[About 1pm: Apologies if you were here earlier and saw a weird disjointed blogpost. An earlier draft of it got posted by accident and I only spotted it now.]

New comic! Wow, that feels good. It’s been gnawing at me ever since the last one. In the meantime I’ve moved to London with Dan and started a Masters. Contained in that short sentence are nine months of upheaval and crisis and uncertainty, and massive quantities of hard work and worry. But we’re here and things are starting to make sense again. Which means more comics.

Like my new print collection! You might already have noticed it in the sidebar, but have a look at the cover properly at the Shop. It’s 40 pages, about two-thirds of which are IN COLOUR. This is a brilliant thing.

One of the reasons this is going ahead is being back at college. I’d checked prices and thought I’d either have to settle for a black-and-white version or not be able to print the last year’s strips at all. But the university print shop is really cheap, it turns out.

The other reason is IndieGoGo, the crowdfunding site, and all the fantastic people who gave me funding through it. I got the cost of the print run and then some. I am still astonished by this. Thank you all so very much.

I’ve been sorting out printing logistics since then – I ended up having to do lots of collating by hand to keep costs down – but all the funders should have their copies in the post within the next couple of days. I hope they all get to you by Christmas. Everyone else, if you’d like a copy (with four pages only ever to be seen in print!) you can order a copy from the Shop now.

Is anyone still reading? How’ve you been? It’s great to be back.

To be concluded next week.

Whenever I go looking for photo references for Tempin’ Bear, especially ones of hunting bears, there are lots of cute pictures and not very many fierce ones. Except this one photo that keeps coming up in Google Images. It’s of a polar bear standing over a bloody carcass of something or other. And it’s nearly always on right-wing loony websites. There’s the “climate change is a conspiracy by evil scientists” ones that you’d expect, but earlier today I clicked on one that didn’t sound like it had anything to do with the environment. It turned out to be mostly about the dangers of being nice to Muslims, who are Taking Over The World. Ew ew ew.

What really annoys me is the way those sites use the photo – almost always with smug accompanying text saying something like “So what do you think of your poster child now? Not so cute and cuddly now, is he?”* It’s as if these people think environmentalists don’t know polar bears are carnivores, and if we see a bear killing something we’ll go “Oh my God! We were wrong! Let’s melt the icecaps right now!”

Considering some of those bloggers’ love of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, you’d think it’d be a bit risky for them to claim that only those who don’t kill anything and who love all God’s creatures deserve to have their interests protected. But then self-awareness doesn’t seem to be their strong suit.

***

Please excuse the missing week, and the general not-managing-to-update-on-Thursday, lately. I’ve been building a website for my freelance work and it has eaten my brain. Code to comics is a difficult context switch. It’s fun, though, and it’s nearly finished.

First person to tell me what the first panel’s a reference to gets a prize!

* When they aren’t gleefully quoting seriously dodgy research by Bjorn Lomborg erroneously claiming that polar bear numbers are rising, that is.

You might not even realise that internalised critical voice is there, until one day it shuts up for a while and the silence where it was is blissful.

Thanks to everyone who came and said hello and bought comics at the Alternative Press Fair. Bemusement, rather than thanks, to that one guy who declared “There’s a fuckin’ MINGE in your comic,” like it was an insult or something. The only possible response was a cheery grin and “Yes. Yes there is.”

Then the next day I went to Orbital Comics, who are now stocking One Word For Everything and also Urban Beasts, by boyfriend Dan with Karen and Anna Rubins. Go! Buy! Enjoy their giant beanbags and their exhibition of original thriller-comic art by Arthur Ranson!

And check out the new Stockists page above. It seemed worth making a page now that I have more than two stockists. I’d like to get some more to add to that. If there’s a comic shop in your city that takes small-press stuff, please comment and let me know.

To be concluded next week. Not that I’m particularly full of self-loathing at the moment – it just struck me the other day how people who say disapprovingly ’she’s let herself go’ are essentially saying that keeping yourself on a very short leash is the right way to live. Frankly, fuck that noise.

Hello to all the Livejournal people who dropped by in the last week because of this strip! I hope some of you stick around. You can get my comics on your friends page by going to the Livejournal RSS feed.

One more time: I’ll be at the Alternative Press Fair this Saturday, near Euston Station in London, from midday to 6pm. Come and say hi and let me press stickers and MooCards into your hands.

So I have inexplicably decided to rename this series of strips after a pretentious line from a Covenant song. Covenant being a goth techno band I was into in the early noughties. Okayyy.

This is part 2 of 3.

I’ve been a hermit lately – several weeks of a lingering cold and ice and then SNOW, lots of it. It doesn’t help that I keep missing Tuesday comics pub because I’m busy making comics. But! Next month I’ll have a stall at the Alternative Press Fair near Euston Station in London, selling comics and craft stuff. Come and say hello!

Yeah. RAWK.

This is from the second Wasted Epiphanies minicomic that came out in early 2007.