Okay, here's your last update for a week! Sorry, sorry; I'm off to Wales tomorrow so I'll just leave you to agonize over the prospect of new characters and cake. Especially cake. Ah, I'm really happy with this page's dialogue; so much for soul-less maniacal bad-guys, eh.

To tide you over, new backgrounds! Yaaay! Involving Bianca, who will feature in person soon enough... You get a choice, too: Dawn Day Dusk Night

Since I'm on Fedora, I've got it set up to transition between those throughout the day, which is more fun than it ought to be. But for you mere mortals Windows users, you can just use whichever's prettiest. ^^ They're only in 1600x1200 right now, I'll do some other versions when I get back. Sayonara!

Back from the New Forest! It was kinda nice, there were ponies and ptarmigans and things. The horseflies and subsequent allergic reactions were less appreciated. >_< Oww.

Anyway, here's the new page, forgive me for that terrible line at the end, I just don't know enough French to make that pun any better. Irresponsible use of alliteration and bad French aside, I think artistically this is probably the best page yet. I love doing film-noir style lighting, I really do. Anyhow, seeya on Saturday... When a couple of interesting new characters will be introduced. :3

By the way, what screen resolutions do people have? I know most people are probably on 1280x1024 these days, but how common are 1024x768 and weird wide-screen ones?

Sorry, this is a bit late; I was in Londinium all day yesterday. No, there's not been a severe change in my art, this page was done by a friend of mine, since he asked so nicely. My script, of course, but his fine art. Enjoy. ^^

Now, the next week's gonna be kinda funny, since I've got about a dozen different arrangements going on, everything from a week in Wales to going to see a musical. It's like everyone I know simultaneously decided at once that I clearly wouldn't be busy in the first week of July. So it's gonna be kinda awkward keeping to schedule, I'll probably give you your next update on Thursday, then Saturday, then not till the Saturday after, I'm afraid. But then after that, I've got some special stuff for yah.

The plot thickens! Into some form of amorphous gloopy cornflower substance which looks horribly like it's walking if you make it vibrate with sound-waves. Only three panels, I'm afraid... I'm not getting lazy, honest. Hmmn. There's something really cool about having my bad guys sitting around eating cupcakes and drinking tea. What do you guys think of the new schedule, then?

Here yah go. Whenever Brandt's not scowling at everyone, he just looks like a happy puppy. And a coxcomb is a jester's hat, for those of us who aren't versed in obsolete English.

Hmm. Sherlock Holmes stories are addictive, but they don't make you want to solve crimes. Sherlock Holmes stories make you want to sit in armchairs, drink brandy and smoke cigars.

Cool, so S'fo is one today. That means I've been writing this thing for, like, a seventeenth of my life. Sounds longer that way. Wellwishers, leave your offerings upon the altar for ritual burning and proceed to the atrium for obligatory cake and hors d'ouvres.

And from now on we'll be updating every Wednesday and Saturday. I'm not sure how long this'll last; naturally, exceptions will be made in the instances of illness, work or sudden and irrevocable death, but we shall take such things as they come. In the meantime, enjoy.

I'm also in the process of meddling with the prologue, because it's in need of some major changes; it'll mostly be updating the dialogue, but you'll see some panels redrawn too. All in due course.

So, yesterday was my last important exam - there is still one English paper left, but you could pass an English exam at least on good faith if you were in fact a silicon-based inhabitant of Andromeda without any conception of what a book is. And now I have this strange, ineffable thing called free time. It's been a good two years since I've really had a surplus of it; at this level the education system's structured such that you spend so much time building for the future or regretting the past that the present is left to eke out a meagre existence based on justification, procrastination and just occassionally, preperation. Naturally, my first reaction is to abolish this alien "free time" by doubling my S'fo workload; this is the last of the once-weekly updates!

Other news... Not much this week, except that the Subterforge e-mail address has changed to maze@subterforge.com; finally gotten my act together to make one actually based on my domain. And the about page is rewritten with a bit more of a summary... That page needs some images. And I'm wondering what to do about the cast pages. I like their design at the moment, but as I update them, they'll get increasingly spoiler-filled. So maybe I could provide multiple profiles for characters, or something... I dunno, do people read cast pages before the comic?

Oh, hey, and happy Friday the 13th.

Love this page! Feels so old-school S'fo, what with all that red and grey. Putting this up a bit early 'cause the last page felt so cheapskate without dialogue. Hmmn. I should write more, but I've just gotten out of an English exam and four pages of 'How do Bronte and Fowles portray conflict in the two novels?' is enough to kill anyone's wit and muse. Huh, I should write essay questions for Subterforge.

Psst. Join the forum. There's actually stuff going on there now. Slow stuff, but stuff all the same.

Mazeburn out!

Okay, so much for the poll system... The system I was using actually had major vulnerability resulting in someone uploading a spam form (with the scariest damn Tux I've ever seen). And they would have gotten away with it too, if they'd not been clumsy and broken a file needed to load up the poll.

Tarnation, as they say. Guess I'll have to script my own after all. e_e

Maze

Right, various updates! First off, there's the comic. Sorry, no dialogue this week! Thankfully, the next page has a lot to make up for it.

