Blue Milk Special

—EDIT 12.30.11 – We will not be updating again until 1.1.12. Disregard my comments below about the Friday update. See you next year!–

Hope all those celebrating Christmas had a happy one. I want to thank Scott Wilkins of Citrus Comics for gifting us with a BMS / Citrus crossover. We returned the favor with a Citrus / BMS crossover of our own.

We have an announcement

This Friday will be the final twice weekly update in a long while. Re: the recent issues. I am going to try and organize the time off work needed for surgery on my cervical spine. My health issues aren’t limited to the herniated disc, and right now I’m a handful for Leanne to take care of. In addition, the trivial complaints about BMS, nitpicking and general excess of nerdiness by a very small number of our readers has severely dampened our motivation to keep working on this FREE comic fan project.

Thanks to the outpouring of support from the usually quiet majority, we were recharged enough to not want to give it up completely. We will only update once a week for the time being, which will give us more time to focus on more important and more rewarding aspects of our lives. For anyone disappointed about this, keep in mind the other alternative was stopping BMS indefinitely. However, we’ve put a lot into BMS so we don’t want to walk away from it if we can find ANY other way of continuing. I have lots of plans for Return of the Jedi which I would love to realize, but who knows if we will actually make it?

It’s easy to look at BMS and say, “oh, those guys use stock art. Can’t be hard at all.” It takes between 3 to 6 hours per strip to produce. Sometimes much longer, particularly when new art is required. BMS started as a stock art production and has always been produced using stock art. It’s not a secret or a deceit on our part and has never been. We’ve outlined how we produce BMS several times in the past, indeed from the very beginning. It was an entirely practical decision and it has allowed us a level of quality that many other webcomics can’t achieve on this sort of update schedule.

The only reason I ever created Blue Milk Special was that I felt that using a library of pre-drawn characters and poses would enable Leanne and myself to team on a project without it needing her constant attention. Leanne works as a freelance comic artist (check out her website), and we also have aspirations of launching our own original web manga next year. I never wanted to take away from her opportunities to work with established writers in the comics industry, so using stock art prepared in advance for BMS seemed like a clever and resourceful way to sustain such an epic webcomic project.

It has worked to varying degrees of success. From the point of view of our readers, there are 400+ strips and there has been between 1-3 comics per week almost solidly for the last three years. From our point of view, there has been repeated tension as we try to keep the comic flowing steadily without it impacting our progress on other projects. Unfortunately it has been really hard to find additional time outside of BMS to do any other projects together. We can also no longer justify the expense of comic convention appearances solely for Blue Milk Special.

That isn’t to say that BMS has not been enormous fun or unrewarding. It has, and frequently is. But at the end of the day, it’s a non-profit project, based on somebody else’s intellectual property. We’d much rather be pouring our spare time into our own original intellectual property. We hope to debut this project sometime in the next few months. We also hope that many of you will not only enjoy this new project, but not hold any frustrations, regarding our reduced BMS schedule, against it.

Hope to see you back on Friday to share the last strip of 2011 with us!