Chronillogical

Remem­ber when I said this?

“Rest assured that Chronil­log­i­cal has a future. … The strip has cer­tainly had ample time to die by now, if it were des­tined to die!” [Source]

I did not know it at the time, but that turned out to be a lie. Oops!

After three years, maybe 150 comics or so, blah blah blah, everyone’s heard this story before. In short, we lost inter­est, and now we are giving up (per­haps more accu­rately, we gave up a while ago, and are now owning up to it). We cer­tainly didn’t set out to dis­ap­point any­body, but it’s prob­a­bly best to stop and move on instead of plod­ding ahead with some­thing that just doesn’t have the same mean­ing it used to (for us, anyway). Right? That’s what I tell myself.*

So, as a send-​off, let’s remem­ber the good times as I link to some of my favorite comics that we’ve done:

The Most Impor­tant Moment in His­tory (1 of 2)
Good Work Indeed
Brown Brown Brown
The Winter strips with Mr. Skele­ton are all pretty good: [1] [2] [3]
And finally, Civil Dis­course Man

So, to the long-​haulers, thank you for read­ing! To those who just stopped by for a laugh or two, thank you for read­ing as well. To those who dared to share yet another web­comic with a friend, thank you twice. Thank you all. And be excel­lent to each other.

—
* Greg and I have gotten accus­tomed to this comic-​making thing, though, and we are play­ing around with some new ideas behind the scenes—ideas that are SO FRIGHT­EN­INGLY PRE­LIM­I­NARY, it would be fool­ish of us to go around making grand announce­ments about them right now. If and when they come to fruition, we’ll figure out a way to tell you. Announce­ments will appear here, I’m sure, and prob­a­bly on Twit­ter, and maybe Face­book, and maybe Tumblr too.

Occa­sion­ally, a web­comic I like will stop updat­ing for a while. And I might be tempted to think “Hey! What is up with this chumpzilla? Dude can’t draw summin’ twice a week? Once a week? I mean what is the deal! I still like that strip. Nuts to that guy!” At which point I might snap my fin­gers all sassy-​like.

And after while, the artist (or writer) (or artist/writer combo) (or just the artist despite a combo, but I am get­ting ahead of myself) might walk into view from behind the con­tent black­out, clear his throat, and offer excuses that are mostly unsat­is­fy­ing.

So … hello again!

Yes, for the third time in a year, hello hello. Today, I speak to you on my own behalf, and not on Greg’s, because this is all my fault. (Mine. All of it!) Hon­estly, I’m not really sure what to say—it’s pretty clear that my inter­est in Chronil­log­i­cal has waned a lot lately, and I need to figure out why. Right now, it feels as though there are a lot of rea­sons, neb­u­lous and ill-​defined, most of which fall under the umbrella of “my arting skills are pretty poor and draw­ing this strip is a pain, which makes me not want to do it!”

What’s frus­trat­ing is that, when the strip started, this was a prob­lem that I could at least push aside long enough to finish some­thing. For about a year and a half, we kept Chronil­log­i­cal on a pretty reg­u­lar sched­ule. But after a while, the strip didn’t feel right, and so I sug­gested making changes to it. Updates suf­fered. Then they suf­fered again. And now again. And I think it’s safe to say now that I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not indus­tri­ous enough to fake it! Not yet. With work and luck, that day will come. (On Eileen.)

Rest assured that Chronil­log­i­cal has a future. (GET IT okay never mind this is not the time for that.) (Not the TIME okay seri­ously I will stop.) The strip has cer­tainly had ample time to die by now, if it were des­tined to die! But I need to do some seri­ous work before we’ll know what Chronillogical’s future should look like. Maybe when that day comes, I’ll be able to commit to a reg­u­lar sched­ule, like the grownups do. Until then, sub­scribe to the feed and we’ll let you know what’s up, when it hap­pens.

For right now? It would be irre­spon­si­ble for me to make promises like “new comics next week!” so I’m not going to say that. Greg and I have some ideas to wrap up this arc, so we’ll prob­a­bly move ahead with that before get­ting all exper­i­men­tal up in here. I don’t know exactly when they’ll show up on the site.

