And here I pimp the hell out of Li’l Mell, which is, against all odds, still chugging away over on Girlamatic. I’m drawing the current storyline, but past installments have been drawn by Vera, Bill Mudron, Andrew Farago, Andrew Richard, and Neil Babra. It makes me no money and has a readership of about twelve people, so the only reason I keep writing and drawing it is that I love it so much.

SPOILERS: The first Li’l Mell storyline features Artie in human form, something that would not appear in Narbonic for another two years. The final weeks of Narbonic and the bonus story in Narbonic Volume 6 kind of explain how he ended up in Li’l Mell. I can’t believe I kept his identity secret for as long as I did. Sometimes I’m pretty great.

The line about moving Trunktown to print refers to the fact that, around this time, Tom Hart had lined up a print publisher for the strip. Alas, it fell through or got pushed onto the back burner or something, and so far there has been no print Trunktown. Which is too bad, because it’d look really snazzy.

That drawing of Jason Thompson in the third panel is one of the best drawings of him I’ve done. It doesn’t look that much like him physically, but it captures his intensity. Back in the day, it actually wasn’t that uncommon for Viz employees to hang around the office at all hours, and at least one person lived there for several weeks until the management caught on. It’s all much more professional now.

By the way, you are totally going to want to check out Jason’s graphic novel King of RPGs when it comes out in January from Del Rey. In the meantime, you can read the Lovecraft comics he’s been drawing over on his website. The Stiff, his comic for Girlamatic, is currently on hiatus, which is too bad because I love it.