I admit that I’m the worst at communicating across all mediums. Cell phones, messages, emails, tweets, Facebook friend requests, urgent Facebook friend requests, notifications that you’ve been unfriended on Facebook; you name it, I’ve ignored it.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy talking with people. It’s just that I always agonize over what to say and how to say it. The neurosis runs deep within my veins and is as much a part of me as my overwhelming artistic talent or my sense of humility. All part of what makes me such a swell guy.

Why you make me update you so bad, baby? You know I just get crazy because I love you so much.

Have I really been doing this for six years? Seems like only yesterday I was drawing stick figures and hand turkeys to trade for shoes. Now, six years later, I have something along the lines of 300-ish comics and three pairs of shoes. Seems like a fair trade to me.

I actually have little to no idea how many comics I’ve made. I used to keep the comics I did for the school paper numbered separately from the ones for the web, thinking that I’d be man enough for two projects. How wrong I was. Then the numbers got flummoxed. And then WordPress numbers them differently. Plus I might have thrown in a few sketches in the regular rotation instead of putting them in the sketch dump page, seeing as how I wan’t that tech savvy.

I also realize that celebrating a sixth anniversary after taking a year off is sort of not in line with the whole unbroken yearly celebration that is the very definition of the word. But, if you take that 300-ish number at face value and divide it by six years, you get an average of a comic every 10 days or so. Which is still better than VGCats. Yes, I celebrate my accomplishments by tearing down my betters.

Thanks to everyone who reads the comic. I do it for you. And constant need for attention. There’s that, too.

BLARGH! So tired. I’ll refine the post tomorrow. Or later today. Steve sleep now.

Ah, you every come back from a 16 month vacation and just feel energized and ready to get back to work?

Yeah, me neither. Still, it does feel good to flex the old muscles and shake off the cobwebs. Seriously, I had intended to get this posted around the first week of January. It was drawn and scanned and everything. Then I had to remember how to actually digitize this thing. THAT took weeks. I used to be able to do it in a day, but that was because it was routine. AND I didn’t bother to write any of my procedures down, because that’d be smart. So, the first few new comics won’t look as good as I’d like, simply because I’ve got to relearn all my old tricks.

FYI, all that stuff in panel 3 is true. I work for a space research agency as a contractor and sometimes-graphic designer. They even let me design an activity book for elementary schools! Check it out!

Also, I’m volunteering my time over at Day’s End Farm Horse Rescue. Been doing it for almost a year now and it’s super rewarding. You’ll probably hear me talk about it later on, so I’ll just move along.

Oh, and I got myself a drum kit. Started playing a few shows. Maybe you heard of it? A little stage production called “Rent”! Hells to the yeah, now I can check off “rock opera” from my life’s to-do list.

Good to be back, people. Let’s get this party started.

They told me I’d have creative control. They told me I’d be completely free to take the comic in whatever direction I wanted. You know what? That lasted about as long as it took the ink to dry.

Now, these bastards on the Less Than Three Executive Board are demanding that I take the comic in a grittier and darker direction, all in the name of massive profits. Well, I don’t care how many dozens of dollars they throw at me. My artistic integrity is not for sale! I hereby disown Less Than Three and any and all movies, TV shows, and spin-offs that may arise from its ashes.

Unless they ask me to direct. Then maybe I’ll un-disown it.

New content will be along shortly. Until then, check out this cool little piece of guest art I did for Sex, Drugs, and June Cleaver. SD&JC (since the Internet DEMANDS abbreviation!) is part of my weekly reading and always manages to make me laugh, cynic that I am. I was appalled when Bree missed an update, because really, only the lowliest, laziest degenerates miss updates!

But, much like rockstars, cartoonists of her level have the ability to command fans to do the work for them. So, as the consummate internet fanboy, I humbly submitted my entry. As victor, I was promised a street urchin, to shine my boots and sweep my chimney, in a totally non-sexual manner.

Alas! I return!

It was a rough couple of months without me, I’m sure. Don’t worry. Papa Steve is here to make it all better.

You may have noticed some upgrades to the style. That’s right, I haven’t been a complete slack-jaw during my absence. I’ve been enhancing myself in every sense of the word, particularly in the art department. Colors are more brilliant, lines are crisp, and the writing has sublimated into an effervescent dew laden with metaphors and nuance.

Oh, and the characters are cats now. Yep, forever. Also, they will start dancing whenever I feel like it. For no raisin.

I got such a great response to my previous Bioshock comic that I decided to do another one. Due to budget constraints, I’ve had to cut back on my gaming habit. The withdrawl seems to have minfested itself as a compulsion to draw comics about the games I wish I was playing.

I honestly don’t know why 2K Games allowed the “Capture the Sister” mode in the game to begin with. Okay, so it was Digital Extremes that did the multiplayer, but whatever. The object of the game is still to kidnap a small girl. I know it’s part of the storyline and within the context of the game’s world it makes perfect sense. You don’t even do anything to the child other than shove her down a hole in the wall … okay, even THAT doesn’t sound right. But have critics of videogames ever needed a reason to take things out of context?

The fervor over violence in videogames, labeled by some as “murder simulators”, has kind of subsided to a low rumbling over the last few years. People have had other things to worry about. But it’s something like this that I can see igniting a whole new firestorm of controversy. Luckily, the headlines of “Highest Selling Xbox Game is Kidnapping Simulator” have yet to surface, but it might not be far off.

My love for Bioshock transcends that of a mere videogame addict. I hesitate to use the word “game” when referring to it, as it is almost a pejorative when placed in the context of this triumph of human creativity. There have been games that told compelling stories before, but Bioshock is the first piece of interactive media that I would classify as both literature and art.

So, naturally, I have to find some minuscule fault and exploit it for comedic gain. Otherwise I would grow jealous of its perfection and thus unable to draw any pleasure from it. Driven mad with envy for not having thought of it first, I’d hunt down the developers one by one, smothering an ether soaked rag over their faces and storing them in large glass jars in my basement.

That’s what this website does for society. It keeps creative people in their offices and out of my subterranean vault of living nightmares.

By the way, “vigintillion” is a real number. It’s a one followed by sixty-three zeros, or the twentieth iteration of our million, billion, trillion, etc. sequence. This, of course, only applies to the U.S. Everywhere else it represents a one followed by 120 zeros.

Now Jon Nelson at Ritsumeiken University in Tokyo estimates that for every cubic foot of snow, there are roughly 1 billion snowflakes. Maryland is 12,407 square miles in area, or 345,887,308,800 square feet. The current snowfall total at Reagan National for the 2009-2010 season is 54.8 inches, or about 4.5 feet, meaning we’ve had 1,556,492,889,600 cubic feet of snow in the region. I say region because not all of Maryland got the same amount, so we’ll spread it out through DC and Virginia and call it a happy average of roughly 1.5 trillion cubic feet of snow. So, 1 x 10^9 snowflakes times  1.5 x 10^12 cubic feet means there have been 1.5 x 10^21 (or, one and a half sextillion, or one thousand, five hundred billion billion, if you prefer) snowflakes that have fallen on our area.

So, mathematically, I exagerated by a factor of 42 when I wrote that it took a vigintillion snowflakes to get this week off. But realistically:
THIS IS WHAT CABIN FEVER LOOKS LIKE!!!!!!!!! AHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!