The Intermission I (Please Don’t Leave The Building)

Season 2 is done.

Episode 37 went up today. That’s the last one for this season. If you’ve been reading along – even if you just found this thing last week – thank you. Seriously.

I want to explain what’s happening next, because it’s not a hiatus. It’s something else.

When I took a break last year, I called it a hiatus, but I actually had a plan. I just needed to stop for a minute to build it. That was fine, it was what it was, but I came back from it scrambling to catch up. This time I’m doing it differently.

Hereafter, I’m calling this The Intermission. The comic is stepping offstage for a bit, but the work isn’t stopping. I’ve spent the last few weeks writing the entire next season – every episode, every panel, every line of dialogue – before drawing a single page. That’s very new for me. Seasons 1 and 2 were written week to week, sometimes night-of, sometimes with the ink still “drying” when I hit publish. It worked, somehow. 37 episodes, never missed a week. But I want Season 3 to be better than that, and better starts with not winging it.

So that’s what the Intermission is. I’m building the buffer back up, getting the next season locked and loaded, and doing some work on the larger world that I’ve been putting off because weekly publishing doesn’t leave a lot of room for much of anything else.

The one-year anniversary is May 25. That’s when things start moving again. I’ve got something planned for that date that I’m really excited about, but I’m not going to say what it is yet. It involves the Herald, and it involves something old.

In the meantime, the OuterNet is still out there. The Herald published an investigative piece recently that I’m pretty proud of. Some of the other sites have been quietly updated. If you haven’t poked around hobartohio.org or any of the linked sites, now’s a good time. There’s a lot in there that the comic doesn’t tell you about. The comic is just a dusty window.

I began this journey a year ago because I needed to build something. I didn’t have an audience. I didn’t have a plan. I just had a steno pad and a lot of feelings about small towns in Ohio. The fact that anyone reads this at all still catches me off guard some days.

There will be lots of other things going on behind the scenes – the website will get some changes, a long requested (harassed) feature will finally be added. There are many things to be excited about if you’re into this sort of thing and if you’re not, well, cool.

Writing wise, Season 3 is the best season of Hobart yet. I just hope my drawing can keep up with it.

See you on the….24th…and the… 25th, nerds.