April 24th, 2011

Hello to those of you who still check back once in a while! I’ve gotten a number of emails recently wondering about the comic and what the situation is looking like. I can say for now that the plan is the same as previously announced: once I graduate, I will spend some time this summer drawing Dovecote. There should be regular updates probably starting mid-June. This summer may be the finale of the comic, as I have another big comic project I’d like to get rolling, as well as a full-time job waiting for me in the fall. But I just can’t let Dovecote go without a good finale, so we’ll be back for a while at least! Hope this helps settle any doubt on what’s going on. Thanks for checking in on us!

Weeks late, here’s the page I intended to finish and post after Paris.

As unfortunate as it is, I think I’m going to have to cave in to saying that I’ll just update whenever I can. A lot of my creative energy is going into planning my senior film, and into taking advantage of being out in the French countryside sketching and painting as much as possible. Dovecote is important to me, but for the time being it’s taken a back seat to these other endeavors.

I want to make it through Ben, Tess, and Jeremy’s backstory comics at least, so a page might appear every once in a while. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Off to a bit of a rocky start here with Dovecote’s return. This week they’re whisking us away to Paris, and I won’t be able to work on or update Dovecote until I get back. But I’m thumbnailing all the upcoming strips, so updates will start rolling smoothly soon enough.

I can’t tell you how much it means that you all were waiting and checking the site during our long absence. We’ve got the best readers ever :)

So way back in about 2008 when this comic was first being born, if you will (gahhhh sooo loooong ago!), I sent Bridget character lists with sort of absurdly detailed backstories. Some of it has made it into the comic, some of it has proved completely irrelevant, and some of it I kept hoping would come up but never actually did. So, the following sort-of-arc will consisit of some combination of those categories of information. :)

I wanted to make this post to gush over how amazing Bridget is, but I realized that it would be too unnecessarily long and incoherent. So in brief: she has taken my completely incoherent script directions and made something absolutely beautiful. Bridget, you rule. :)

Already have some ideas for the next arcs… what do you hope/predict will happen? I promise to avoid stealing ideas that are better than mine. ;)

So… I’m still alive, for the record. Though the script snafu of early September certainly suggested otherwise… all I can do is offer my most profuse apologies. Any and all slacking this fall has been totally my fault. I’m spending my fall semester in England, and was unexpectedly without internet access for the first two weeks.

As for the story arc that wouldn’t end… I am absolutely thrilled to report that I just sent the final scripts to Bridget mere moments ago. There’s always the possibility of additions, as Bridget comes up with brilliant plot ideas that never crossed my mind… but I think it’s done. So the end is in sight!

Alan Bennett, one of my favorite playwrights, talks about the play you intended to write which is hidden, somewhere, within the play you actually end up writing. Dovecote isn’t a play, of course, but the principle applies… the story I set out to write was so very different from the beast this thing became… And there were definitely some growing pains along the way (like, um, the date of the battle changing halfway through… er…). But I think its heart remained intact, even as the details shifted wildly, including an entirely new ending thought up by Bridget right before we both left for school.

So, I want to apologize again for all the ball-dropping that happened on my end the past month or so. You guys are amazingly awesome and I feel terrible for having left you in suspense. And I promise that the next story arc will be very, very short…