UPDATE: Blown video card. Not a major problem, but Big MAC is in the shop for a few more days. I will post a pinup on Monday, and I should have Big Mac back on Tuesday. No data was lost or anything, so no worries. Just takes a while to get the replacement part I need. At worst, there won’t be a new story page until Wed afternoon. But check back anyway. We might get lucky. Alas, just had to turn down two nice jobs. Can’t do digital painting without Big Mac! This little snafu has put me a week behind on my digital art, but pencils and inks go…

Calista Brill, editor of First Second Books, lists giving A Distant Soil a read as her guilty pleasure for 2010! My guilty pleasure is drawing it. Once again, my sincere thanks for coming to the official A Distant Soil website to read the comic! Your patronage helps fund this project! I am most grateful!

This is one of the creepiest scenes in the series, but it has some of my favorite work. All details and patterns are drawn by hand. These scans are from the printed book. Tone sheets tend to print better using the old photographic processes, and all pages in volumes I and II of A Distant Soil were shot on negatives. Quebecor, our printer, did a particularly good job on volume II.

First and foremost, my sincere appreciation to Robert Pincombe for his noble sacrifice of dollars on the altar of A Distant Soil. Robert popped us a donation after reading VERY BAD PUBLISHERS, which I continually flog, not just for my benefit but for yours. If you consider getting into the art and entertainment profession (any area, including webcomics,) I really wish you would take the time to read about my experiences. The posts start off a bit slow, but I go into detail about contract scams and other publishing pitfalls. And in other happy news, the restoration process is a lot speedier now that I have learned to use the…

Shot from the original art. I didn’t have enough Photoshop skills to do clean up and restoration on the early pages I posted, but now I do. It takes at least an hour per page to fix mistakes and remove flaws. This is one of the reasons I am considering cutting back to posting 3 pages a week: I need to spend more time doing NEW pages. This page was especially problematic, with word balloon pointer mistakes and line segments missing. I had to restore parts of the background and do some work on the figures. Fortunately, the site is bringing in more money. If that continues, I will be…

The comic returns on Monday for five days a week space opera goodness! Thanks so much for reading! If you’re arriving here the first time, enjoy your holiday, sit back, and have some webcomics! If the traffic on the site continues to improve, I can maintain the five days a week updates through 2010. If not, I may cut back to 3 or 4 days. We will see. I was going to cut back in January, but I will keep up the five days posting until March at least. Let’s see what happens! Your vote makes me dance and sing! YAY! Thank you!!! And if you want to take a…