Favorite Thing I Drew in 2011

This year I did a lot of creating.  The most important (but from my perspective the easiest to actually create) was Arthur.  We had a son in April, but all I really did was supply half the building materials while Bethany did most of the work.  I did paint him a picture, which I guess makes us even.

I also pumped out some comic books, easily the most productive year of my life.  I designed or illustrated over 600 greeting cards for my day job, drew 103 finished comic book pages, 4 covers and saw 6 books published.  It was a great year, and I can't thank those of you who supported RiGBY and Screamland enough.

To finish out the year, here is my favorite sequence of the year, from Screamland #3.  The Mass ended up being one of my favorite characters to draw thanks to his malleable frame, and I really like the acting in this scene.  I'm man enough to admit that not everything in Screamland came out as well as I would have liked, but this scene (as well as the aquarium scene in issue 4) stand out as high-water marks for me.

Rigby Twitpics

Some recent in progress RiGBY pics from twitter.

Where's Rigby?

I've had a few inquiries about the ETA on new RiGBY comics, and my stock answer has always been simply that "I'm working on them." Which, honestly, is just a cheeky way of not answering.  In truth, I had the opportunity to rethink RiGBY thanks to my work on SCREAMLAND.  And even though RiGBY will be staying a primarily digital comic, I still want to implement some of the new ideas into the existing comic.
To do this we'll be starting over at the beginning.  After reading SCREAMLAND on comiXology it became clear to me that the way we read comics on digital devices is purely anachronistic.  I'm not planning to completely reboot RiGBY, but I do want to reformat the original pages into what I think will provide a much better digital reading experience.

I'm also completely changing the way I work on the strip.  Originally I wrote each strip one-at-a-time as I was drawing it, mainly making up plot points and twists as I went along.  It was a necessary evil that allowed me to post comics on a (mostly) continuous basis, but prevented the comic from being about anything more than drawing dinosaurs and making Star Wars jokes.  So now I'm writing the entire first book, and will be posting not a page-at-a-time, but a chapter-at-a-time.  I know this will make for less frequent updates, but each update should be more substantial.  The first book currently weighs in around 200 pages, with about 10 chapters.  There are tentative plans for two books after that, but lets focus on getting this first one done.
 Bottom line: look for new RiGBY starting in February.