Whew, finally came to the close of another story! I’ve gotta admit, it wound up being tougher than I thought to get the hang of a Kelly & Metafoblin-centric story. Having said that, few things have brought me more joy than bringing Evil Kevin into world. (Will he show up again before the Haunted Ghost of Cap’n Redgebeard? Taking bets in the comments section!)

Anyway, I’ve really been jonesing to get back to simpler stuff and characters I feel more at home with… aaand I’m going to do that! Starting next week we’re going to take a little mini-story detour for some good ol’ fashioned Rog & Perry monkeyshines. Also it will be Halloween themed, on account of I love Halloween so dearly and can’t resist drawing stuff related to it in October. So, that’s going to be a thing! Beware! Take care!

The final version of my new game, Kurm Frog Teach ABC, is now available to play for free on itch.io!

The game is a physics-based visual novel (that is literally the best description I can think of) in which you control an education-minded frog puppet who just wants to teach children ABC. Along the way you’ll encounter math problems, celebrity basketball tournaments, harmful vegetables… oh! And there is a monster at the end of the game.

I created Kurm Frog for the 2017 Awfuljams competition (which it won!) and I’ve been polishing it for a public release over the past month. It’s hard to talk about the game without giving too much away, but it’s something I’ve worked really hard on & am really excited about! If you like my comics work or my other games work, I think you’ll like it for sure. So make sure you give it a try!

…or else.

Uwaa, I’ve been so busy that I almost forgot – 6 years ago today, Badnix ran its very first strip! (This would be the same strip I revisited last month, by the by.)

Six years of Badnix means so many things. Six readers… six dollars of ad revenue… ah, but I kid. In commemoration, I’m going to post something “special” – the original list of story ideas I compiled for Badnix all the way back in 2011! Baffled comments from modern day me are included in italics.

• Introduction (“Professional Enemies”) – This was referring to the very first story, which for some reason I renamed A Fistful of Coins.
• Knuckle Kid Strikes – “Knuckle Kid” was Kevin’s original name. His arrival wasn’t originally going to be quite as cataclysmic as it turned out to be – I imagined him just popping up every once in a while and being kind of a jerk.
• Introduce Gillian – Gillian was a fish character who did show up in exactly one story and then disappeared forever. I don’t know how I planned to have her interacting with other characters outside of bodies of water.
• Perry’s nephew – I used this one, kinda!
• Company competition – wow, I was digging deep for this one
• Rog loses his apartment – again, the untapped narrative potential is staggering
• Perry visits Ghost World -> Ghost Wife – Perry was going to marry a dead person I guess?
• Glitch Plague (zombie parody) – Probably the seeds of where Number came from?
• Arika’s mother – yup, Charlotte did eventually show up
• Transportation week – …what
• Halloween week – oh, that got used
• Meanwhile in Dark World – I dunno, I guess that was the first Christmas story?
• Hobo story – um what
• Fast food story – seriously I have no idea
• Gazoo Parody – I was so hyped to parody a tertiary character from a moldering old cartoon that this wound up being the 2nd story ever
• Shopkeep’s Life – there was going to be a recurring NPC Shopkeep character – kinda blew through all that material in this story
• Rog’s grandfather – yep, he showed up eventually
• Rog visiting Gillian – again with the fish character – this also barely qualifies as an idea
• Gillian’s gallery showing – seriously thought that Gillian was going to take the world by storm
• Mushstash + the secret order – Mushstash was going to be a mushroom guy who was a member of the Original Badnix – I think I still draw him in flashbacks with Rog’s grandpa

Huh! That was… revealing. Jeeze. All joking aside, it’s easy for me to forget how different this comic was when it started. The gulf in quality between the comic now and where I started more than reflects six years of hard work and challenging myself, and more than anything I’m proud of that.

I know I’ve been too busy to give Badnix the attention it deserves lately (case in point – I’m probably not going to have time to post a new page tomorrow! Oops.) but I promise that I am more excited about working on it than I’ve ever been. These last few stories have only started to really tap into a soul that I’ve always known was buried under the hackneyed Nintendo puns (which I love dearly, mind you), and I am so excited to keep digging in that direction. I’m not going anywhere! Badnix is not going anywhere! And I hope you guys will stick with it, too.

As I mentioned in the last blog post, the 600th comic (i.e. the one that was posted today) is something kind of special – it’s an extended remake of the very first comic ever!! This is also the first time Kelly, Kevin’s girlfriend and ostensibly the person who set the plot of the comic into motion, has had an on-panel speaking part since 2011! A sign of things to come, perhaps.

Sorry this story took so long to get started – I was & continue to be buried under a truly unprecedented volume of deadlines! I’ll do my best to keep the regular updates coming, but there’s definitely still a chance that my head will dip under the waters of Not Badnix Work® again here and there. As always, your patience is appreciated. [insert string of grateful emojis here]