Ack, I have to apologize. I’m sick. Actually, a bad cold has been bouncing back and forth around our house for several weeks. I got it again…and really bad this time. I posted that we had a news entry yesterday, but I had put it on the blog. Then I came home, realized my mistake, and fell asleep doing the comic. I probably should have just mentioned it in the posting, but I had hoped it wouldn’t get the better of me…but it did. Ugh. I often comment I hate November and March, since those two months seem to hit our house the worst with illness.

On a brighter note, Raif’s appointment yesterday went well. No permanent damage, and he is without pain. He got a clear to go back to school. Again, a big thanks for the outpouring of support.

We’re gonna follow the paperboy story for the next few strips, with a little more light being shed on this mystery. Stay tuned.

Oh, and we’re gearing up for the Booyah next week, as well as our upcoming 100th strip! Yay!

A special thanks to everyone for their concern and well-wishes for Raif after his injury last week. He’s doing much better. With the holidays, we didn’t have a ton of time for work on the comic. Today we have some follow-up doctor appointments for Raif. We still plan to put up a strip today, but it will be later in the day. Thanks for your patience.

Black Friday has actually become as a much a holiday as Thanksgiving itself. Though it has many definitions, predominantly the term “Black Friday” is used to mean the day after Thanksgiving, when most retailers start getting Christmas shoppers. Since holiday shopping sales (meaning the 8 weeks or so in November/December) often account for as much money as the stores makes the rest of the year together, they essentially go from being in the red to the going into the black on their financial books.

This comic (issue 94) was yet again inspired by Linus. Even though in real-life he is a bit older than Max, Linus does provide a lot of material for this character. The other day while watching a television commercial for After-Thanksgiving early bird specials, Linus proceeded to tell us why it was called Black Friday. His explanation (which was identical to the one Max gives) made me laugh out loud. Kids are so innocent and their sincerity is priceless. Of course, I explained the real reason it was called that to our son, but I thought it would make a great strip. Particularly since a lot of people will be celebrating the long weekend (as well as starting their shopping) and won’t be checking the site until Monday or Tuesday. We wanted a small stand-alone strip before jumping back into an ongoing storyline.

On another note, Max and Ada are on the floor coloring in this strip. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Our kids are all very much into art and drawing. I think we go through more crayons and paper than about anything else. High priced toys and gadget hold nothing over pencils and notebooks. Even though this is a “smiley comic” we really try to add little bits of real-life to it. I think a lot of parents can relate to sitting around while their kids draw and color. Oh, and of course Mike taking a nap on the couch! One of the biggest compliments we get on Bitmap World is how expressive and descriptive we make the smilies and their world. It’s a conscious effort on our part, and we’re delighted people take notice.

Hoping our American friends had a great Thanksgiving, and that everyone has a great start to the year-end holiday season!

We didn’t plan on having a Thanksgiving themed strip. But this was an idea that actually came from real life. Linus’s school had a food drive where they assembled baskets of Thanksgiving food. They were raffled off through a hoop-shoot. The winners didn’t actually have to make a dunk, they won simply if their name was selected from the hat. Then, for fun, the student and teacher competed with the other groups to see who could get the most hoops. Linus was so excited and proud when he came in and announced that he had Thanksgiving dinner taken care of. This actually had more significant meaning since Jim is still out of work and money is tight. Anyhow, using that as a starting point, we thought it would make a cute story for the Pixels. Of course, their ending was a bit more surreal than ours.

Another series of Cosmic Dungeon strips. I thing I’ve said it before, but I both loving and hate doing those strips! I love them because they are so much fun, and I think the story is great. RPGs and MMPORPGs have been a part of our lives for so many years, it’s really exciting to draw upon that experience for this storyline. The reason I hate these strips is that they require so much more work than the regular strips. Truly, a price for affect.

We hadn’t planned to go back to CD so soon. We were going to come off of the monkey storyline and were going to jump back into one of the other ongoing plots. But, even with the couple of filler strips we had, we decided we wanted to pad things out a bit more in the pacing department. Since we’ve had quite a few fans tell us how much they love the Cosmic Dungeon strips, it seemed natural to go back sooner than later.

I personally hit a big writer’s block when scripting these newest 3. I knew what they were going to be about, but the dialogue just kept escaping me. I was actually getting worried that we’d have a series of stinkers, which I really didn’t want. Then, while walking to the commuter train on Wednesday night, inspiration hit. There is often a lot of musing among webcomic writers about where and how ideas hit. In this case, there was no inspiration, but rather working through the story over and over, and on the 20th time, an element coming to me that hadn’t before. Once that happened, the words came naturally. The added plus was that the idea blossomed into something I’m very excited about.

For those wondering about the other story arcs, be assured, it’s coming. We’ll be in CD a few more strips, and then we move on. Be assured, answers always come. All in good time…and pacing.

Today’s strip (Issue 87) looks like a filler strip. Well, it is and it isn’t. See, we had come up with this idea a while back, and planned to run it at a future date. But over the weekend, a lot of the time we were planning on devoting to creating comics ended up being used for fighting off hackers. Not quite how we like spending our Saturday night.

This strip was actually inspired by watching our kids play a “family-friendly” online game. It was notorious for hanging on the initial load if too many people were accessing it. It was funny hearing some of the comments they would make waiting for the program to pop up, and how they occupied their time before it actually loaded. We thought it would be an amusing addition to the Cosmic Dungeon storyline, considering many online gamers have encountered this type of thing and can relate. As it goes now, it was a quick and easy filler, but very legitimately acts a segue back into Cosmic Dungeon, which we haven’t seen since strip 66.

Note, I DID edit/update this blog entry a bit, because Michelle said the first version was kinda sparce. She’s always getting on me for not making more entries here. Sorry.

When looking at Strip 86, some of our readers may think that we chose Harry’s name specifically for this reason/joke. That’s not true. When we were coming up with names for the characters, we tried to give most of them meaningful names. Such as the next door neighbors are a neon green, and all of their names (for the mostpart) are variations of green. And Mr. Smiley being ironically named so because he never smiles. The majority of the other characters have names that are computer terms or related to the computer field. I simply wanted Harry to be different. And Harry seemed like such an ordinary name–honestly Harry Potter never came into my head once when thinking of this. As for Leroy, since he is Harry 2.0 (their equivalent of Jr.) I thought he needed an ordinary, if not seldom used these days name.

It wasn’t until a few weeks into the strip when I was looking on another website and saw the classic “Happy” emoticon that I realized that smilie was Harry! And then of course I noticed the spelling sameness/difference. It was so funny to me, and perhaps a bit profetic. So, I did this strip.

Oh, and I am editing this entry to add that Dott’s story about how she got Cyan’s name really happened for me. I saw Katherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. Her character’s name was Tess. I just fell in love with the name, and thus that is how my first daughter got her name!