If I’ve left out any details you’re curi­ous about, please sound off in the com­ments!

Season’s greet­ings to all the Chris­tians, the ex-​Christians, and the Christian-adjacent—plain ol’ reg­u­lar greet­ings to every­one else!

So our hope was to have the latest strip done by Christ­mas Eve (today!), and that did not happen. Clearly! And it’s not our wish to leave folks with­out any­thing at all on this, the day before tomor­row, so I decided instead to briefly res­ur­rect a hal­lowed Chronil­log­i­cal tra­di­tion.

(I wonder if TUBACHRIST­MAS orga­niz­ers would con­sider incor­po­rat­ing any con­tem­po­rary film scores into their car­ol­ing reper­toire this year.)

All right, I’ve got presents to wrap, super­stars. So you all have a Hoppin’ TUBACHRIST­MAS, a Boppin’ BASS­CLAR­INETHANUKKAH (belated), and a Zippy BAN­JOSAT­UR­NA­LIA!

So you’ve noticed that the next comic has been slow to appear. Nobody panic! You may not see it, but if you listen closely, you can hear its steady approach from beyond the horizon—like a herd of buf­falo, or per­haps a hor­ri­fy­ing war machine.

This next comic has had a couple of false starts, and after a night that yielded zero usable mate­r­ial, I said to myself, “Screw it. Screw this noise. I am going to draw Lucca Ashtear.” And, lack­ing a gavel, I pounded my fist upon the desk. The heav­ens thun­dered in assent. It was rad.

I will admit that I have played some Chrono Trig­ger these past few weeks on the DS—hence the pic­ture. It shouldn’t sur­prise anyone that Chrono Trig­ger is a game that both Greg and I have played¹ and enjoyed and remem­ber fondly. It’s easily one of the best RPGs I’ve met, which is a mean­ing­less state­ment con­sid­er­ing 1) how many other people say that and 2) how few RPGs I have in fact played. That doesn’t dimin­ish its influ­ence on our work, though.

In fact, when Greg and I find our­selves in a tough spot (with regards to story or char­ac­ters or per­haps both at the same time), invari­ably we will ask our­selves “Why doesn’t this feel more like Chrono Trig­ger?”² And for good reason! It’s a fun story with fun dia­logue and fun char­ac­ters³—do you sense the subtle pat­tern here?!

Fun­ness is, after all, the essen­tial ele­ment that we strive for. Some­times we suc­ceed more than other times, and I know that, for the long-​term, we are headed in the right direc­tion. All I have to do now is finish the next dang strip so that I can prove it to you.

tl;dr ct 4 lyfe

—
¹ Per­haps not so long ago as you’d expect—I didn’t touch it until my fresh­man year of col­lege (!) and I don’t think Greg com­pleted a full playthrough until he was well into high school.

³ Lucca strikes me as one of the story’s less engag­ing char­ac­ters, actu­ally, but she has a fun look. (Fun!!) You know who has a flip­pin’ weird look? The pro­tag­o­nist. What is up with that hair, some­body please tell me what is up with it. (Aaand here I am, bewil­dered at the hair­styles in a JRPG. I am 65.)

Just before the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day, too! Pretty much the per­fect time for a con­tent lull. I’ll do what I can to set things right before Wednes­day, though it might be nec­es­sary to sched­ule the next comic for a Friday update. Not sure yet! The wait, I promise, will be worth it, as the comic fea­tures both robots (a type of apoc­a­lypse) and cheese­cake (a type of dessert).

On top of that, the strip that fol­lows this one will be about twice as long as the ones we’ve been post­ing lately. As a result, it will also be delayed a bit—so that’s some extra good news for every­one!

I feel I’ve ful­filled the Web­comics Artist arche­type quite well today, I really do. Delays! Excuses! Apolo­gies! These, my friends, are the fun­da­men­tal ele­ments that com­bine to spell “Pro­fes­sion­al­ism”.

(Anyway. See you in a few days!)