We’d like to apologize for the lack of updates lately;  work has demanded the time from both of us, and we’ve had server issues, and yadda yadda yadda.  And Eve Tyrannis came out, too.  That didn’t help things.

But we do have content in the pipeline, and our Inker/Colorist has been practicing with his new Wacom tablet, which will keep him from falling into drink after every ink/color session (pixel art isn’t hard, but it’s tedious!).

Soon.  Say, a week.  In fact, come back on 6/12 and there will be new content.  Or subscribe to our RSS feed so you get a nice reminder when it happens.

See y’all soon!

Some things just don’t go as planned.  And some things don’t go as planned, all in a row.  Between large natural gas emergencies calling out Lee and Shawn’s ADD, we finally have the first Missing Number Comic copyright 2010!

We are within tasting distance of the next story arc!  We’re quite ready to get out of “backstory” mode and back into “Pokemon themed webcomic” mode.  We’re almost to the point where non-Pokemon content beats out Pokemon themed content!

Yes, the uniforms at the bottom are uniforms from Star Trek: Enterprise.  Enterprise was one of Lee’s favorite Star Trek series, so, lacking any good ideas for costumes, Shawn decided to toss those in as a bit of an easter egg.

So, enjoy this issue!  And if you like our comic, go ahead and vote for it.  Voting brings us visitors, and more visitors means more motivation to get off Eve Online and grab a pencil.  Or at least switch to ice mining!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We were looking at the costume designs for Team Star Fox, and one thing we noticed, right off the bat, is that they’re all spiffy.  It’s not like Star Trek where everyone is in a Starfleet uniform.  Star Fox characters are dapper.

This comic wasn’t originally part of our Three Year Plan… we brainstormed it over spiked egg nog over the holidays and decided to go ahead with it.  What did David look like flying for Star Fox?  Well, here you go!

Disaster struck Missing Number HQ over the holidays.  Unlike the Curse of Missing Number, however, this wasn’t caused by a computer FAILURE, but a computer UPGRADE.  Shawn got 4GB of high performance gamer memory, and he’s gone to town with it… by gaming!  Eve Online and TF2 mostly.  The extra memory should allow multitasking, and once Hulkageddon is over and Shawn can part his Covetor in empire space safely, he’ll be able to multitask with the Comic.

Or, at least that’s the plan.  Alas, Star Trek Online’s open beta starts next Tuesday… and guess who preordered?  (If your guess is “Those bastards who write this comic,” you’re correct!)  We shall endeavor to get the comic out on time despite the distractions!

Enjoy today’s Very Special New Year’s double page update!

Thanks for coming.  If you like our comic, why not vote for us?  It gets more people to visit, which gives us inflated analytics numbers and egos, which go straight into making comics.  It’s win win!

The holidays are always an exciting time, full of danger and peril and lack of time for even the necessities of life.

That, and Shawn’s hard drive (literally) had it’s cable fall out during an OS installation and had his operating system get completely corrupted.  Repairing that took a few days, which delayed the comic past the already week-long glitch.

That’s why we recommend signing up for our RSS feed!

We’re so close to the end of this arc we can taste it.  Here, Fox and Pepper argue over drumming David out of the fleet, and decide instead to graduate him with honors.  Good luck, David!

We also bring up a concept we came up with for this comic:  that Star Fox has a contract with General Pepper to be the only defense force to actually fight Andross.  We always wondered why Corneria had a huge local defense force… but needed four fighter pilots from Star Fox to save the day.  That’s our explanation.

Lee, our Inker/Colorist, obsesses over details (it’s why he’s on our team!) and kept up an hour long conversation about the eyes of the characters in this comic.  Fox, Pepper, and David use his standard “pixar eyes” technique.  Slippy, being a frog, got not only a larger version of the pixar eyes, but one strongly distorted to look very watery.  And Peppy, bless his heart, David had no end of trouble with Peppy.  He eventually settled down to a hybrid of what he called “all of the Ranma 1/2 eye styles wrapped up in one!”

(I hope our lack of respect for the Star Fox frog wasn’t too strong.  I think it’s subtle enough.)

Lee asked me if I thought that we might be broadcasting our love of having characters pop out of the frame with this issue.  I… think it’s possible.  The first time we ever did it was with “The Other” PC Bill in the comic where he got hit with a water baloon.  I just hope it’s not obvious that Shawn hates drawing General Pepper’s hands.

I’d also like to correct a breech of etiquette I’ve been responsible for for weeks:  We’ve completely failed to thank Blambot for their excellent Self Destruct Button font which has become the font for Star Fox Universe dialog.  It’s very rare for a webcomic to NOT use a Blambot font (unless they use Comic Sans MS… shivers), but still, we should give them a shout out.  Up until the reboot of the webcomic, we had been using only the ingame fonts from Pokemon Script Collection, but we decided in the reboot to go ahead and use extra fonts to show difference in universes and to provide a bit more oomph to the text in the comic.

My only regret is not putting the Ask Ketchum Cap Logo on Slippy’s hat.

Enjoy this update, tell your friends, and see you next week!

