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Hey, friends. Hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, or whichever holiday you choose to celebrate. It’s been unseasonably warm here in Chicago so we still haven’t had our first big snowfall. I can’t remember the last time I experienced a Christmas that was completely devoid of snow, but I was pretty surprised what a dramatic effect it had on the entire tone of the proceedings. Something was most definitely missing.
It’s commonplace for everyone who lives here to complain endlessly about winter, but I actually like snow. Granted, I don’t have to drive in it very often (thanks public transportation!) but I’ve been around it my whole life so at this point I feel like if I were still bitching about the weather here, that’s all on me. There’s a great big country out there – go find somewhere warmer.
Of course, we’re still being teased with what’s supposed to be “the worst winter in the entire nation” so I may be singing a very different tune in a month or two. We’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy the first page of the second issue in our Hoover Damned storyline. Also, I’m still working the kinks out of the new newsletter system. So for those of you that subscribed, that should be up-and-running again next week.
Our old newsletter plug-in turned out to be a tricky, tricky beast so we’ve created a new one. The bad news is that our subscribers probably haven’t received any of the messages we’ve been sending out. The good news is that if you already signed up for the previous newsletter, you do NOT need to sign up again.
If you haven’t subscribed yet, give it a shot. We send out a reminder every Monday to let you know that a new page has been posted. Sometimes you might even get the link early. There’s also some other fun stuff we’re working that’s going to be exclusive to our subscribers. You can find a preview of these messages and a sign-up form here.
And as always, you RSS-savvy folks can find a link to our feed at the top right corner of the page.
I can’t believe it, but we’re already quickly approaching the two-year anniversary of Ed Mann Walking. It’s in January and right now it looks like it’s going to coincide with a pretty cool moment in the current storyline. We’ll be just under 100 pages at that point, but my first reaction was still “That’s it?”.
I’ve said before that I wish we could update two or three times a week. I think it would probably have a dramatic effect on the number of regular readers. But the comic is just one of a handful of ongoing projects that Kristen and I work on and it just wouldn’t be smart for us to try and commit to an unrealistic schedule. It also wouldn’t be fair to any of you. We’re planning on shooting a new web series in the near future and we’re already trying to get a jump on upcoming Ed pages in preparation for that.
I’ve never been very good at keeping secrets, so it’s crazy to be so far ahead in the plotting of not only this arc, but the larger story as well. There’s so much ground to cover and so many things I can’t wait to explore. I suppose that’s good, though. Much better to be frustrated about having too many directions to go in rather than feeling burned out by all of it.
I know the last few pages have been a bit talky and there’s been a curious lack of the undead. I promise it’s all building to something.
So I’m trying out a new size for the pages. It’s a little bit smaller, but I think it’s easier to read and it should help considerably with the load time. It’s not a huge deal for checking in every week, but I was thinking more about anyone who’s reading through the archive to get caught up. Just trying to shave off a few extra seconds every time they click to go the next page. So now I have to go back and resize the previous pages. Good thing I made this decision 19 pages into this arc instead of 90.
Hope everyone’s having a great Halloween. I’ve been spending the last week or so hunting down a suitably creepy or scary movie and I have to admit the results have been fairly disappointing. Not only have I seen almost everything, but I’m also incredibly desensitized to anything that used to disturb me.
Kristen and I did watch House of the Devil last night and that was pretty good. I loved the look and tone of it. I’d heard it was a pretty successful throwback to the horror films of the late 70s/early 80s and shooting it on 16mm definitely made it a lot more unsettling than it would have been otherwise. Tom Noonan was great in it (as always) and I really dug the first hour or so.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but I have mixed feelings about the third act. I thought that it could have gone just a little bit further with the subject than it did. Still, a great homage to all of those “satanic panic” flicks and miles above anything else I’ve watched recently. Like that awful prequel/remake of The Thing. Blegh.
Speaking of John Carpenter, to quote Halloween… “It’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”
Perhaps there’s still a chance I’ll stumble across a genuinely unnerving title.
We’ve been working on a few of these for a while, but weren’t sure what to do with them. They’re send-ups of iconic movie posters featuring the EMW gang. Originally, we were going to attach them to some of the messages we sent out on our mailing list. Instead, we decided to just share them here.
We’ll probably start a gallery once we have enough of them, but for now here’s the first one. Nothing too crazy, but hopefully it brings a smile to your face. Oh, and if you have any ideas for future posters let us know!
