I originally used the raccoon comic as a placeholder so I could get a feel for working with Comicpress, and so that I could have a finished story here for people to read while it takes me the month and a half to finish the current story. But I never really considered it finished without color, so I took some time to jazz it up with some sepiatones so that it’s a little bit easier to understand, especially the last page, which didn’t make any sense at all without some color.

We’re in the process of having merchandise made up in advance of Further Confusion, where you’ll be able to find us in the dealers room; these are a few of the items that will be available.

If you’re not going to FC, though, or if you’d like to get someone something shiny for the holiday gift-giving season, I’m making this stuff available for purchase online right now, so that I can kick the tires on this storefront application.

Those of you who are tuning in from the RSS feed will have no doubt noticed entries showing up from Flickr in your reader along with updates from the blog and comic here. I’ve taken advantage of Feedburner’s magical powers to include the flickr account so that subscribers can get bonus artwork and sketches. I’ll try not to flood you with uploads (which is kind of a comical notion in and of itself, given my rate of output), but if it does become obnoxious, please speak up. The idea here is to have some kind of interesting content to make the week-long periods between new pages a little bit more tolerable.

One of my goals for the year is to sketch daily, so you’ll know if I’m being good or not if you see a new sketch in your reader every day. You have permission to yell at me if I’m not keeping up.

And if you’re not a subscriber and would like to get in on this caper, you should absolutely subscribe right now.

Hey cats – I’ve got a tee shirt design up for vote in the Shirt.Woot derby this week, and if you’ve ever purchased anything from Woot before, you’re eligible to vote it up. I’d appreciate it hugely if you did!

I’ve been doing a bit of tweaking and fine-tuning of this site, some of them you can see, some of them you can’t yet, but here’s what’s new:

• I added a graphical link to the store over there on the left. I made mention of merchandise earlier, but I didn’t add the site navigation until now because there really wasn’t much there. Now that FC has come and gone, I’m taking the time to photograph the leftover inventory and get it up there for you cats.
• Also, if you’re a subscriber, expect to get notifications of new products as they become available in the feed. Because I can do that.
• I added a social networking widget which should show up at the bottom of new entries, for the purpose of digging, buzzing, retweeting, or whatever other new and exciting indignities you might want to visit on this comic through new and exciting space-age social networking technology.
• While we’re on the subject of social networking, it is now possible to become a fan of The Dawn Chapel on The Facebook, the way the kids do. Or rather, the way your mom does. I’m still kicking the tires on facebook integration, and the Facebook page is at the moment embarassingly bare, but where you might see a glass completely empty, I see a ground-floor opportunity to mix metaphors. In the empty glass. You know, like a martini.

February was a pretty good month for The Dawn Chapel. We got a lot of love from blogs and other comics, and every time someone retweets a link to the comic, it just sends me over the moon. In particular, I am sending cosmic waves of gratitude toward Big Big Truck for linking us up in her livejournal; Nikki Jeske gave us a plug for #webcomicwednesday (which is a twitter-hostile hashtag if I ever saw one) and linked us up on her webcomic, the Family Menagerie, as well; and livejournal’s Quiet Dignitea also had some very nice things to say about us.

For March, I have two shorter pieces planned, each of them four pages in length, as well as a one-off. If you’re good at math, yes, that means I’m planning nine pages this month, which will mean keeping an update schedule of not one, but two pages a week. Is this madness? Have I gone mad? The answer is: yes. Mad like a March hare.

(If you’re bad at math, it still means I’m planning nine pages this month. I don’t discriminate.)

Thirty pages is in my mind kind of a magical number, I read somewhere once that that’s the minimum number of pages you should have in your archive before you submit a comic for review, as you need at least thirty pages to really get a solid idea of what a comic is like.

It’s possible that the number is totally arbitrary and there’s no merit to that argument at all, but there it is, and we’re going to sprint to that milestone.

Or, hang on, we’re going to March to it, if you prefer. (and I will gladly accept high-fives for that joke via paypal.)