This was actually two pages of script, but neither page had a lot of meat to it. Both scenes also end on the same note. So I combined them into one page to move things along.
Over the last few weekends, I’ve steadily been updating the site archive and re-uploading the Phase Two chapters in a slightly larger resolution. The pages were originally released at 700 pixels wide, in keeping with the website layout at the time. With Phase Three, I reformatted the site to accommodate pages 750 pixels wide.
As of now, all of Phase Two has been resized to match Phase Three. I plan to do the same for Phase One and the mini-comic “Sister” over the coming weekends. (I’ve been working backwards from the more recent pages so that anyone browsing the archives during this transition will see a “clean” switch from small older pages to big newer pages, instead of starting with bigger pages, then seeing smaller pages, then seeing bigger again.)
I’m not changing the content of the pages. The strip-formatted pages from Chapters 1 and 2 will remain strips. They will just have their upper and lower textual elements removed. (Series title, logo, strip number, strip date, and strip title.) Those parts are redundant, since all of that info is present on the webpage itself nowadays.
For more details and preview images, check out the post on Patreon.
Exactly what it says in the title. I was slammed with several hours of unexpected overtime this week, and that ate into the time I could spend finishing next Monday’s new page. I meant to get it done early in the week, because I’m out of town this weekend. (Actually posting this from my hotel room… I had SO LITTLE SPARE TIME this week, it’s not funny.)
Thank you for rolling with these delays, everyone.
UPDATE 12/12: The page was just finished and uploaded to Patreon at 2:00am Monday morning for Early Access subscribers. It will go live here at 2:00am Tuesday, December 13. I’m immediately starting work on the next page to make sure it goes out on schedule next Monday.
Page 334 of UTC was supposed to go up Monday, since that was the 3rd Monday of September. Obviously, it didn’t. I lost track of things.
I’m sorry I wasn’t more on the ball with the new release schedule. The page will go up next Monday. I’ll focus on sticking to the proper schedule for pages 335 and 336 on October 3 and 17, respectively.
(For the vital info, skip to the TL;DR section)
As you may have noticed, if you keep up with the comic regularly, UTC is slipping behind its Friday schedule more often, by half a day or more.
The “vacation” schedule I’ve been trying out during production on Chapters 14 and 15 — where I take one week off roughly every 3 months — clearly isn’t sustainable. There hasn’t been a single case in the past year where I was able to stick to the designated week off. Something always comes up to throw me off-whack, whether it’s problems at my regular job, personal obligations and activities, or plain old burnout.
The conclusion I’ve drawn from this is that I need to give myself more breaks. I work a full-time job, am trying to maintain a healthy social life, good sleeping and eating habits, and find time to relax and consume content rather than produce it. One UTC page takes on average 8 hours to make. That’s effectively a whole extra day of work per week.
Many of you are probably thinking that I don’t need to justify myself for being a human with regular wants and needs, but it does have to be called out for those who may not know that UTC, and art in general, is a side gig for me, not a career.
Now, here’s the rub: I have 3 long vacations scheduled for the last 4 months of this year. I’ve been planning these for many months now, and have known that I needed to get UTC a few weeks ahead of schedule in order for the comic to update steadily while I’m gone.
Unfortunately, every time I got ahead of schedule, it was undone soon after. When I put extra work into the comic one week, I didn’t have enough energy left to work on it 8 whole hours the week after that, or something else came up that took away time.
I simply can’t get the comic ahead of schedule with the current pace of updates. No matter what, there will be disruptions to the comic’s release from now until the end of the year. So, to minimize the impact on you, the reader, I’m going to work those “weeks off” into the release calendar in as organized a fashion as I can.
TL;DR
Starting in September and until further notice, UTC will update twice a month on every 1st and 3rd Monday. Patreon bonus content will release on the Mondays in between.
The new schedule is organized here.
That means for the rest of 2022, there will only be 9 more pages (well, 8 pages and the Chapter 16 cover).
Feel free to give feedback about this new schedule.
Thank you for continuing to enjoy and support UTC! We’re getting there.
Jim
