GREAT one for discussion!  For now, I’m off to bed – with another big week ahead of me, how could I do otherwise?

See you next week!