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$.

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 2 of a three issue series! Tune in this up coming Wednesday for the final page!

About 9 months ago, during initial planning of Missing Number, I (the sketch artist) sat down with a semi-pro comic book artist friend of mine to discuss the characters.  Dispite his best efforts, my art level only grew slowly, to the point where I decided the best way to practice working on the comic was to actually work on the comic.  So Missing Number was launched.

This is why the art so drastically changed during the first 10 issues.  Everyone here at Missing Number was honing and building our art.  And we always realize there’s another step to make!

Anyway, Allan (the comic book artist) kept interest in Missing Number, and has been a virtual fount of creative criticism along the way.  When we approached him to do a out-of-character tounge-in-cheek guest strip, he gladly accepted, and work has been ongoing from there.

We here at Missing Number HQ are pleased to present part one of the Deus Ex Machina Guest Strip.  To quote the drink dispensers from the Heart of Gold… Share and Enjoy!

Allan and I have worked on many art projects before… he’s a really fun guy.  The last project we conspired upon was a design-ey art piece starring Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell, celebrating wireless communication through the years.

If you would like to see Allan’s full portfolio, just follow this link! NOTE!  This site is not completely PG “Safe.”

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!

We’re quite proud of this comic.

Before we get into the details, an announcement. We’re starting to phase into “Story arc” mode. We’ll be presenting multi-episode story arcs with “to be continue-ds” every week for weeks at a time.

Now, our philosophy over here at Missing No HQ is that every single comic should be able to stand alone, even if it’s in an arc. And we’re going to stick to that. You should never leave our site in the middle of an arc feeling that you’ve wasted a week. Every comic stands along, but they mesh into a deep storyline.

Our pencil artist found this comic to be a challenge. He’s still just getting used to drawing the characters themselves, and now he’s got to do an overhead shot? It turned out excellent, IMHO. I’m quite happy with the final result.

Well, we survived the thunderstorm.

Our first two-parter. (Not counting the first two comics, which were uploaded concurrently.) We are expanding a bit on our universe. We see the landlord, Tom Nook, and his bodyguard and secretary (the male and female characters from Animal Crossing, respectively. Apparently they had problems paying their rent, and have taken up employment with Nook himself).

Our inker referred to Tom Nook as “Nookler,” and the name has kinda stuck internally.

What is Link up to? Why is he attacking the landlord? Find out next week on our next edition of Missing Number.

Speaking of which, due to changes in The Real Life (both the penciler and colorist are changing jobs), we have decided to change the official update day to SATURDAY, 9PM. This will give us a day to finish up anything we had problems getting completed due to work schedules.

As you may know, we have a “Novelization” feature that allows you to see a “text version” of the comic. This is in the “longdesc” of each comic image; screen readers can read the longdesc and read out a version.

Well, the joke here is completely visual. Sorry!

We also added teeth to our characters! (Future Note: This may sound silly, but we experimented on this comic, and thought that making the teeth very obvious was a plus. Hey! This is our first webcomic! Sorry if we didn’t catch the obvious!)

Yes. that’s the biggest piece of news for the week. Enjoy!

We finally bring in the last main character of Missing Number, Windwaker Link. Take two normal NPCs, a crazy computer programmer, and a out-of-work video game character, put ‘em alltogeather in an apartment, and what do you get?

Our comic!

David, our colorist, tried some new things with the lighting, especially the “frontal” lighting from the frame where David opens up the door for Link.

And, how do you like that? An on time update.