Plus, happy first-of-July, have some celebratory vote incentives! This month there's another reference sheet over at TWC, while bCx has been treated to a nice new wallpaper.

I can also now announce that in two weeks, twice-weekly updates will be every Wednesday and Saturday. The forum has a bit more detail about this. Oh yeah, if you've got an account at the forum, the member-only section's open now, complete with a few fairly embarrassing old versions of the comic. Epic.

Mazeburn out.

Well, I spent a couple of hours trying to work out how to build a system for this myself (those found via the benevolent Google being either bad or for old versions of PHP), I remembered how many random tools my host seems to have. And lo and behold, I found Advanced Poll, a wonderful little tool which took no time to install. I've been wanting to add in polls for a while now, partly because I'm an egotistical thing hungry for reader feedback, and partly because I think they're cool. But I also think Shakespeare and He-Man are cool, so nobody will think less of you if you disagree.

I'll be conducting these on a weekly basis starting from next update, I guess; some will be stuff I'd actually like to know (people's screen resolutions, design opinions, ect) so I can optimize the comic, sometimes it'll just be stuff that's interesting, and sometimes - like right now - it'll be inane self-referential stuff with less purpose than a legless centipede in a world with inadequate cybernetic technologies. Suggestions for polls are welcome, too. ^^

Wow, so after about twelve years of it, school's finally over. ^^ I'm on study-leave... Just a few exams to go, and I'll have three months' free time before hopefully shipping off to Uni. And what relevance is this, you ask? Well, it should give me chance to build up a decent page buffer so I can begin twice-weekly updates (so the comic takes me less than seven years to write), from mid-June onwards! ^^ I'll be sticking to the schedule more strictly this time - but I'm not too sure which days to put 'em on, any preferences there? I'm thinking one will be at the weekend, since hardly any comics seem to update then. Other than that, I guess this site deserves a bit of a refurbish in places.

Bit of a lazy page this week. ^^; Story should be hotting up a little bit soon, though. And say g'bye to Goldstein, since this is the last of him for a little while.

All the time I saved by only doing four panels was more than taken up by writing the dialogue for this thing... 'Dura lex sed lex', by the way, means 'the law is tough, but it is the law'. Latin has such good parallelism at times! It's so much more efficient than English. And hey, new speech bubbles! Bellyfeel prolefeed doubleplusgood, yes? Oh, I should so provide a Newspeak translation for Subterforge. That would be a first. Anyway, I'll eventually go through and change all the old pages to have speechbubbles like this, much to the expense of my patience and wrists, but don't expect that any time soon. ^^

Oh yeah, and Quincey finally has his cast page image; he's been needing that for ages. Enjoy!

Mazeburn out.

Okay, take a poll of the general attitude of each of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and then average that out, and you'll have a pretty good estimate of what this last week's been like for me. I'm aware this page sucks. I set myself the stupid challenge of doing all the colouring in two and a half hours (about half the normal time), and by jove, I did it. Badly and roughly and scrappily, but - it's done. Writing's subject to change, but I just want to get this thing out of the way so I can think about other stuff.

Okay, here's the page! All nine damn panels of it; there were originally ten, but then I remembered I'm a hack. And I apologize sincerely to all those who use 1024x768 for this horizontally-expansive monstrosity of an update; I feel I've been awfully unsympathetic to smaller resolutions since getting my TFT. I'm sure the site looks horrible, and for the stegosauruses viewing this comic over time-travel-Internet (patent pending) on 600x800, it's probably broken your monitor.

Yeah, I know, lynxes don't have long tails like that. But they look so cool! Maybe Goldstein's not all lynx.

Okay, first of the month, meaning it's time for some fresh vote incentives! What joy. What joy indeed. Somewhere high up in the stratosphere, angels' voices ring out in ineffable glee at this very moment, a sound which holds more tremendous glory than this mortal Earth can ever know. Tragically, it's only noticed by one guy at SETI, who no-one believes. Probably for the best.

Okay, this is an Absint month, I think... First up, TWC has been blessed by a brief audience from the mad god hisself, quoting a line from Shakespeare which I just love, even though it's got very little relevance either in or out of context. Whimiscal! I draw characters talking to birds too often. I talk to birds too often.

As for the incorrigible bCx, Absint's reference sheet, fresh off the press I wish I had. Enjoy, damn you!

Erm... If Monday's page is late, blame Valve for being so damn freakin' awesome.
Mazeburn out!

Finally, Carter's back in the game! Long time no see. And he's not the only one with a free-form filing system...

Very early update; this page has actually been done since Monday, and wasn't meant to go up till Saturday... But, uh, I pretty much just wanted to try out the news system again. Minor shift in the style here; I'm back to pencilling the lineart rather than digital ink.

Minor update to the Extras section, in the form of this wonderful piece of giftart, from a friend of mine. So props to him.

Well, I've finally gotten my act together and set up a functional news system. It's not perfect yet, but at least I'm not editing a damn text file anymore. I owe credit to half a dozen tutorials and some code left over from my Computing project, so it only took about three hours to set up. Three mind-numbingly repetitive and dull hours at that, but such is life. Time to test this thing out! There's also a comment section now because I'm egotistical. Feel free to say what you like and have me delete it if it carries communist propaganda and the like. Hmm. Wonder if HTML works with this thing. Space-spiders.