I’ll be updating this with colors later in the day.
And… well, I think maybe I may follow some advice to take a week off. Vacation, sabbatical, hiatus bad word no. Whatever you want to call it.
No date on that for right now, but if anyone has guest art or guest comics they’ve been thinking of submitting, Open Call.
my copy-pasting is too subtle, no one will ever notice it. mwa ha ha ha ha ha
I’ve always considered a hiatus to be atleast a month if not more, just a week is a vacation. That being said both are understandable if you’re working on not getting burnt out from giving us these amazing comics and telling such a wonderful story.
Oh heck.
Welp.
I’m willing to bet money that Cern did his little broadcast to deal one final blow to the other clans. Humans IRL can be xenophobic as Hell to our own. Sarnothi will not have a pleasant next few, forever, I guess.
Being called a fish is literally child’s play now.
my thoughts exactly – he knows he can´t send killers after the traitors aka refugees and risk trouble with the US or kanada, but this way he can make sure their life is hell.
I’ve been the fool who works themself until my body crashes and I get sick. Don’t me as dumb as me….rest up and take time.
Yeah I’m mostly sure that it’s why I currently have a cold. Either that or all the times my 13 year old dog has needed a 1am potty… then a 3am potty.. then 5…
Or both.
If those are all the same night, your dog might need to visit the vet. Good luck!
I can’t remember the last time you had a guest week. You totally deserve a break.
Know a guy who worked himself to death, worked 18 hours a day, skipped meals, used coffee for sleep and dinner. Died at age 40.
Don’t be that guy. (Not that you are even near 40 Y.O., but that’s not the point.). Walking happens with two feet. One active, the other passive. One works while the other rests. All work and no play makes Jack-sh**, a slave and his passion are soon parted. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of boys? The Selkie, she knows.
Gosh it is awfully early morning this morning.
I actually am 36, so I’m not too far off from that. >_>
Whippersnapper! 😉
Yeah, take a break.
…I hope to god that Selkie’s friends can be there to help defuse the situation.
“Hiatus” is definitely a bad word! It is loaded with uncertainty of whether our favourite webcomic shall ever continue! /O_O\
“Vacation” is perfectly acceptable; just let us know when you’ll be back, then be SURE to update on the date you’ve committed to, and you’ve done right by your readership! ^_^
Yeah, that’s why I did the “bad word” joke, seen too many webcomics just never come back from their hiatuses.
Actually, why /don’t/ more webcomicists take yearly vacations? The folks at Oglaf do, every Cristmas/New Years they give themselves two to three weeks away from the comic.
Because fans complain about the guests strips, and they’re too worried about losing us. So then we lose them.
I don’t honestly mind guest strips occasionally, though I might feel differently if I took them as a Sign of The End. O_O
I have always appreciated seeing an artist I’m familiar with tackle a comic I’m following. I like the April Fools Day versions where they trade comics in a kind of circle, and I like occasional oddities like in Sluggy Freelance where just random crazy happens, sometimes in much less polished art, or when non-canon stories happen. IIRC, the Foglios (Girl Genius) once took their turn at a Sluggy Freelance story!
I also enjoyed when Schlock Mercenary managed a creepy story each October (Schloctoberfest), for as long as that tradition lasted.
So there’s lots of ways that things like this can work out. And honestly, a strip that’s putting out material regularly, quality material either in storytelling or in art, has much more reason to take a regular, ideally prescheduled, break, compared to a strip that does sporadic updates anyway and just falls off the radar for a few months. We know that a guy who’s producing regular quality content is not just being lazy, but taking a necessary break, and that it’s their right as a creator and as a human being to take a break now and then.
Well… “we” meaning most sensible fans. There’s always gonna be entitled jerks who get upset at not having their updates as fast as they want them.
And on the 8th panel Selkie says “Oh come on! You only just now figured it out?”
Can I mebbe do a guest comic, whenever you decide to take a break?
Sure! That’d be great 😀
What sorta stuff are you looking for in guest comics? I don’t have a working laptop, and I’m not an especially good artist, but it’d be nice to give back to a comic I’ve loved so much. I could draw something traditional and borrow my boyfriend’s scanner? But I dunno what goes into a guest comic.
