July 21, 2012: This is about my other webcomic, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, but it is big news that I want to share with everyone. I just posted the following there:

The Rite of Serfdom remasters are now done, at long last. All 342 existing episodes have been given a makeover, with new lettering, new more organic looking gutters, a size upgrade, a colour depth upgrade and more. "More" varies from little bits of touchup here and there to a complete redraw of a whole page or even a sequence of pages. One thing left to do is the addition of one page to a redrawn sequence, because upon rereading, the scene seemed to shift too quickly. That will get done in the next week or so.

And then it'll be time for the next stage of this big project! I will have 343 high-res, full-colour master files with lettering, plus one cover illustration done years ago that was never included in the archives. What am I going to do with them? Why, I'm going to make a book! With the help of Aggie Janicot, who is now interning at a graphic design shop to bring her expertise on digital publishing and printing up to date, I plan to release The Rite of Serfdom in multiple formats, including both ebooks and print. We still need to figure out a lot, including such burning questions as "What's possible?" and "How can we make it work without breaking the bank?", and we still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are pushing ahead with this, one way or another. If you want to read more as we work on this, and if you want to find out more about our other work in progress, join the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan Facebook page or follow RoguesClwydRhan on Twitter; both channels are updated very frequently with the latest news.

This is a very exciting project for us to be working on. All we have at this time is the materials, a tentative release date and the sweat of our brows. We will keep everyone posted as we work past each milestone for the release.

Hello and Welcome to all of you who clicked on the ad on Curvy or one of the other Stinking Hellebore comics/websites! I hope you enjoy this here comic. If you did, can I ask you a favour? The website the comic is hosted on, ComicFury, measures popularity in some unusual ways, based on some arcane formula involving not just pageviews but comments and subscriptions. If you have many updates but few subscriptions, then no matter how popular you are on on the net as a whole, other ComicFury members will see this information on the ComicFury homepage, assume you suck, and ignore your updates. So if you have an existing (free) ComicFury membership, could you please subscribe to Spun Off so that this terrible fate does not befall the comic? All a subscription does, by the way, is inform you of updates on a special page within the Comicfury system. Also, if you don't have a membership, getting one will allow you to comment with a fixed identity and avatar, post on the forums, and start your own webcomics on ComicFury if you're interested in doing that, as well as subscribe to comics as mentioned above.

Another way you can help this comic out is if you're a member of The Belfry, the venerable webcomics listing website. The Belfry listing for Spun Off is here, and subscribing to Spun Off through that helps me in pretty much the same way as subscribing through ComicFury. A subscription on the Belfry does even less than one on ComicFury: it just adds the comic to a list of other comics you've subscribed to, counts those and creates recommendations based on who subscribes to what. Actually, I've found over the years that that's pretty useful.

Of course, no one should feel obliged to do anything. Just sitting back and reading helps me plenty: I become more motivated when I know that what I make is being read and enjoyed. So thanks for dropping by!

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.