Kitfox Comics

I got a new art tablet. This one is the new Intuos Art tablet (medium sized) and it is so much more responsive than my old Intuos 3. I’ve been playing around with it for the last few days and still getting used to it, but do like how much more control it gives you. It’ll also replace an Intuos Pen (small) that I bought last year which also had nice responsiveness but which was so small I found it hard to get the precision I needed. Anyhow, hopefully this will do good things to the way I draw the comic.

So as chapter 4 is drawing to a close, I’ve been thinking about about how things have been going with Kitfox Comics and what I might be doing with it in the future.

I’ve been drawing the story for nearly five years now. Originally I had envisioned it as an RPG style video game, but lacked the skills I needed to do that, since I really into different sort of games from RPG to casino games as baccarat online where I can make some money on the web. Above all, my drawing skills were terrible and I thought that presenting the first few chapters as a comic would be a great way to build skills.

Even the title is tentative – rather than giving it a proper name, ‘Kitfox Comics’ is a reference to the web domain it’s hosted on (I used to follow D C Simpson’s ‘Ozy and Millie’ during its original run and knew about the trouble Simpson ran into with a domain name poacher – so I wanted to avoid naming it unless I could secure a domain for it first).

Anyhow, five years later I have improved quite a bit at drawing and rendering, but still fall short of professional level art skills. I’m also having a lot more demands on my time which is making producing each page more difficult. Each page takes about six or seven hours to make. On top of that, I’m only getting about 40 hits per day – a rate which hasn’t changed in years. It’s hard to say what percentage of that are unique humans, but in any case the strip isn’t pulling in huge numbers.

Ive been thinking of changing up the format. Maybe going to black and white, maybe dropping the format down to a weekly newspaper size, maybe even rebooting the whole story and going with something gag-based with short story arcs rather than the novel-length and increasingly grim serial that I’m currently doing.

In any case, I need something more manageable. And I would really like to bring viewers something they really like too.

So, for everyone following my moving saga, I had planned to complete the last stage of my move to Canada today. I had rolled in the month before and put the majority of my possessions in a UHaul storage locker. At this particular storage facility, they have a policy that you must use a particular lock to lock your unit with – however, they were all out so they told me to just use a regular padlock I had with me and that they would replace it later. When I arrived today to get my things out, they had indeed replaced the lock. And lost the key. And since these are special locks, they can’t just cut it open with bolt cutters. And the one person who works in the place who knows how to remove these special locks is on holiday until July 3.

Anyhow, looks like next week’s update is likely going to be a miss. Luckily I do have a new place to move into, albeit without furniture.