It doesn't get any better.

Our own Gabriel tracked down some of my "writings" while he was rifling through the debris of his adolescence. Would that the bleak evidence of a mind in tumultuous development were cast outward from the Earth, there to careen or be annhilated.

The strips while we were gone originally dealt with the tribulations of young Ann at E3, but we'd done so many "stories" up to that point, and in some cases done them in such a way as to make their veracity ambiguous, that we decided it was best to return to the one-shots of our youth. I'm aware that the conventional wisdom states that doing storylines is somehow a more noble or difficult endeavor than making "gag-a-day" strips, "gag-a-day" more often than not employed as a kind of slur. I guess it depends on your process or something. It's always seemed to me that utilizing crass causation to determine the content of your next comic is essentially a form of cheating.

Now that I really look at it there is a burgeoning, understated power present in your earlier works.

Listen man, I’ve got a closet full of shit here and not all of it is mine if you get my drift. I seem to recall seeing an old piece of notebook paper with your hand written script for a comic book called “Scythe”. Wasn’t she a female assassin who carried a big, what was it now, oh that’s right a scythe! It wouldn’t be hard for that to get scanned and uploaded.

Do you know why I am here? To protect you from the kind of indiscretions you can see up there in panels three and four.

So over at the drawing forum I hang out in there’s kind of a cool thread going on. Artists are digging through their closets and pulling out old super heroes they created when they were kids and then redrawing them. I personally have a stack of characters I could go back and dust off but the one I had the most fun with was Sunburst. Jesus just saying his name is embarrassing.

There must be someone else who feels this way, but I've never met them - to the best of my knowledge Gabriel is the only person who doesn't find Will Wright's games enthralling. Or, in any case, he's the only person who doesn't mind saying so, willing to put his gamer card at risk by taunting Olympus.

I can understand why that might be, too. I look like the sort of person for whom commodified sex would be a welcome diversion from thoughts of self-violence. Do you understand what I mean? The certitude of it. It's actually sounding better all the time.

As becomes apparent every time I write after a trip, the tension and anguish your "flying machines" cause me is intense. I apologize for writing about it absolutely every God damned time, but finding the way to phrase a situation that frightens me is how I deal with it. In any case.

Just got this from Oblivion's Producer, via the combat designer:

Rising early to tend his spawn, our own Gabriel was apparently awake in the precise window to buy a few tickets for a local Serenity showing. We didn't have to run a scam or anything.

I know that we have a well publicized, unwelcome affection for permutations of the word Witcher, but we saw their E3 presentation this year and today's sketch simply leapt from the pen. You'd never recognize Bioware's Aurora engine underneath all the work they've done on it - it sparkles. I always jump up and down and do that little clapping thing when I see an RPG on the way for personal computers, and if they deliver it over here with a polished translation I think I might very well be able to settle into it. There's clearly a complete universe behind the game, even if its tendrils have yet to reach our shores. There was only thing that really bothered me, and I wrote as much on the comment card. The real comment card, I guess I should say. Not the imaginary one we wrote "witch" variants on.

I was under the impression that my appetite for World War II era inhumanities was coming to a close when Infinity Ward sent Call of Duty bobbing out into the sea, but the skill and enthusiasm they brought to their task urged me forward. I have heard people say that CoD2, or at any rate the demo they showed in the theater there in the Activision booth, was the finest thing they saw at the show - this is not a sentiment I can echo. When I heard the initial rumblings of a German campaign, I thought, yes, that is something I have not previously done in a lower resolution. The notion didn't actually go anywhere, and I don't know if I can do all the rest of that stuff again.

Monday, Wednesday, Friday expect posts to accompany the daily strips at about the usual time, but for tomorrow and Thursday's great works please extend me your gracious understanding if posts are up around lunchtime here in the PST.

I’m home now and feeling significantly better. Thanks to everyone who showed up and stood in line to get one of our comic books.