Quick entry here. This past week our kids started school. We thought to do a strip to commemorate this, but since in the BMW world only a couple of months have passed, it wouldn’t work well in the timeline. Anyhow, Jim came up with the Helpdesk joke, which is so surreal it’s funny. Sad thing is, I have talked to a lot of helpline people, and this joke is not as far-fetched as you think. As for the Mr. Smiley joke, this is actually a strip Jim thought up in the very early days when we just came up with the idea for the comic. Funny that a year and a half later we are just getting an opportunity to use it. Other than being a very funny joke, it certainly tells us a lot about Mr. Smiley.

And before everyone gets really upset about the comic being late, note that we have not been idle on the site. Jim has been working hard on finally getting our Wiki together this past week. Since we have enough content, we think we can finally open it. So, stay tuned for its premier at the next Booyah.

Thankfully, we didn’t use that line in today’s comic (Issue 161).

From the day we started Bitmap World, we were waiting for this day.  The day our “superhero” would be revealed.  It only took 14 months and 161 issues.  Though, we can honestly say that this character appeared in many of the early banner ads for BMW.  Though as time went on and it was clear that this character was going to remain a secret for a while, we ended up pulling him from the banners.

I know I am a geek, even though I am the writer/artist, I just think that last panel is WAY cool! *shivers*

We went around a couple of times on exactly what was going to happen in this comic. Michelle finally decided on the minimalistic direction to take it. When I saw it, my first reactions was, “Harry really is a lunatic, isn’t he?” I don’t know if any of you are playing along in our Laugh Olympics in the forum, but we did mention that this storyline, and Harry’s psychosis about the paperboy, is based loosely on similar situation in one of our favorite movies. If you can guess what movie it is, post in the forum, or leave a comment here.

My friend, Anne, has a popular Blog. It’s simply called, “Cooking with Anne.” From the first time I heard that, I thought it sounded like a good title for a cooking show. That was what spurred the idea of making it a show in the Bitmapworld universe. I ran the idea past Anne some time ago, and she graciously gave me the green-light to go for it. Even though I toyed around with this concept months ago, today’s comic (Issue 133) is the actual strip I had in mind from day one. Anne is very smart and sassy, and I knew that would be reflected in her BMW alter-ego. I just thought the idea of this total chauvenist coming on her show and trying to take over was hysterical. Of course, I immediately knew how she would end up handling him. Her ending monologue, however, came to me as I was doing the actual strip, and I totally love it!

On a somewhat-related note, there was a webcomic that was/is called “Cooking with Anne,” done by Ben Bittner. It’s a short piece and is not your conventional cooking-show type take on the title. When Anne was first starting out, she wanted the URL, but Ben had it for his strip. That comic has not been updated in a while, and Ben no longer kept the name, and after switching hands a couple of times, Anne just got the domain for herself recently.

If you are looking for some great cooking, be sure to check out Anne’s blog. It’s a great read, and the recipes are soooo good. Oh, and if you were wondering why the strip has been running late lately (aside from our server woes), you can look at Anne’s site design, which was done by the BMW team (Jim and me under our Mirz-Jiles moniker). We’ve been doing web-work to make extra money while Jim is still out of job.

Sometimes the biggest delay in doing something, particularly a webcomic, isn’t so much one large thing, but a dozen little things. Though, yesterday, we had a pretty big deal with one of the kids’ schools, and that put us back. Again, we appreciate our reader’s understanding. Some people have asked us why don’t we make a buffer of strips. We have made small buffers in the past, just 2-3. But usually when we have extra time we concentrate on story development. It’s not unlike us to sit and have a pow-wow about what’s gonna happen next and in the future. That’s also easy to do when we’re cooking dinner or cleaning around the house. Multi-tasking!

There has been one thing we have been doing a lot of work on, and that’s getting together a new system for doing the strip’s lettering. We use a custom font that I created. However, due to limitations in the font program that created it, the font is not rendered perfectly when we do that lettering. It requires hand clean-up and kerning. For a wordy strip, like today’s strip (issue 116), that process can take almost as long as drawing/piecing the comic. We’ve been searching for a program to remaster the font. Hopefully when we do, it will cut down the overall time to do the comic, which will be a good thing.

It’s been in the single digits and teens around these parts for the last couple of weeks. It’s almost been too cold to do anything. Spring is a while off, but we can’t wait. The cold weather stinks.

For those of you who are wondering…no, we didn’t get our Christmas cards out. It’s a long story, but we had a huge technical problem on a project we were working on. We had to burn 100+ dvds and had a major snafu with not only the burning software, but the burners themselves. It was a collosal mess we have been working on for a couple of weeks, and it put us behind on everything. Thankfully, the project is done, and we’re getting a little caught-up with other stuff, but as you can appreciate, the comic did come as a secondary priority these past few days. We appreciate your patience.

Any parent who has had to sit through the barrage of holiday specials can appreciate today’s comic (issue #104). Seems everyone has a Christmas tale to tell, and if you mashed them all together, they would make quite a piece of work. Originally I was going to have Dott go to talk to Harry in the kitchen, but decided I wanted to show off another part of the house–Harry’s home office. Even though these are pixel graphics, I spend a lot of time thinking about how a room should look and creating it. As in a set for a show, any creation I make is gonna be used a lot, so I feel it’s important to get it done right–even if it is ultimately minimalistic.

As for the blinking tree, I debated if I wanted to do it or not. Honestly, we had eventually planned on doing something like this in some later strips for effect, and since it seemed appropriate, went ahead and did it now. I think was the key was to keep the blinking rather slow so it didn’t distract from the strip. Weigh in what you thought about it in the forum.

I have it linked on the front page, but if you haven’t seen it yet, on my Pixel blog, I have linked up a bunch of movies and shorts from around the Web that my family likes. You may find quite a few on the list that you’ve seen before, but there are also a few you may not have watched. So, check it out HERE.

We ARE planning on having a strip up on Tuesday. See you then.