Back in February, we found out that my mom had been diagnosed with cancer. She’s fine now and the doctors are very optimistic that she’s fully in the clear, but having lost my dad to cancer barely two years ago, it knocked me for a pretty hard loop. Between the anxiety and the duty of driving my mom to doctors appointments, there was about a month and a half or so where I don’t think I ever managed more than a half-day of work, and some days was unable to work at all.
This naturally led to me falling behind, which left me feeling massively overwhelmed, and I found it difficult to know what to prioritize between comics, shop orders, and commissions. Working on comics would delay fulfilling orders and commissions, fulfilling orders would delay the comics and commissions, etc., so whatever I chose, it constantly felt like one step forward but two steps back. I’ve only managed to draw five new pages of JL8 so far, and most of that has only been in the last couple weeks. There are still orders from around the new year which need to be shipped, which I feel even worse about, but am working on rectifying.
Truthfully, I should’ve communicated all of this back in March, but frankly, I was afraid to. This kind of thing has happened so frequently the last few years that I’m not so much worried that folks are just going to leave, but whether or not they’ll even BELIEVE me. Either way, I’m finally feeling comfortable enough to share this update, so it is what it is.
I’m going to keep chugging along on Chapter Nine, and will start posting the new pages as soon as possible. In the meantime, maybe I’ll see some of you in Detroit for Motor City Comic-Con next weekend.
Thanks for reading, and take care.
-Yale
