Beginning of a new chapter! Whoo. Carter looks really weird there; I should get out of this habit of painting without sketches, it screws with expression and anatomy. Oh yeah, the last chapter's .zip is up in the archives section, so you can download that and hoard it at your leisure. New poll... Looks like I've still got some work to do on the formatting. No new vote incentive for this update, I'm afraid; I'll sort that out at the turn of the month, so keep your eyes peeled as the horrible idiom goes. Morbid idioms are fun... Shot in the dark, make a stab at something, break a leg, by the skin of your teeth, to twist your arm...

Figured I'd curb this chapter off here; it had reached 24 pages and I want to keep 'em all about the same length. I think there'll probably be around ten chapters in total... Meaning I'm around a fifth of the way through the comic. Cool.

Not much to say 'bout this page, 'cept that I should've put way more time into it... It's not that I'm a bad artist, I'm just tremendously lazy and would rather be writing zeugmas than adding another hour's paintwork to something people are only going to glance at for a moment.

P.S. - Null, or anyone else running 1024x768 - is the poll positioning any better now? Can't test it very easily since my computer crashes when I change resolution. ^^;

Didn't think this thing would be up on time! Mainly 'cause I rewrote it, like, yesterday. Now I have a headache and eyestrain. Possibly the combination of Subterforge, Lewis Carroll and electronica causes permanent brain damage, we shall see.

And if you look to your left, ladies and gentleman, you'll see a charming example of modern architecture; the Poll Booth... But no, don't thank me. Thank my gracious sibling, who coded this thing purely in PHP, much nicer than any MySQL mumbo-jumbo. Now I can add to the net total of irrelevancy in the world once more! 'Tis a great day indeed.

Other stuff. Oh yeah; I'm now gonna be putting up a forum post for each page... Not for my ego, but 'cause people want one. Like, two people. But that's what counts for people in the world of small-time webcomicery. Go look at it or something.

Well, there goes my buffer... I've been really busy lately, what with family and exam results. Got what I needed, so it's off to university in late September. ^^ Aww, no slacking off for a year... Onwards to ambition! Dunno what'll happen so S'fo updates then, not sure I'll be able to keep them biweekly, but we shall see.

Oh yeah, I disabled HTML from the comments box. For good reason. ^^ I was wondering, anyone want a seperate forum post for each comic page? That place needs some noise.

Meanwhile! Yay, new character. Snow leopards are beautiful but hard to draw feminine. No cast page up for her yet, but there will be soon.

Oh yeah, and Buzzcomix has a new vote incentive, this time Carter's new ref sheet. And that's all for this week!

This was such a tricky page... I hope the read direction in panel three works okay. Comic is pretty much the worst medium to portray someone doing social mingling - my other option was doing loads of tiny panels, but I think it would've seemed bitty. Yeah, I find that bird-mask guy creepy too.

In other news, I've finally found a system which should work for polls. It's a tad archaic - last updated six years ago - but amazingly 90% of it works. The admin panel is in tatters and as for the user side... well, let's just say the green and black was really cool in 2002. But with a bit of luck, I should be able to fix these little misdemeanours and get it up next week.

Auroras are fun and pretty. <3 There's such thing as a metaphor extended too far, Bianca...

Minor rotation in the vote incentives! Yay. Just for Buzzcomix, which is now out of beta and looking very pretty indeed. It's another reference sheet, this time for Bianca - I'll probably be putting up a new reference sheet every other update, since I did most of the work for them already and they're kinda fun. ^^

I'm so glad it's finally raining, summer heat sucks. Perhaps a fact accentuated by my habit of walking about three miles a day. Roll on October!

Mazeburn out!

Whoo, costumes are really fun to draw! Yeah, I realise Bianca looks perhaps a touch modern, but she's slutty avant-garde. I love the style of masquerade balls, a fact which is entirely the fault of Poe, Gaston Leroux (expect a Red Death cameo) and Andrew Lloyd Webber... And whoever art-directed that gorgeous scene from the 2004 Phantom of the Opera. Dances, they're one thing I've never seen done perfectly in a comic... You can drama and you can do fightscenes if you're really good, but paced movement? That's tricky. Anyone know of any examples?

