Chronillogical

Hello!

If you stretch your memory waaaaay back, you might remem­ber there exist­ing once upon a time a silly little comic called Chronil­log­i­cal. Depend­ing on how strong your memory is, and specif­i­cally whether or not your brain is the sort of brain that inter­mit­tently cleans house, dust­ing away those mnemonic motes that cease­lessly and sub­con­sciously accrue: pass­ing thoughts of pass­ing people, of places, of things—per­haps that fellow you spent all night talk­ing to at last year’s New Year’s Eve party, or that strik­ing woman who sat next to you on the bus on an oth­er­wise dismal Novem­ber day, or any of the other count­less indi­vid­u­als that chaot­i­cally float into your life and are ejected just as hap­haz­ardly past­wards, the rocket fuel pro­ject­ing you into tomor­row—which indi­vid­u­als have exactly zero rel­e­vance to your day-to-day, month-to-month, or year-to-year oper­a­tions, and among which indi­vid­u­als we can now include, with the advent of this brave new inter­net age, those half-​substantial beings who exist some­where across the ether, at the other end of an inter­minable wire strung deep beneath the land (or sea) (or bypass­ing the wire alto­gether and going via satel­lite, quite lit­er­ally through the ether, if there were actu­ally any ether out there to be literal)—because let’s be honest, as bal­ly­hooed as this wave of social media is, there’s still noth­ing quite like star­ing another human being in the eye and affirm­ing that yes, by gum, they do exist, and so do I, and here we are in the real honest-to-goodness phys­i­cal uni­verse, and if I wanted to shut this other person up I could per­fectly well do so, per­haps devi­ate his septum with a well-​planted fist, or a knee to the groin that he would cer­tainly never see coming (the knee, that is, not the groin); depend­ing on how strong your memory is, you might not remem­ber me, Greg Poulos, co-​creator of the afore­men­tioned comic strip.

You may be more inclined to remem­ber John Chouinard, Chronillogical’s other co-​creator, my co-​conspirator and gen­eral guy-I-do-things-with-on-occasion.

Anyway, long story short (too late!): John and I are start­ing up Chronil­log­i­cal again!

*crick­ets*

Well, we’re excited about it anyway.

We’ve been mean­ing to bring Chronil­log­i­cal back for a while now, but we didn’t want to announce any­thing until we had finally gotten some new strips under­way. Well: we have finally got some new strips under­way! We have some new scripts writ­ten (taking off from exactly where we left off the story) and John will be draw­ing them this week. He may even be draw­ing them as we speak¹!

Full dis­clo­sure: John and I are kind of eager to wrap up the Troy sto­ry­line and start trying out some new ideas. As a result, you might notice things moving along faster than pre­vi­ously. That said, aside from the (hope­fully) quick­ened pace, the rest of the Troy sto­ry­line will be pre­sented in much the same format as what we’ve done so far.

Once Troy is over, how­ever, we reserve the right to start play­ing around a bit more with form, tone, and per­haps even (gasp!) the update sched­ule. Ulti­mately, we’re hoping to free our­selves from some of the more unpleas­ant stric­tures of plot so that we can actu­ally mine the full poten­tial of our time travel conceit.

Suc­cinctly: We want to make the strip more fun for you to read, and more fun for us to write.

But that’s a little ways away, and we can cross those bridges when we come to them. Let’s presently refo­cus our atten­tions to the more imme­di­ate future, shall we?

Back before we went on hiatus, John and I didn’t really have much in the way of a buffer of strips. We (gen­er­ally) man­aged, thanks to copi­ous amounts of flex­i­ble free time. In the interim, that free time has sat out in the sun a bit too long, dried up a bit, become a smidge more rigid. As a result, John and I are think­ing about prepar­ing a buffer of 6–10 strips.

That would, how­ever, post­pone the re-​launch of Chronil­log­i­cal by sev­eral weeks. Which brings me to the true pur­pose of this far-too-lengthy post: we want to hear what you want, dear read­ers. Are you so parched of comics that even an extra week of wait­ing would be dis­as­trous to your health and sanity? Should we there­fore release what may only be an ini­tial trickle; or, are you will­ing to extend the cur­rent drought a few weeks longer for the promise of a more sus­tained stream—indeed, per­haps even a river?

More directly, with­out my stupid metaphors: Do you want John and me to start updat­ing ASAP, run­ning a higher risk of miss­ing the occa­sional update? Or should wait till we’ve built up a buffer (prob­a­bly by mid-​April) so we can better guar­an­tee con­sis­tent updates? Please let us know!

How­ever we even­tu­ally decide to roll this out, rest assured that John and I are super-​psyched to hang­ing out with Milo, Jen, Roy, and all our read­ers once more. We’re sin­cerely sorry for leav­ing every­thing hang­ing for the past few months—but ulti­mately, we both agree that the hiatus was the best thing for our­selves and the strip. With this break over, we’re hoping that Chronil­log­i­cal will return better than ever before!

Here’s to… the FUTURE!

(Get it?)

(The FUTURE?)

(‘Cause it’s a strip about TIME TRAVEL?)

(Yeah, you know you missed this.)

¹ Unlikely.