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To clarify, my comic doesn't run on "whatever schedule," as you said. My post says that my comic updates every Wednesday, which it has for several years.

As I said, I don't do this full time, so what slowed me down was the fact that I was working 4 part-time jobs, teaching, and moving internationally took up time. It wasn't that I "slowed down", it's that life stopped trying to kill me temporarily

It's kinda both! I was able to speed up production a little bit, and also major life events stopped happening 🤘 because I don't make money on this comic, it's at the whims of everything else, and now that I'm settled, I've been able to just sit down and work on it!

I've been feeling insanely depressed about the prospects of my work, and the only thing that's been dragging me out of the pit of despair has been seeing films that genuinely inspire me. I feel like I've been waterboarded by AI and corpo slop and thank god for human creators.

Found the email I sent when I got accidentally added to the faculty listserv of an orthopedic surgery clinic and nobody would remove me so I sent this email to all faculty/staff/med students and they removed me almost immediately

We know these directors can do well because they both were behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. If we can make this thing fly, it'll do great. I just need these studios to realize that we're all super poor, and if they want culturally specific movies to do well, they have to make people care.

I loved the movie. For me, it was a 10/10, but that's mostly because I deliberately seek out movies with new and unique art styles, fast pacing, cultural nuance, and things that aren't rinse-and-repeat corpo-slop.

People just flat-out don't have money to go out to the theaters. My trip to see this movie, getting 2 tickets for adults, a regular popcorn, and a soda, was $40 USD. That is almost 1/4th of my weekly grocery budget, and I know families with kids are stretched even thinner.

OH AND as an author and someone working in the animation/game design industry: people are broke af. Eggs are like $9000. The studios will blame marketing, audience turnout, and lack of interest, but rarely discuss the fact that the cost of living is INSANE and families are stretched thin.

A lot of layers of Spirited Away get missed by broad American and non-Japanese audiences because they don't practice Shintoism or didn't grow up with that mythology or cultural background.

4Kids censored the hell out of SO much stuff and removed a lot of cultural details that they assumed people wouldn't get (anybody want a jelly donut?).

I think a lot of people forget that before John Lasseter championed Spirited Away and helped bring it to broader American audiences, many mainstream Americans weren't familiar with Shintoism, Japanese Buddhism, or the mythology behind films like Spirited Away.

They assume their audience already knows the mythology. US white kids grow up with Santa and Mickey Mouse, so they automatically know those characters. Plenty of Pinoy kids grow up hearing stories about the aswang and manananggal. They're already familiar with the mythology.

Chinese animated studios get around this by making movies for Chinese audiences first, so they don't have to explain every piece of mythology from scratch (Ne Zha 2 is a good example of this, or anything along those lines: Monkey King: Hero is Back, Ne Zha Reborn, or White Snake).

It suffered a lot from some of the things I think KPop Demon Hunters suffers from, which is: "How do we cram a bunch of culturally-specific mythology into a movie for American audiences so they get our culture but don't drown?" and the answer is... You can't.