Last week the University of Alberta’s department of English and Film Studies hosted the Pop Print Culture Conference, which included several events focused on comics. Wednesday afternoon featured a panel discussion with several academics presenting papers about comics. The presentations were fairly interesting, but the crowd was comprised mostly of academics, so the question period was focused mostly on the presentation that busted out references to things like semiotics. Afterwards I met with Orion Kidder, the organizer of the comic portion of the conference and the editor of Pop Cult Comics, the comic anthology that was created for the conference. I drew a one page story called Apocalypse Hockey for it that I’ll post on the site soon-ish. I like getting paid substantially for two hours of work. After that I had a long conversation with Andrew Foley (writer of The Holiday Men) about web-based comics and his work as an editor.

Thursday was a lot busier. Andrew Foley and I teamed up to take on Rudi Gunther ( of Deathworld fame) and Bob Prodor (a local art dynamo) in a comic battle overseen by Jay Bardyla of Happy Harbor Comics. We were defeated narrowly, but revenge shall be had. Afterward Jay and local author Minister Faust did a seminar on the importance of community the arts, which was more interesting than it might sound.

The most interesting part of the day, though, came after the seminars, when I realized that an editor from Dark Horse Comics was in attendance. I’ve never showed my stuff to a comic company before, but it was a really valuable experience. Rachel, the editor (editress?) looked over my sketchbook and some of the comic pages that I had on hand (and by I, I mean Jay happened to have some copies of Tales From The Harbor with him that had my stuff in them). Her critiques were incredibly helpful in showing me what I’m doing well and what could use work. I’ve actually already started incorporating some of her suggestions into the upcoming Rent-A-Thug story, “King of the Streets”. Which you’ll be hearing a lot about in the near future, since I’ll be starting to post it next Wednesday. It looks like it’ll last a good two months or so, based on the script so far.

Anyhow, I think I’ve rambled on long enough. See you tomorrow for the final Rules For Criminal Success strip!

Okay, so moving the site over to the new host is taking longer than expected. Much of the problem stems from the fact that I suck at computer things. ComicPress is ridiculously easy to use, but beyond that I basically have no website skills. Which results in me being easily confused and afraid to test things out in fear of screwing something up.

The part of this that affects you, the reader, is that there won’t be any updates next week, either. I’m pretty unhappy about that, but I’d rather take my time and do things properly than try to get it done quickly and create more problems for myself by screwing it up. To make up for it, I’ll be posting five new comics the first week back (Monday through Friday).

Sorry guys, but hopefully after this change-over there won’t be any site stuff that affects the update schedule for a very long time.

So unfortunately there aren’t going to be any new comics this week. I do, however, have a reason for no updates. I’m going to be moving to a new web host shortly, and because of that the site is going to be down for a while. I don’t know how long, but possibly up to a week. Hopefully less than that, but I’m technically incompetent and will likely require help getting the site back up and running once it gets transferred over to the new host.

I apologize for the inconvenience, but the move to the new host is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and now’s as good a time as any.

Rent-A-Thug is now listed at WebcomicZ. It’s a new webcomic listing site that you should check out, as fans of webcomics. Or as people I know personally that I bullied into reading. Either way.

Rent-A-Thug on WebcomicZ. The rankings are based on a variety of factors, including the number of people that visit my site from my WebcomicZ page, how many votes I get, and how many favourites I get. I encourage all of you to vote. It only takes a few seconds and increases the site’s exposure to other potential victims… er, readers. You know you want to click the button.

There’s a new drawing in the Illustration section. It’s called Hockeypocalypse and is based on a comic project that I’ve been developing in my spare time. Check it out by clicking the Illustration link in the sidebar or you can just click here.