UTC: Urgent Transformation Crisis

You may be wondering where this week’s UTC page is. I’ve had some struggles with the script. At first I thought a last-minute rewrite would delay me by only half a day. But when starting to draw it, the scene still felt wrong. Hollow and really easy to nitpick. Then it became obvious a central concept wasn’t working and I was stumbling to write around it/cover it up.

So, I’ve completely thrown out the script for this page and, by consequence, the next two pages beyond it. And now, I’ve got nothing at all to show.

I’m calling this week a wash and will work on getting the page out Monday, April 10.

I apologize for the late notice. You will see a new page next week. Thank you for your patience.

If you’ve been checking the site regularly for the latest pages all month, you’ve noticed that I’ve slowly been trying to bring updates back toward the usual Monday release and stop all these mid-week delays. This week’s page was scheduled for Tuesday (today). For a number of reasons, I’ve decided to throw in the towel and push the page back to Thursday, March 2. This means I’m falling short of the 4-pages-per-month target.

Ultimately, the delay will turn out to be a wash, because the original plan after I posted the next page was to announce a break in the comic for the week of March 6. My 40th birthday is next week, and as a little present to myself, I’m going to pause work on the comic so that I can catch my breath, and celebrate with my family and friends.

You might ask, why not just take the break now? The next page feels like a much more appropriate place to pause the comic for two weeks than the one we’re currently on.

So, where we were only going to see 3 pages in March, we’ll have 4 after all. Page CCCXLVII will release on March 2, and then after the break, pages will (maybe I should say “should”) come out March 13, 20 and 27.

As always, the Release Calendar is continuously kept up-to-date with the latest UTC schedule. Even if I don’t make a big splashy announcement here, I will update the calendar, especially if the delay is really short notice.

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.