The dialogue on this page reminds me of Team Rocket somehow.

Okay, got the new vote incentives up... TopWebComics has a piece of design for the upcoming page which I spruced up a little... Buzzcomix seems adamant to baffle me to despair with its beta layout, but if fortune favours me you should get Brandt's new reference sheet. Hadouken!!

No page tomorrow, by the way, guys; sorry, but I can't work without a buffer so I'm taking this opportunity to make one. Also, I was somehow under the impression it was Thursday till about midday, so I feel cheated of half a day anyway. Instead, I'll be putting up slight revamps of the first five pages of S'fo; modified writing, some spruced up art, and an end to those nonsensical maroon backgrounds. I'll be going through the prologue five pages at a time and getting rid of the bits I can't stand to look at... Should make for an all-round smoother read, I think. It'll also be lightened up a bit, I'm pretty sure it's pitch black on some monitors. xD

Happy 1st August, everyone! Eep, exam results come out in two weeks...

EDIT: Prologue changes between pages 1 and 5 are up!

As requested, the tutorial is done now, based on this page... Right now it's only up on the forum, but I'll be revamping the extras section when I get chance, so it'll go there eventually.

Oh, also, the new vote incentives will be up on Friday. ^^

Hmn. I don't seem to have anything else to say this week. How're you guys?

Accents are awesome, but wow, are they ever hard to write when they keep switching back and forth between characters. Hope the Caribbean-style accent reads okay... Go, Firemon! Flamethrower! Critical hit! Epic.

I totally forgot Ike's facial tattoo on the last page, too; not added it in yet, I'll do so tomorrow. Makes him look less like a frog, at least. ^^ Sorry, I keep re-using that background... It's not easy to do a comic page from start to finish in two days. xP Oww, RSI...

I was wondering, would anyone be interested if I did a brief tutorial for S'fo pages? I mean, more for interest than a preachy guide on how to comic.

Okay. I hate this page. This page took absolutely forever and I'm not amused by it, but it was too late to change it. Sorry for lateness, sorry for rubbishness, let's hope I can get this off the front page by Saturday. Commenters, don't you dare say it's not that bad, else I'll be sincerely disaffected with your taste and tongues may need to be removed. So instead, feel free to bandy around wild conspiracy theories and suchlark.

I hate not having a buffer, I really, really do.

Still, this is a particularly mean thing to do to a lizard.

Non-canon page! Yay. Yes, I realise these jokes are lame. I like lame jokes. I also like noir-style shading and gangsters. ^^

Also, the profile pages are now totally revamped. Hope it works okay in everyone's browser; I seem to recall IE6 doesn't like transparent .pngs, so that might be a problem... Anyway, you'll find them written from the perspective of Ash Mile now - seems a bit more in context, y'know. And they'll be updated whenever Ash's information about a character changes. What do y'all think? If this is well-liked, I'll be doing another one for the world info pages too. Seems a bit more interesting than the old profiles to me (I'll put the old images up when I redo the extras section) - though it does contain spoilers for anyone who hasn't read the comic, I'll be writing a proper summary/introduction at some point for those purposes. Oh yeah, don't get confused about the dates; it's in British format. Because it makes sense. Where'd the convention of the month being first come from? If someone asks you the date, you don't just tell them July...

Initially I spent a while looking for stock of blank books (lacking the diligence to paint them), something I've done before with no joy, till I realised I could just scan some of the stuff from my own shelf. So the cover's from some odd little prayer book I found and the internal pages are from the Time Machine... So if you ever need blank book stock, here.

Hmn. The only CV I've ever written is for a imaginary cat.

