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!

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, 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!

And now is the big moment, the day we’ve been waiting for, an event so huge we had to be TWO DAYS LATE to do it right!

THE GRAND REOPENING of Missing Number Comics!

Looking back at our “old” art, and comparing it to our new style, we got to talking;  how to explain the change in art (some subtle, some not) smack dab in the middle of a story arc?  Discussing the game origins of the comic, we decided to do an “update” of the game software, and therefore explain it all.  So here you go!  An original* explanation for art updates!

We even consulted our old inker (who has put down the pixel ink tools and gone to better things) who gave us tips and pointers on how to emulate his inking style from TWO YEARS AGO.  Thanks, Chris!  He’ll be sticking around to do our sprites still, so stay tuned to see an updated header with new sprites!

Finally, thanks goes to Allan Brown, who busted backside to produce the Pokemon Trainers images for the Pokemon:  Unobtanium Version window in the bottom right.  In addition to being the cool dude who convinced us to go ahead with this project way back when, and who helped us start developing our artistic talents, he also provided us a two part guest comic as well.  Thanks, Allan!

Next Saturday tune in to see the subtle and not so subtle changes in the comic!  Be sure to tell all your friends!  We’ve got a ton of stuff in store for the future!  Remember, (except for tonight) Missing Number Comics updates every Saturday night!  (Our RSS feed is here:  RSS!)

* OK, so it’s not totally original.  F@NB0Y$ (naturally, right) did a similar strip a long time ago.  In recognition of this, our game patcher is called YAAAAR! in reference to Patches from F@NB0Y$.

“I swear,” says the artist, “I will NEVER ever name a comic after a computer glitch again.” Yes that’s right, folks. The artist’s computer has died again. Sorry for the delay. Here’s Saturday’s update:

Sorry for the lateness of this comic… again.  If you haven’t read about it, we’re in the process of moving, so it’s causing delays all across the board.  Next weeks’ comic might be delayed as well, depending on how fast Verizon gets our FIOS hooked up!

We finally get to delve into the backstory of Dave and Chris.  Before we started on this journey, we planned out complete back stories for Dave and Chris.  All that work’s gonna come in handy!

See you next week.

P.S.!  We have a new feature here at Missing Number Comics!  As our archives grow (and they will grow… this is only Issue 25), finding a specific issue can be difficult.  To help with that, we had just recently implemented a “tags” system, that appears directly below each comic.  You can use these “tags” to find comics of similar subject material, etc.

Well, now we’ve added even more value for your … value.  Enter the Google Custom Search!  Located directly below the Google Ads to the right hand side (EDITOR’S NOTE: nowadays it’s at the top) is a search box powered by Google Custom Search.  You can use this search engine to do a full text search of the entire Missing Number Site.

How does it work?  Here’s a bit of our website secret sauce: each comic comes complete with a “Novelization,” a prose version of the comic.  You can see it by clicking over on the “Novelization” link next to the ads under the comics’ image.  This serves three purposes:  users with text browsers or other assistive technologies can enjoy our storyline if they wish… Google (a text indexer) can index against this text, allowing outside searching of our archives (something I wish more comics would do… as long as they aren’t Pokemon comics, as I don’t want to lose my PageRank)… and now, it’s used by our Internal Custom Search to make searching our archives easier!

And they call Google evil… come on.  All I had to do was sell your eyes for advertising…

This is Part 3 of a three issue series!

The startling conclusion to the Deus Ex Machina Miniarc!

Thanks go to Allan for providing this excellent diversion.

We haven’t sat on our hands over here.  We’ve been working setting up our next story arc, so tune in next week for more Missing Number!

In any case, I hope you’ve enjoyed the comic so far, and do come back next week!

This is Part 1 of a three issue series! Tune in Saturday for Part 2!

This one has been floating around for a bit.  When this comic was first proposed, we thought about the console-de-jour for the characters.  We didn’t want a F@NBOY$ situation, with a specific user for each console.  We didn’t want to really emulate any of the gaming comics out there (as we don’t see ourselves as a generic “Gaming Comic.”)

So, it was decided that the three main characters David, Chris, and Ashley would be Diehard Nintendo Fans (witness Dave’s Nintendo Shop), but that other consoles would have their say (Except for the PS3, which is evil).

Even the Virtual Boy comes into play!

We try to reduce our comics to 128 colors;  both to save bandwidth/load time, and also it gives the comic a specific, Game Boy Advance effect.  However, for this one (the dramatic lightning scene, the swooshes, the glowing EVIL, etc) he had to not only bump that up to 256 colors, but also turn on dithering.  Dithering is something we rarely use, mainly because it make everything speckly;  we prefer solid fields of colors.  But, sometimes, the purity of art must be sacrificed for the presentation.

Do enjoy this issue.  It’s a setup for a couple of guest issues, so be sure to turn in next week!

(Sorry for the lateness of the update;  one of Team Missing Number is getting married, so we threw a “Bachelor Party” at Main Event;  we played way too much laser tag and Dance Dance Revolution.  And we had WAY too many Energy Drinks.  And we miscalculated our return time )

Not much to say about this one.  Last issue of the Vulpix Come Home arc!  We will be starting a new arc next week.

Sorry for the delay on the update.  We had a wedding in the family yesterday, and it was only a 360 mile drive (one way)!  We underestimated travel/rest/matrimony time, and by the time we got back we had just enough energy to collapse into sleep.  And sleep in.

If you’ve liked our comics so far (including this arc), feel free to vote for us!  The links are in the graphical buttons in the Vote box to the right.

Also, say hello to our new affiliate, GlitchCity.info!

Well, that issue was fun as well. First time the sketch artist has attempted Officer Jenny and Nurse Joy (in a final draft, that is. The practice sketches have already been shredded like Enron paperwork).

The inker has discovered a speedup technique on the inking style, it saves him something like 10 hours an issue (there’s a reason we’re weekly!), but keeps the Game Boy Advance/Diamond-Pearl art style.

The colorist is happy that he’s back to being the only person working on the coloring and shading. It’s a bit difficult to coordinate color style between two different artists. The colorist has been put into deep-freeze awaiting his next issue.

In any case, we’ve had a lot of fun with this arc, and there are a few more issues to go! Can’t wait to see what’s coming along…

…in Missing Number: Adventures in Glitch City! (Or in this case, Iridescent City.)

This one was fun to draw. New guest stars: Jessie and James of Team Rocket!

Not much to comment about this one… except to ask how the Virtual Boy got behind the door. Hmm. The world may never know.

P.S… if you like our comic, go ahead and vote for it. The voting links are off to the right of the page, in the SHAMELESS CAPITALISM box. Voting means more viewers, which means happier artists