I don’t really have requirements for it except that it remain family-friendly ish. Any art style is fine, and content can be a favorite side character, or maybe a silly joke or pun, or some kind of scene you’d like to see, whatever.
Here’s the start of the previous hiatus — just read through and see the different styles people got up to. And be aware of your limitations as far as how fast you can reasonably get it together; my Christmas update there looks great and I’m super proud of it (take THAT, part of my brain that’s forever telling me I can’t make good art!), but it took *forever*, and I passed the deadline so the only reason it got accepted is that Dave is super patient and generous.
As I pointed out to someone in the comments section, if Dave tried to get that level of art into his regular updates, we wouldn’t HAVE regular updates. There’s always a trade-off between quality and speed, especially when you have a life other than just devoting yourself to a webcomic. Look up Lackadaisy Cats for an example of a perfectly gorgeous, well-researched comic whose updates happen once in a blue moon 🙁
Actually, though, the coolest thing about creating that page was that I learned a lot about GIMP techniques — especially the glowing Christmas lights, which are random colors from a palette, used with the glowing-lights default brush and some amount of jitter.
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie-hiatus-1-isabelle/
I’m bad at comics, but I can try to make you some fanart!
March Break, woooooo!!!!
Ok, mebbe a week late, but who cares? You’re a grownup, dessert for breakfast all the way!
This either means instant popularity, or total shunning. The last one is a lateral move at this point, so there’s really nothing to lose.
LOL — for a moment I thought you were talking, like almost everyone else here, about Dave taking a break! And I was like, What? Does not compu– Ohhh. Talking about Selkie.
It might not be fine at school — we’ll have to see what pans out — but putting it off for a single skip day probably wouldn’t have helped much.
Indeed, it might be better to go back and face the other kids in person now, while they’re still mostly just confused, than wait until hostile attitudes harden from what they’re hearing at home.
Heh, my brain went there too 😛
Yeah, there’s not too much risk here… except, possibly, that the bullying might get worse (“take THAT for not being human!”). Or that some of the parents might be concerned about their kids going to school with a non-human, and we might end up with segregation issues. It could get very bad if people let out that Selkie has offensive capabilities beyond those a human has (poison spit, a shriek that… I forget what it does exactly, sharp teeth of course, and so on).
Possibly the principal etc. will get “proactive” and restrict or harm Selkie out of some idea of heading off problems before they become problems. Which is itself a problem.
Perhaps you could do fewer S&K strips. I like S&K, but if that’s what it takes, then so be it.
Hi Dave,
Is the weird misspelling in the fourth panel deliberate?
I started reading recently and have been really enjoying it!
Thanks1 Glad you’re liking it so far.
That’s not intentional, I slip up the I E order on Weird a lot. >_>
“I before e, except after c, and when sounding like aye as in neighbor and weigh”
but science is weird!
(that’s how I remember two of the exceptions to the rule, anyway)
Ooh, “science is weird” is a great way to remember that! I don’t have any problem with “science” because the combo is representing two vowels, not just one; the IE/EI problem is when it’s a combo representing a single vowel.
But I remember “weird” as in “most of them are I before E, but weird is just weird.”
I’m surprised you haven’t learned to like, do a pile of back up comics for stuff like this.
Used to have a buffer, let it get away from me and never got it back.
I briefly had a YouTube video buffer. It didn’t last long. Mostly when I end up with days I don’t have a video prepared for, I just hunt through old footage and pull a short clip of something mildly funny. It’s not great, but it has maintained my six-days-a-week posting this long.
However, I’m also starting to feel a bit burnt out, especially with putting more time and energy into A Fugitive in Stardew Valley (the videos for those take HOURS to craft, way more time than I put into any other videos right now), and I’m considering if I’ve reached the point where I need to drop down to three updates a week or maybe even just one, for a while. I don’t think I’m quite there yet — hoping to last to the half-anniversary so I can be proud that I made it a year and a half with six updates a week — but we’ll see how it goes.
Selkie’s a good kid; I don’t think I would have turned down a day off school.