Phew... This page took forever, for some reason. Silly complex backgrounds. Anyway... New character, whoo. Accents are so fun to write. Don't worry, not all the humour related to Bianca will be mocking the way she speaks. x) No cast page for her up; I'm revamping them somewhat, should be done next week. Oh yeah, I probably won't make Saturday's update, but I've got a non-canon comic ready to go up, so you shouldn't be lacking.

Well, here I am, back and bedraggled from a seven-hour train journey... Holidays are fun, but it's definitely nice to hear accents I can understand and not have to walk three miles to the nearest newspaper stand.

This update isn't quite a filler, but something close. Ever heard the term 'Mary-Sue'? Meaning a character which resembles the author's ideal. Well, that there is the Mary-Sue of trains. I mean, a quiet, cushy 1800s-style carriage with red-leather seats and a blazing aurora as you roll across a thousand miles of tundra. And there'd probably be an old man with a gentle Cockney accent to come through with an old-fashioned tea-caddy every now and then. No screaming Welsh children or half-drunk louts, no-siree.

Okay, here's your last update for a week! Sorry, sorry; I'm off to Wales tomorrow so I'll just leave you to agonize over the prospect of new characters and cake. Especially cake. Ah, I'm really happy with this page's dialogue; so much for soul-less maniacal bad-guys, eh.

To tide you over, new backgrounds! Yaaay! Involving Bianca, who will feature in person soon enough... You get a choice, too: Dawn Day Dusk Night

Since I'm on Fedora, I've got it set up to transition between those throughout the day, which is more fun than it ought to be. But for you mere mortals Windows users, you can just use whichever's prettiest. ^^ They're only in 1600x1200 right now, I'll do some other versions when I get back. Sayonara!

Back from the New Forest! It was kinda nice, there were ponies and ptarmigans and things. The horseflies and subsequent allergic reactions were less appreciated. >_< Oww.

Anyway, here's the new page, forgive me for that terrible line at the end, I just don't know enough French to make that pun any better. Irresponsible use of alliteration and bad French aside, I think artistically this is probably the best page yet. I love doing film-noir style lighting, I really do. Anyhow, seeya on Saturday... When a couple of interesting new characters will be introduced. :3

By the way, what screen resolutions do people have? I know most people are probably on 1280x1024 these days, but how common are 1024x768 and weird wide-screen ones?

Sorry, this is a bit late; I was in Londinium all day yesterday. No, there's not been a severe change in my art, this page was done by a friend of mine, since he asked so nicely. My script, of course, but his fine art. Enjoy. ^^

Now, the next week's gonna be kinda funny, since I've got about a dozen different arrangements going on, everything from a week in Wales to going to see a musical. It's like everyone I know simultaneously decided at once that I clearly wouldn't be busy in the first week of July. So it's gonna be kinda awkward keeping to schedule, I'll probably give you your next update on Thursday, then Saturday, then not till the Saturday after, I'm afraid. But then after that, I've got some special stuff for yah.

The plot thickens! Into some form of amorphous gloopy cornflower substance which looks horribly like it's walking if you make it vibrate with sound-waves. Only three panels, I'm afraid... I'm not getting lazy, honest. Hmmn. There's something really cool about having my bad guys sitting around eating cupcakes and drinking tea. What do you guys think of the new schedule, then?

Here yah go. Whenever Brandt's not scowling at everyone, he just looks like a happy puppy. And a coxcomb is a jester's hat, for those of us who aren't versed in obsolete English.

Hmm. Sherlock Holmes stories are addictive, but they don't make you want to solve crimes. Sherlock Holmes stories make you want to sit in armchairs, drink brandy and smoke cigars.

Cool, so S'fo is one today. That means I've been writing this thing for, like, a seventeenth of my life. Sounds longer that way. Wellwishers, leave your offerings upon the altar for ritual burning and proceed to the atrium for obligatory cake and hors d'ouvres.