Sorry we are so late with this one.  Shawn had a heck of a week and Lee pulled a yeoman sprint to get his entire portion done in 7.5 hours.

Shawn just got a new graphics card;  it’s sweet.  But with great graphics power comes great game playing responsibility.  Which is a reason why the comic is late.

But enough navel gazing!  We’re winding up the arc.  All the people are in place!  Just a few more updates and we’ll finally know the backstory of Chris and Dave!

This is also the first time we’ve been able to show Windwaker Link TNG, with updated graphics.  I don’t know what caused us to draw such an un-Windwaker Windwaker Link over the last few years, but in any case, we’re back on track there.

Also, we have some unintentional irony here.  Back a few comics ago Chris complained about Ashley changing costumes… and now here he is in a completely new shirt.  No, we don’t know how to explain that away

In any case, enjoy our comic update!  And vote for us!  And visit our affiliates!  They’ve got good comics!

Well, there you go, another week without a special new feature!  So sue me, I’ve been eating pie.

We’re building our way to the day when this arc finishes and we can get back to the Pokemon… mostly.  In some ways, I feel guilty calling this a Pokemon comic because we spend so much time in the other game universes.  Pokemon takes up a larger role in future plots, but you must admit, we’re not your standard Pokemon comic.  Not once have any of our characters gone on an awesome Pokeventure themed after a game plot line!  (…yet)

This is the first… and hopefully last… time we will ever use the phrase “FOR SCIENCE!” in our comic.  It’s such a hackneyed Webcomic meme.  ”Why are we pushing out couch out the window?” says one stereotypical webcomic character to the other.  The other stereotypical webcomic character strikes a stereotypical heroic pose on a bright background and shouts “FOR SCIENCE!” (in the boldest, darkest font the webcomic artist can find).  We’ve actually made a conscious effort to avoid most webcomic memes… but I was running out of room on the newspaper and besides it actually applies here.  So apologies for that.

Lee’s been having fun this week;  we use Subversion (the version control system for nerds and programmers) to keep our working directories in sync over the 1500 miles between us.  But this week he’s been on call and therefore away from the house.  Any update to the comic involved him redownloading the file, making a change, then sending the file to me through email.  I’d then check the file in and comment on the next step.  It’s been quite roundabout, so three cheers to Lee for getting it done on time.

Raise your hand if you see the obvious Star Wars reference  Very subtle, I know.

We’re getting really close to resolving this comic arc, I promise! David has lead his squadron into a fight with a planet killer machine, because Andrew didn’t wait for Star Fox to arrive… what’s going to happen?  Who knows.  Well, I do because I write the script, but that’s about it.

I’d like to direct your attention to our newest affiliate, Pokemon Yellow Comics.  Go take a look at his witty comic… right now!  Another Pokemon comic to watch out for is 2G Pokemon Webcomic.

I failed to give credit last week, let’s give a big round of applause to Chris, our spriter, who created the sprites for the Star Fox text boxes:

We’ve got a possible new feature in the works for people who vote for our webcomic… we shall see what comes of that.  In the meantime… how about tossing a few votes our way, huh?

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed so you can catch every update.  We usually update around 9PM Central Standard, in America, but we can’t always do that.  We just squeaked by with “one hour late” today… Lee was on call all week, and Shawn’s schedule changed radically.

On a final note, I’d like to give a shout out about a book called “7th Son: Descent,” a thriller novel I’ve been reading recently.  It’s a really neat thriller story about human cloning and it’s various uses, nefarious and otherwise.  Let me go ahead and warn you:  this book is not PG rated.  It’s got some disturbing scenes in it… I mean, it’s a thriller, right?  (Just had to get that out as our comic is generally PG rated… didn’t want any surprises)  In any case, I’ve been reading through the “Blog Text” version of the story in Boing Boing.  See, what’s really neat about this book is that the author is releasing the text in PDF and Blog Text and Audio Book version absolutely free as an enticement to purchase the actual book.  I’ve read through half of the posted story so far… and am quite entranced.  As a fan of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, I like the techno-thriller aspect of it.  Now, for my peeve:  I’m not a Puritan… but I guess I’m a bit peeved about the trend in the techno and thriller genres to feel the need to discuss sex, have gory gratuitous violence, and feel the need to cuss every other word.  I realize that all of this happens in the real world, so I’m not trying to be a prude or anything… I’m just sayin’ that when reading a book about cloning or political assassination I don’t need to relive somebody else’s fantasies, if you know what I mean.  Well… I guess that’s why God invented “skipping to the next chapter.”  All in all, the book is actually a pretty good read… it’s the main reason why the new voting feature is delayed!  I’ve spent most of today’s free time reading the content available on the site.  The book is slowly being posted for free, or for those of you who aren’t freeloaders, you can get the book in print.

Anyway, enjoy the comic and see you guys next week… maybe even on time!

