My most recent story, The Landing Pilot, took, for those who were counting, a total of eight months to complete, or just over a page a month. It was a busy time for me for various personal reasons - all of them good - and I don’t see myself returning to the rate of two a week that I could manage back when I was single and had a bullshit staff job that had me home by two each afternoon. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that nothing of value is ever produced by a brief flash of brilliance, so much as by continuous, steady, careful effort. One page a month is more pages a month than a hundred people who are sure they have a novel in them if only they could find the time to sit down and write it. So: many more stories to come, gradually.
In terms of web publishing, for a couple of years now after I gave up on publishing to DeviantArt due to its poor user interface and community that seemed to be focused more on fanart and bad photography than on narrative storytelling, this comic has been published both on the main website (minus a two-month period where WordPress shit the bed on me) and on Tumblr. Tumblr was well-suited to comics, which is why you see a lot of them still on there, and had a good community of mature artists, photographers and so forth. I was given to understand that the user base had declined somewhat since I’d first started posting therein 2012, but it still seemed to be the right place for the comic.
Of course, about 10% of Tumblr was porn of various degrees of quality, as was evidenced by the robot blogs that always seemed to follow you automatically. This is natural and normal, and I think that about 10% of the internet is porn, as is about 10% of the human psyche. Now, driven by FESTA-SESTA and the general fear of lawsuits, Tumblr is poised to unleash a set of algorithms that will protect its user base from the horror that is female-presenting nipples. Now, this isn’t going to impact THIS site, directly, and I fully intend to continue to post comics there until the site eventually, inevitably goes out of business, but it does seem likely to result in Tumblr’s user base tanking in a way that will produce a negative feedback loop and destroy it as a functioning social network. No doubt, Tumblr will eventually go the way of MySpace.
Which leaves me in the market for another network to post to, that will have enough users to make it worth the trouble, and will have the KIND of users who will be interested in my work. It may even be an opportunity to branch out and find a bigger audience, which I probably need to do anyway.
But yes, FESTA-SESTA is a terrible law that is sadly not going anywhere any time soon, because no congressman will touch the issue of sex workers rights and/or free expression with a boathook.