Italy was amazing. Our hosts pulled out all the stops and made us feel like we never left home. I will be talking about this trip, to the irritation of everyone I know, for the rest of my life. But I came back sick. It’s not Swine Flu (whew!), but oh man did it make the nine hour flight from Milan to JFK a treat. Especially since I got literally no sleep the previous night due to my core temp spiking and crashing like a roller coaster. And every night previous to that I was lucky to score four non-consecutive hours of sleep. Apparently I’m hardwired into EST, because no matter how hard it was 1am in Milan, my body was all, “Nope, it’s 6pm moron, you’re not sleeping.”

So, yeah. The exhaustion, weather, and travel just caught up to me.

Blah blah you don’t care, let’s get down to biznazzzzz.

Comics are off this week too. I need to recuperate. I’ve got a weird foreign disease roiling around my chest and no health insurance – I’m not going to push my luck. It feels like I’m already through the worst of it, so we should be back on track next week. In the meantime, I’m going to sit in bed and read and sleep.

…and probably work up a blog post about how amazing the trip was before I got plagued.

Made it back to Orlando. Need sleep now. Details to follow post coma.

Oct 27th – Nov 2nd I will be going to, in, or coming back from Italy. If all goes well, I will not contract a horrible disease in my travels and 8BT comics can resume upon my return. But the fact is I’m overdue for a cold and I’m going to be in a crowd the size of SDCC in one-third the space of SDCC. Why anyone would want to afflict this beautiful town with that kind of rabble is beyond me, but what the hell, I’ll go.

Not sure what kind of connectivity I’ll have over there. Apparently Italian cell phone signals are made out of actual gold that’s carried, by hand, through a network of underground tunnels lined with gold and originally dug by the kings of Europe using golden spoons. When the signals arrive at the only relay station on the continent, the Pope himself transmits your message via (golden) teletype to a satellite (also golden) originally put into orbit by a rocketship (solid gold) powered by fuel derived from the remains of every single saint.

At least, that’s the only way I can plausibly justify the international rates on my plan. I mean, seriously. These are kilobytes, not grams of plutonium.

So, I dunno. There may or there may not be updates from the road. My stupid Twitter account would probably be the best way to keep track of that. Either way, I’ll see you jerks next week.

I was planning initially to thank each person individually for submitting their artwork to me for the comic project Brian had mentioned. After getting literally hundreds of e-mails this just is not possible. I wanted to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who sent their art in. I think I’ve seen more art styles this week than I have ever seen before. A lot of you are VERY talented individuals. We’ve narrowed down the field to two or three people we’re looking at (you know who you are). Again, the responses have been overwhelming and I would like to say “thank you” not only to the readers of this site, but also to Brian to putting out the call. Of course this does mean that any future projects I may hopefully have, I’ll be looking to Brian to put the word out again 🙂

                                                                                 -John

Today’s page of How I Killed Your Master represents the end of our first chapter. Check it out from the start and let us know what you think.

We’ll start the next chapter when I get back from Italy. We burned through the majority of the buffer to get here, so maybe Matt can use next week as an excuse to catch back up. Alternatively, it’d represent a great opportunity for you guys to sneak in some commissions while I’m unable to scream obscenities at him for daring to think of doing things that aren’t directly tied to HIKYM. Like all that goddamn sleep he insists on needing every two or three days. Don’t get me started!

Interesting Atomic Robo fact. Our issues place in the Top 300 of all comic sales every month we release one. We’re always in the bottom fifty, but still, we’re there! I know “Bottom of the Top 300” doesn’t sound so hot, well, unless you know a fair amount of comics history and the hows and whys of near total market domination by Marvel and DC. In the print world we’re still an unknown team working on an unknown book from a new publisher, so making the list at all is impressive. To put the Marvel/DC Domination Thing into perspective: while Atomic Robo and the Shadow From Beyond Time #5 came in at 296 in the Top 300 of all comics for the month of September, it was also in the top twenty of all small press books.

Y’know what’s interesting about that list? Atomic Robo is the only comic on it that…

1) …doesn’t tie in to a larger intellectual property built on film, TV, animation, other comics, video games, and in some cases decades of previous material consisting of one or more of those media.

2) …doesn’t have an established creator involved.

You guys are making this possible. Thank you.