Pokemon themed Deviantart picture of the week:

Phew.  Thanks for coming back after we turned our back on our fans last week by missing an update!  The Curse of Missing Number struck again last week and Shawn’s computer went kaput.  Turns out the SATA cables sometimes get loose (the computer usually sits on it’s side, so the hard drives are vertical with their backs facing the ground) and the computer would make a funny “click” sound as the hard drives lose their data connection and the computer falls face first in the mud.  The computer is now permanently upright, and no more problems… so update!

Take a look at our Charadex if you haven’t lately, we’re constantly adding new information every week about the Web Comic.  Yes, it’s an entire wiki just for our comic.  Why?  Because… well… Shawn likes Wikis, and as he’s webmaster, he can have as much Wiki as he wants so there!

Don’t forget about our Blank! project.  Blank! has fallen behind a bit, but there’s quite a few issues there.  The Blank! project contains (or will contain soon) each and every issue of Missing Number Comics: Adventures in Glitch City… with no text!  All editions of Missing Number are released as Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike which gives you the ability to “remix” our comic if you wish… and to make it easier we provide blank versions for your use.

What we’d really like to see, however, are people interested in translating Missing Number into their native languages.  We see plenty of hits coming from Non-American countries, and I’d love to see those numbers grow, but people need to be able to access Missing Number in their language to get the best spread, yes?  If you’re interested get in contact with us.  All you have to do is add the text and speech bubbles, and we’ll host your version.  You can even add your signature to every page, make your own author notes like this one… basically you’ll have your own version of this site to translate to your heart’s content.  Now how cool is that?

Also, we’re interested in hosting other Pokemon themed webcomics… if you’re interested in starting a comic or moving a comic over, contact us and let us know.  We’ll see what we can do for you.

Spread the word!  Except for the curse, we plan on updating every Saturday Night.  Subscribe to our RSS feed to know exactly when we update!

THE UPDATE WILL BE A LITTLE LATE. SHAWN’S COMPUTER DECIDED THAT IT’D LIKE TO JOIN IN ON THE ‘CURSE OF MISSINGNO’ AND NOT TURN ON.

Our update schedule says “Every Saturday Nite!” and we’ll do that, even if it kills us!  Unless we can’t.  I mean, there’s no use crying over spilled cow juice.  We still have an hour to go, Central!

So, in any case, here’s our update.  To be brutally honest, this is actually a “TOS” comic from before-reboot, moved forward in time and spiffed up to modern day standards.  It gave a nice “As I was saying” effect to the reboot comics, wouldn’t you say?

I’d like to give a shout out to Chris, our sprite artist, for the David sprite in the bottom left hand corner for the dialog box.

Also, a shout out to Blambot for providing some new fonts.  We’ve decided to use fonts with a slightly free-er hand, especially for non-dialog boxes, and Blambot has tons to choose from.  Thanks!

Also, you might notice that the Arwing in the bottom right is a little… off.  For some reason, we just couldn’t execute an “Arwing” and instead created… that.  We decided that recruits wouldn’t fly Arwings, they’d have a different style of craft just for themselves.  I jokingly called them “W-wings” due to the shape of the trailing edge, which Lee then termed the Dubyawing.  There we go, the Dubyawing.

In other site news, over the next couple of weeks we will be updating the Charadex with all kinds of new articles.  Hope you find them interesting.

One final thing:  Everyone else is doing special “All Hollows Eve” night updates.  We don’t do that kind of thing.  But sometimes we do randomly pull up sketches… like this one from Chris:

Not everyone enjoys opening doors to scary looking strangers.  Just sayin’.

See you guys next week!

Well, this sure has been an exciting Saturday!

We decided to start advertising on GG-Guys.com and TheSlackerz.com, some webcomics we enjoy reading, with the goal of sucking their readers from them with our comic.  We noticed quite quickly, however, that site performance was suffering with only a load of a few hundred users per day.

We made the decision to move the site to a Linode Virtual Machine, and I, Shawn, started making preparations.  And somehow in the process the Missing Number Comics on Dreamhost completely borked itself.  And a DNS entry was entered incorrectly.  And as errors compounded onto cached errors, I lost more and more of my sanity!

The curse of Missing Number has struck again!

But if you are reading this post, and seeing this comic, then your DNS has finally cleared itself and you are now seeing our shiny new site.  Doesn’t look like much change on the face, but I guarantee you, we went from clogged Volkswagen Bug to Joint Strike Fighter on the inside, with an easy ramp up to even more power if necessary.

So, when we begin our advertising again, it’ll be with a site that works   Thanks for your patience!

One final note, now that the ranting has died down, our local sprite artist produced the two sprites which appear in the second frame, from hand, without using a Pokemon base sprite:

Why redraw these guys if they’re pretty much the characters from Fire Red/Leaf Green?  Details.  The costume details for the Fire Red and Leaf Green male and female player characters don’t exactly match our Male Player Character and Female Player Character.  And we wanted to make it obvious that these sprites and characters were ours, not just similar versions of well known characters (like our rendition of Naruto).  I would put Male Player Character and Female Player Character into the “Original” character column.  Of course, you’ve only seen these guys as sprites, but I can assure you that when they appear in the comic, their uniqueness WILL appear!