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!

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.

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$.

AND THEN SUDDENLY IT’S 2009!

Today we were supposed to have our grand re-opening, but Shawn, the artist, am still unpacking after his move from Texas to Minnesota.  So, instead, enjoy this piece of filler!

Stay tuned to this space, we’ll be rebooting the comic for real within the next two weeks!

“Height always has the advantage, ’cause grenades fall down.”

Chris – My brother and our Quality Control/Sprite Artist, said whilst I was playing Lost Planet and kept getting hit by flocks of grenades

(And we’ve finally reached the end of our old updates and have reaced the point where we originally ended. Slight chance that there’ll be no update next weekend. The Sketch Artist, Shawn, has just moved from Texas to Minnesota and might still have some settling in to do. Meanwhile I, The Inker (considering that I’m doing the coloring, shading, and most of the backgrounds maybe the new title should be The Digital Artist, makes me sound super-important), shall wait down here at Missing Number HQ until I recieve a sketch to ink.

Thanks for sticking around!)

This was the comic update whereupon our website was haxxored by leet scriptkiddies.  Hope you’re happy scriptkiddies, cause like the Terminator, we’re back!

We’ll have an actual, honest to God update next week, with the goal of getting a real update every weekend.  Saturday, preferably.  We’ll be reimplementing the rest of the site as we go.  I’m making a good try of doing it right this time. (How embarrassing, in hindsight, that this ended up being our last update because our old inker quit on us. But we’re back now!)

Also, all previous comments were lost.  And we will not be bringing back the comment system.  The spam to not spam ratio was too high, and we spent way too much time trying to survive the flood.

However, you can email us!  Just send an email to Shawn or David, AT missingnumbercomics DOT com.

Back to business!  We continue the prequel-adventures of Chris and David as they find their way to their fateful collision.

Who’s that making a cameo in the comic, in the first frame?  Why, that’s HomestarRunnerTron from YouTube, the person responsible for Missing Number’s Official YouTube Video.  If you have not seen it, Watch it now.  If you do not, Captain T-Kachu, the Pirate Pikachu, will not be pleased.

On the website front, we’ve got a new, updated, spiffy vector-type logo in our title box at the top of the page.  It’s not much of a change… actually, come to think of it, it’s quite a leap in quality from our old logo (which is nearly a year old now!  As the logo existed before the comic…).

Also we have a new affiliate, The Lonely Soda Bottle. Click their link if you want to take a look.  It’s a new contender in the international webcomic market.  Yet another friend of Missing Number!  Speaking of which, if you would like to affiliate, contact Shawn at MissingNumberComics dot com, and we’ll see what we can do!

Hmm… anything else?  Oh, yes.  New sprites:

What’s with the size difference?  Jenny and Joy are Diamond/Pearl sprites, whereas HomeStarRunnerTron is a Ruby/Sapphire/FireRed/LeafGreen sprite.  Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be upgrading some sprites to Diamond/Pearl style.  We call them… Sprites:  The Next Generation.  Catchy, no?  We think so.  It takes a LONG time to do these sprites right… so superkudos to Chris for his efforts (He also made the “overworld” sprites for the second frame of this comic.)

Anything else?  No, not really.  Sign up for our RSS feed if you want up to date messages about our updates   (Especially since it’s not too regular…).  And… if you want to accomplish things in life, avoid Guitar Hero.  Really.  If you’re not planning on dedicating the rest of your life to playing that game, just stay away!  We’ve spent too much time on Guitar Hero…

(OK, we’re getting close to the point where we left off. For those who haven’t been following us all this time, we got to about issue 30-ish before everything crash and burned. The comics and notes that you see were up around a year ago. Well, we wanted everyone to catch up with our revival, not to mention giving us some time to get back in the groove of things, so we’ve been posting the old comics two per week. From this point on, however, we’ll be doing one per week, just like our normal updates. Please enjoy!)

Whoo boy.

So, you see, the sketch artist works at a big software company, and this week was big rollout week.  Which meant pulling all nighters and drinking unsafe quantities of Monster Energy Drink to trick his cells into not dying before the project was done.

It’s launched, and it’s a success.  Our sketch artist, however, is but a shell of the man he used to be.  That is why this comic is so completely and horribly late.

His great, great, apologies.

The next update just might be late as well, as the project completely delayed all art from being produced.  The best way to keep up with our comic is to subscribe to the RSS feed, which is updated immediately upon posting a comic!

Enough recrimination!  This comic was really, really fun to do… we decided that because it was going to be late ANYWAY, we might as well kick it up a notch.

First off:  New Color System!  You wouldn’t believe just how little more work it takes to make the lines NOT BLACK between colors, and just how much it adds to the detail of the characters!  I especially love the way Chris’ sash turned out.

Secondly:  We’ve got a few hidden jokes in this comic;  the Pokemon world is a mix of English and Japanese (at least in our comic), and so we tried to get authentic Japanese translations for the signage in the comic.  Please tell us if we made a mistake.  Not that we would change it.  The Japanese have been killing English for long enough, we should be able to get away with OUR bad grammar!  (Said with much humor and laughing!)

For example…

Third:  We put SO much detail into this issue, we couldn’t drop the images to 256 colors for the first time EVAR in our series (yea… all 28 pages…).  So, this is a 24 bit PNG!  Let us know if you have browser issues with this!

Finally:  A new character in our series:  Autumn Cunningham, Chris’ 16 year old “little” sister.  Say hi!

OK… it’s way too late, but we wanted to get this issue out as fast as we could.  So, share and enjoy!  And if you like our series, vote for it PLZKTHX!

“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…