Chapter 11, Page 25
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Hey everyone. I’m aware that this comic, which already has had a pretty irregular update schedule these last few years, hasn’t been updated since January. You might be wondering if it’s dead.
The truth of the matter is: I don’t know. Honestly, the later months of 2022 and the start of this year have been fairly chaotic and not great for my sanity; and working on Five Comic was feeling like an additional source of stress rather than a fun project (when the whole point of it was to be a fun personal project; it’s not like this is my job or anything), so I’ve taken a break, and I’m not sure for how long. I’m still not sure if I can commit to saying I’ve shelved it, but equally I don’t know *when* I’m coming back to this. Art-wise, I’ve been focusing on my commissions, and personal art that isn’t Five Comic.
I’m leaving the comic up so that I can return to it at a future point if I want to, rather than pulling the plug entirely, and I do feel guilty about just…walking away from it like this, but absence from it might stop me from starting to hate it as a project. The thing is, I started writing Five Comic over 10 years ago, and I’m increasingly starting to feel like I don’t vibe with it any more (at least right now). I’m not the same person at 35 as I was at 22 when I started this, and I’m increasingly finding it hard to have enthusiasm to work on pages (having severe ADHD doesn’t help matters) and I’m looking at storyboards for the current chapter, that I originally did in notebooks on my lunchbreak in 2016 or something and struggling to decipher the damn things; and not gonna lie, 2020 kind of soured my enthusiasm for working on a comic the plot of which is “catastrophic plague ravages the wasteland formerly known as the UK.” I’ve got other creative projects (fiction and art) that when I get a spare brain cell, I’m going to re-work this site to feature, but re-working the site itself is kind of on the back burner a little bit.
So what does the future hold for this comic? Not a clue, mate. But I’lll still be around and about, maybe returning to the comic in the future but certainly doing art, writing, and god knows what else.
If you want to follow my various creative happenings, you can find me at (1) Queencordite: Art by C. Bowen | Facebook !
First page of the new year. Not sure how regular of an update schedule I’m gonna be able to stick to because…well, 2020/21/22 did some Things(tm) to my ability to stay on track, along with feeling a certain amount of fatigue around a project I’d been working on for this freakin’ long and honestly getting a *little* resentful towards it but still not wanting to straight up abandon what I’d started, but here we go. If I can average a page every month I’ll be reasonably happy, although it’s nothing like the 1 page a week I started out at.
“State of the artist” update: I was in surgery on Wednesday and am now back home, recovering well but in a lot of pain and with about 1 brain cell.
I don’t have a lot of go-juice right now as I was in hospital last week, but I finished up this quick doodle I started before I went in. It ain’t great, but I didn’t want to leave it totally unfinished.
Ey up.
So uh. As if I wasn’t failing to maintain a consistent upload schedule already, I’ve had some medical emergencies lately and recently found out that I’m…well, quite badly ill (physically this time, it turns out; not just my usual depression and ADHD malfunctions) and likely to be in hospital very soon. This may make my update schedule even more messy and non-existent, or it may make pages be more forthcoming as I find ways to distract myself in between hospital appointments and the like.
I’ve got a new page today, though. Thanks to those of you who are still reading (IDK how many of you there are, but I appreciate you), and Logi for his webmastery activities, hosting and saving me from my own incompetence on several occasions.
I’ll keep hanging in here, and posting and updating as often as I can.
God, it’s been so long since I actually posted something, and people probably are wondering if I’ve been actually dead, or ditched the comic full stop…The answer is no; this is a project I started, and I do plan to finish it. However, years ago a friend said to me that you really shouldn’t force art, and I always knew that was true, but lately I’ve really needed to take a *big* if unnanounced step back just to save myself from resenting the project, wringing a few more pages out of myself out of obligation, and then throwing in the towel out of frustration. I figured it was a safer bet to just…see Five Comic as a project I could return to as and when I felt like it, rather than one I was starting to feel as some kind of UUUUUGH obligation.I’ve been pretty busy with (and slightly behind on) commissions over at Queencordite: Art by C. Bowen lately which I’m catching up on, in addition to coming off some medication I’d been on for a very long time (yay wooo SNRI withdrawal symptoms are brutal!) and in my downtime, wanting to work on other creative projects (which I do intend on also hosting on www.five-comic.co.uk when I’ve finished re-tooling it), so Five Comic has very much been on the back burner. When will it resume? I’m not sure, I’m actually feeling like I might wanna draw another page this weekend, but I can’t promise any kind of regular weekly update schedule, so for the forseeable, Five is gonna carry on being a “worked on as and when I have the inspiration and brain cells” project. It hasn’t been shelved, by a long shot, but regular updates aren’t likely to be forhcoming, at least not for a little while.Thank you all for your patience though, those of you who have been reading since I started in 2011, those who stumbled upon it recently, and those who aren’t quite sure how you got here. It means a lot, and I hope to at least have the continuation of plot for you in some form or another without the wait being too gargantuan.