The Dawn Chapel

I’ve had a few people over the last few days asking me if it is okay to make usericons for livejournal, twitter, DA, FA, gravatars, instant messengers, forum signatures, etc, out of images taken from the comics, and I figure there’s probably more people who are wondering who haven’t asked, so I’ll go ahead and answer it here:

Yes, you can use Dawn Chapel art for user icons. You’re welcome to recolor it, caption them however you like, go nuts. I’m not particularly picky about attribution (since it’s kind of tough to fit a source citation on a usericon), but if you do get asked where you got your lovely user icon, you know I’d surely be pleased if you sent them this way.

I’ve been meaning to make a page to keep downloadable goodies like wallpapers, icons, and link banners for a while now but, I mean, look at me. I got stuff to do.

I edited the Early Bird comic because (as I’m sure basically everyone noticed) I negected a word in one of the dialogue balloons that kind of muddied the joke. I noticed, though, that it seems to have bumped it up or reposted it in some of the RSS fetchers (the Livejournal one was where I saw it) so you may have been attacked by that page unexpectedly. Sorry!

Also, you probably don’t need me to point this out for you but I’ve completely disabled comments on entries. My opinion on comments sections in general is no secret, but considering there are maybe like, four regular readers, having only one or two comments on some of the entries leave a more lonely impression than no comments at all, if you ask me.

Besides, I do get plenty of feedback from readers directly, or through twitter, and (again, if you’ve visited the site lately, you don’t need me to tell you this) I’ve added a twitter search widget to the sidebar. If you want your tweet to appear there, linking to the comic is good enough, and if you don’t necessarily have a link but would like to comment, just tag it with #dawnchapel and we’ll consider that hashtag to be our open forum.

If you’d rather contact me directly, I’ve added a feedback form. I don’t get a lot of email, so you can pretty much count on me responding to you.

Finally, I’d like to thank the bazillions of you that have tweeted the latest comic right up into orbit, and the handful of you that vote regularly, and the other handful of you that have added The Dawn Chapel to your belfry subscription list, and the other other handful of you that upvote and/or submit comics to Reddit. There are not enough high-fives in the world.

So yeah, no new comic this week, but I finally got last week’s finished, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I think that black-capped chickadees may be the most adorable of all birds, and clearly I am not the only person who thinks so. But hey look didn’t I draw one of these before? I swear I am not trying to crib Kerschl, I promise.

We’re planning on taking off and visiting family at the end of this week and the trip may prevent me from getting this week’s comic up. It’ll depend on how industrious I’m able to be over the next three days (and whether I can find the story, which I’ve misplaced). If I don’t see you this Friday, be sure eat lots of barbecue and blow things up for me this weekend.

So one of my favorite things right now is Tod Wills’ comic Ekwara, a cartoon fantasy full of gorgeous, cheerful artwork that reminds me a whole bunch of 1980’s fantasy films like Willow or The Dark Crystal. Ekwara started out as a weekly full-color comic, all done up with watercolors, but recently Tod’s stepped up his game and has gone weekdaily, giving up color in favor of moving the story along much faster. The man is some kind of machine, as in addition to Ekwara he does two other comics, Crimson Flag and Dracula, and manages to keep his Zazzle store stocked with new and excellent artwork every week on top of that. These are initiatives that I as a voter can get behind.

(there are not actually any cricket bats in Ekwara, the title of this post was unnecessarily misleading in that respect, and for that I apologize)