Add me to your Xbox Live or PSN: username is eternityinblack!

Edit: In the meantime, check out http://www.gamesand.me if you love gaming - and subscribe on iTunes so you don’t miss a thing.  Also, I’m toying with the idea of filming a live action Xanny’s Curse.  It seems I do much better filming and editing as opposed to drawing.  Will let you know in a bit what happens.

So today I won’t promise another page but provide you with some update as to what’s been going on and perhaps some trivia regarding Xandy.

As all of you might have surmised, I’ve been working my butt off for the past few months trying to get both the site and the comics back up to snuff. It won’t be easy - there’s a grip load of Xanny’s Curse material that I want to post online that it’s going to literally take me months to make them or even get around to doing them. I’ve already gone through 3 hard drive crashes on the PC and I’m trying my best to remember or even retrieve what was lost. Come May, xannyscurse.com will be renewed so that people can read Xandy’s currently-in-hiatus adventures. And just to note, Xandy being stuck in the men’s restroom is a joke of sorts and you’d have to wonder what’s going to happen next. All I can say is I’ve already figured it out, but the problem isn’t drawing it… it’s putting it online.

Before November, I literally HAD a scanner - that’s why Xanny’s Curse continued for a little bit then died again. I used my parents’ scanner up until November and now the story continues in my head, unfortunately as it seems. Between planning for a Japan trip this June and today, all I can tell you is that I’m trying to avoid spending money to get a new scanner since my significant other will be moving in with me and we’ll have a scanner by then.

And yea, I realize that this is a really poor excuse to delay Xanny’s Curse for maybe another five or six months, but if the renewal of the domain is any indication, I’m still holding onto this hoping I can come back to it. My employers have been great, and I have had time to pen a lot of the things I want Xandy to experience. And I can say that the support has been great from you all.

But to touch upon the whole “why do you need us” questions, well, it’s pretty simple. Xanny’s Curse was my idea, and yea I shouldn’t let anyone influence my work - but I think that something I felt was missing in the whole web comic thing was the whole idea that webcomic artists remain distant from the people who read their comics. By creating a dialogue using comics as a tool I think it can influence everyone to try their hand at anything - something that movies and books do. And of course, in our increasingly social atmosphere what with Myspace and Facebook, we can achieve something by building a community as opposed to just showing up on a site every week just to check up on updates on the comic. If this somehow still sounds vague, I apologize as I am typing this while at work.

In any case, I’ll leave you with some trivia that maybe some of you already know - actually I just figured this out while I was reading the comments and seeing my name and browsing through scripts at userscripts.org.

Xandy is “X and Y” put together. If you haven’t taken any kind of biology class before, XY’s definition can be found here.

As with most things, I hope that the next update will be sooner than later, so keep on truckin’ and I’ll catch you all laters.

Edit: I just checked the very last page I posted, and that was done using my Wacom tablet. If I can find my Wacom tablet AND get really PO’d from Lost Odyssey’s loading time tonight, well, you just might get a new page. No promises!

Edit 2: The good news, Lost Odyssey is amazing and so not what the reviews say it is, well, except for the traditional Japanese RPG part. The bad news, it’s distracted me from XC yet again.

Edit 3: I’m throwing this out there… my XBL and PSN name is EternityInBlack, and if you wanna see what I’ve been up to just check it out here: http://live.yahoo.com/eternityinblack. Now, I’m also studying XNA… talk about ADD.

Edit 4: Okay, I REALLY REALLY TRIED drawing XC again last night, using my pen tablet - but all my drawing were crappy.  I know exactly how I want to end this whole “Trapped!” storyline sort of thing and I just need to be able to sit down, draw, and make sure it’s decent enough to show.  Also, I’m thinking if there’s any way I can make a game about Xandy that makes sense.  Ideas?

Onto what’s been happening - well, since Filler #1, I’ve been working at a new job and getting situated.  I was hoping that the new features that I’ve added on the site would encourage people to discuss what they liked or did not like about a page, or even get some feedback as to how the series is progressing.  Now of course I am ultimately at fault for abandoning said series, but imagine making something that you personally felt is very important to you only to find that there’s no one telling you how “good” or “bad” your work is.  It is because of this that I decided not to update, since I felt that there was no dialogue between the various people who’ve checked out the previous XC pages, nor the ones that are just being exposed to the new stuff.

The decision didn’t come easy - I was getting busy planning to move to a new apartment, one that’s much closer to work, and planning for the future.  So I left XC to collect dust again, only to be shook up by Anifanatic and The Great Sage.  And to be honest, I’d much rather get flamed for not updating the site than to not get any reaction at all because right now updating the comic is almost as fun as facing a brick wall and telling it how much fun work was today. I guess what it’s come down to is - how much am I getting back from the community as a content creator.

So, until that changes - or whenever I decide to update the darned thing - we’ll see you on the flip side.

After a nice meal with the parents, I then sat myself down at my desk, picked up my tablet, and started… doodling. I was briefly talking to Thom from The Wotch when I was overcome with creative energy. After that, I suppose, was history - another XC page was posted within a day of the other’s publication.

But what’s strikingly different between the two is the art style. Today’s drawing had a lot more shading, some depth, and fairly composed scenes. I admit that some of the scenes are oddly framed, but all the drawings were done within 30 minutes! Shading, lettering, and posting online included… What’s really taking a lot more time is me writing this post - but that’s something that I chose to do :).

Compared to the drab, almost experimental comic yesterday, I am very pleased with today’s look - but people who’ve seen Vince’s work might have nightmares of looking at the third panel here hinting at quite possibly a serious look for Xanny’s Curse. While the comic does look more refined, the story will stay the same. I’m not sure if I can keep up the same quality over the next panels, but I’ll do my best.

So - Happy Memorial Day (?) and enjoy the panel!

Little did I know that it would take me this long to muster enough courage to lift the pen of my new (if you call three years old new) tablet and continue the storyline. I figured “three” is the magic number here (as in I updated the comic three years ago), so I had the notion to put in the little Monkey Island joke in there. By the way, all the instances of the word “Monkey Island” are copyrighted by Lucasarts Entertainment (can’t figure out how to do a superscript with my current CMS).

The biggest thing that prevented me from updating Xanny’s Curse was my use of the pen tablet. I wasn’t too sure if I would be able to capture the essence of each character in a quick manner. Nonetheless, I tried really hard to get as much style into these three drawings in a manner of minutes. The whole goal, in my case for that matter, is to create these pages as fast as I can so we can get the story rolling. Not being around for three years makes me think a lot about things I’ve left dormant, and Xanny’s Curse was one of those things that I would eventually “get around” in doing.

Do you mind if the art’s like this? Let me know.

Back in January I mentioned in my blog that I wanted a site that will enshrine house the Xanny’s Curse series. While it took months of laboring and design to finally create the layout you see today, careful attention has been placed in order not to alienate the individuals who have been life-long subscribers to the Xanny’s Curse comic. One of the biggest pushes why this update was made actually occurred this past weekend (May 20th, if you’re keeping tabs), due to the sheer fact that I was unable to access the Xanny’s Curse comic close to a 12 hour period. It was at this time that I was determined to push the site live this week - and the reason why you’re also seeing it now.

While I’m getting some of the features up, please bear in mind that this is a work in progress and a majority of the pages on the site are still offline and need to be uploaded. I’m currently putting entries on every single page I’ve posted so I can give some much needed color commentary on some of the pages that were posted in the past. I’m hoping that these comments give you a much better understanding of how the comic came about and give you a clue as to where Xanny’s Curse is headed in the future.

I’m trying to get the pages as fast as I can… I’ll update the comments and contents as the days go by.