Ok so....this is probably going to be a fairly long entry, so here goes;

This largely concerns Verboten as a comic, as well as a number of other personal things I am involved in, art-wise. First off: I'm really sorry for the severe lack of updates as of the last....six months or so. I hate to constantly cite "real life" as cause for lack of updates, but things just kind of grinded to a halt since October or so. At that point in time, work slowed down, and I was in jeopardy of being laid off--or losing my job entirely, if things continued to get worse. September and October were slow months IRL and art wise. While work was slowing, I was looking for other avenues of work, which is why comic work slowed at that time.

Then in October, they ended up laying off a bunch of people, and while I wasn't one of them, I got demoted to a crappier job that I didn't particularly like, but it was still a paycheck.

Then, a couple weeks later (Mid-November) my car broke down. I didn't really have the money to fix it, so I had to wait a couple weeks until I could put the money together. So, I finally got it the money and took the car in to get it fixed, and I thought I was ready to go.

A week later it died again. It wasn't as much to fix this time, but it was still a lot. But surely, THIS time things would be fine, right?

A week later, we had a bad snowstorm, and needed new tires. I had been putting it off for months, but with icy, snowy roads, I NEEDED new tires.

All in all, in less than a month's time I had put almost $2000 into this car. A car which I had BOUGHT for $2000 in June.

So then January rolls around, and things looked better, but work picked up so much that we were constantly working overtime. This was great to replentish that money I spent on the car, but it was eating literally ALL of my free time. I think in January I had three days off the entire month. It was largely the same with February. Plus with all of this crap happening, my motivation was just being sapped away by all this mental and physical wear and I just had no desire to really work on things with all this going on.

What's more, I've never really felt Verboten was up the level I expected it to be at. Some times I was really proud of the pages and the way things were going, but I always felt like I could be doing better. And during those times I was busy or just exhausted, I felt the comic really suffered.

Also, while I really like the my initial approach of having all these "prequel" chapters to introduce the main characters, I feel like their purpose never really got off the ground. My intent was always to get several chapters out, and have these prequel chapters be sort of  "practice" chapters to sharpen the art, storytelling, etc, and accumulate fans and feedback on what people liked, and what they didn't like so I could further polish things....This....never really came to fruition. Instead, people largely have found the chapters to be kind of jumbled, and people didn't seem to really like the disjointed nature of the story telling (as in, each chapter jumping from character to character, and none of the chapters really continuing where the previous one left off.)

So....I've been slowly working on what I consider to be the "bridge" chapter, between the prequel/backstory chapters, and the main comic. I've gotten a few pages done, and I've decided to start posting them as-is, so I can jump start the main comic, and will now have the chapters each leading into on another without weird jumps from one time period to another, and one character to another. The current running chapter (Chapter -004) will be be worked on concurrently with the "bridge" chapter (Chapter 000).

So, that is to say that there are exciting times ahead for Verboten! This is the story as I have always meant for it to be told. Chapter 0 is one that I did originally intend to be a prequel chapter, but I feel that it is necessary to the story, so it will be included as the first chapter of the main comic.

There are also plenty of other Verboten (and other comic) related projects in the future. Chapters -4, and 0 are being worked on concurrently as I mentioned, and I am trying to plan out more Verboten stuff ahead of time. I also have other comics that have been on the backburner for far too long that I would like to get working on.

Along with all of this, my friends and I who host the site www.zibaricon.org are going to be reworking much of the site in order to generate more interest and traffic. We've got a lot of great fans as it is, but the more the merrier! If you've come to the site in the past, I encourage you all to come back, as the site has been updating more frequently, and we have some really big plans for upcoming projects and want to include the fans in the fun! If you've never been to Zibaricon, you should come over!  Not only is Verboten hosted there, but we've got a number of other comics, projects, and fun things by some of my friends and myself.

So, stay tuned here at DA, and on Zibaricon for lots of cool upcoming stuff! 2013 is going to be a great year!