While I was working on other things, Aggie Janicot took the image she coloured earlier and turned it into a series of promo images, for the Fantasy Comic Portal, for the Spun Off website itself and for paid and unpaid advertising. She also created a new header image for the site and suggested some changes to the colour scheme.

Below is the first series of official promo images for Spun Off. Feel free to use any of these to link back to http://spunoff.thecomicseries.com/ from your personal website, social network, forum, webcomics aggregator or any other site that you might want to place these images on.










The second image, the skyscraper with the big gap in the middle, is incomplete and will be replaced by a version with a short blurb when my head is a bit clearer.

Group portrait of the cast of Spun Off. Digital colour by Aggie Janicot. Cropped versions of this will be used in a logo graphic, Comicfury banner and possibly advertising graphics.

In the next few weeks, I hope to flesh out the website a bit and hash out some more script and worldbuilding. The comic is uploaded and scheduled through August 8, and I have vacation time coming up in a week. Some of that time will be spent scripting some neat bits that are in my head, with action and good scenery including the Goblin village. This will involve making a lot of preparatory art, some of which I'll probably show here and/or recycle for incidental graphics.

Until my vacation time, I want to focus on my other comic, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I'm nearing the end of a mammoth project to remaster the artwork for the Rite of Serfdom storyline, and I hope to get that in the can before the end of the month. After that, there's a good chance that I will slowly start producing new artwork for the comic again, although I also need to remaster Feral. the next major storyline, which is unfinished. Remastering in this context means re-prepping every art file at high resolution so that I can use it for a number of media including ebooks and print books, and exporting the files to what is now the standard format for the website, which is now 648 pixels wide for vertical pages and 800 pixels wide for horizontal ones. This has turned out to be a multi-year project and I'll be glad to see the end of it.

Spun Off meanwhile, seems to have stagnated a bit, readership-wise, which is why I am now considering advertising it. Word-of-mouth works best, but sometimes it needs a little support.

The effect from the Belfry listing seems to have worn off a bit, though Spun Off did gain a few lasting readers as a result. I'm very happy about that. It's time, though, to start thinking about what to do next. I don't want to go overboard with promotion for the comic, especially paid promotion (I still haven't earned back the hundreds of dollars I spent on Project Wonderful advertising for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan back in 2006/2007) but I am open to new ideas for promotions that are free and easy. The Belfry experience shows that these can be

In the next week, there'll be some sexual content in Spun Off. Nothing serious or pornographic - amateur gynecologists will have to continue to look elsewhere - but it will have to be taken into account when planning promotions in the near future. There's upsides and downsides to promoting a comic with sex in it. It can help in some places, and hurt in others. Also, I want to avoid the impression that Spun Off will always be a comic about faerie sex as the storyline after this one will be completely devoid of that.

On the other hand, two of next week's updates are big-production, full colour comics, and the two after that are of much higher quality than we've seen so far. On balance, next week's sequence may be a good time to get the word out about Spun Off.

I'd like to welcome all the hundreds of people who came to this site from Spun Off's new Belfry listing over the past week. And for those of you who have Belfry accounts but were already reading, you can add the comic to your Belfry "Subscriptions" (they're more of a list of favorites or online bookmarks), through this link. Give the comic a boost in its ratings, find similar comics and have a website remember Spun Off for you if I ever start missing updates!

My wife, known on the web as Aggie Janicot, was playing around with some artwork I'd sent her, and ended up recolouring and fixing this old sketch of Neive I did in 2009. Among other things, she darkened Neive's skin to match some other colour images that I had sent her, and fixed the hair. So here we are with our first fan colouring!