And from now on we'll be updating every Wednesday and Saturday. I'm not sure how long this'll last; naturally, exceptions will be made in the instances of illness, work or sudden and irrevocable death, but we shall take such things as they come. In the meantime, enjoy.

I'm also in the process of meddling with the prologue, because it's in need of some major changes; it'll mostly be updating the dialogue, but you'll see some panels redrawn too. All in due course.

So, yesterday was my last important exam - there is still one English paper left, but you could pass an English exam at least on good faith if you were in fact a silicon-based inhabitant of Andromeda without any conception of what a book is. And now I have this strange, ineffable thing called free time. It's been a good two years since I've really had a surplus of it; at this level the education system's structured such that you spend so much time building for the future or regretting the past that the present is left to eke out a meagre existence based on justification, procrastination and just occassionally, preperation. Naturally, my first reaction is to abolish this alien "free time" by doubling my S'fo workload; this is the last of the once-weekly updates!

Other news... Not much this week, except that the Subterforge e-mail address has changed to maze@subterforge.com; finally gotten my act together to make one actually based on my domain. And the about page is rewritten with a bit more of a summary... That page needs some images. And I'm wondering what to do about the cast pages. I like their design at the moment, but as I update them, they'll get increasingly spoiler-filled. So maybe I could provide multiple profiles for characters, or something... I dunno, do people read cast pages before the comic?

Oh, hey, and happy Friday the 13th.

Love this page! Feels so old-school S'fo, what with all that red and grey. Putting this up a bit early 'cause the last page felt so cheapskate without dialogue. Hmmn. I should write more, but I've just gotten out of an English exam and four pages of 'How do Bronte and Fowles portray conflict in the two novels?' is enough to kill anyone's wit and muse. Huh, I should write essay questions for Subterforge.

Psst. Join the forum. There's actually stuff going on there now. Slow stuff, but stuff all the same.

Mazeburn out!

Okay, so much for the poll system... The system I was using actually had major vulnerability resulting in someone uploading a spam form (with the scariest damn Tux I've ever seen). And they would have gotten away with it too, if they'd not been clumsy and broken a file needed to load up the poll.

Tarnation, as they say. Guess I'll have to script my own after all. e_e

Maze

Right, various updates! First off, there's the comic. Sorry, no dialogue this week! Thankfully, the next page has a lot to make up for it.

Plus, happy first-of-July, have some celebratory vote incentives! This month there's another reference sheet over at TWC, while bCx has been treated to a nice new wallpaper.

I can also now announce that in two weeks, twice-weekly updates will be every Wednesday and Saturday. The forum has a bit more detail about this. Oh yeah, if you've got an account at the forum, the member-only section's open now, complete with a few fairly embarrassing old versions of the comic. Epic.

Mazeburn out.

Well, I spent a couple of hours trying to work out how to build a system for this myself (those found via the benevolent Google being either bad or for old versions of PHP), I remembered how many random tools my host seems to have. And lo and behold, I found Advanced Poll, a wonderful little tool which took no time to install. I've been wanting to add in polls for a while now, partly because I'm an egotistical thing hungry for reader feedback, and partly because I think they're cool. But I also think Shakespeare and He-Man are cool, so nobody will think less of you if you disagree.

I'll be conducting these on a weekly basis starting from next update, I guess; some will be stuff I'd actually like to know (people's screen resolutions, design opinions, ect) so I can optimize the comic, sometimes it'll just be stuff that's interesting, and sometimes - like right now - it'll be inane self-referential stuff with less purpose than a legless centipede in a world with inadequate cybernetic technologies. Suggestions for polls are welcome, too. ^^

Wow, so after about twelve years of it, school's finally over. ^^ I'm on study-leave... Just a few exams to go, and I'll have three months' free time before hopefully shipping off to Uni. And what relevance is this, you ask? Well, it should give me chance to build up a decent page buffer so I can begin twice-weekly updates (so the comic takes me less than seven years to write), from mid-June onwards! ^^ I'll be sticking to the schedule more strictly this time - but I'm not too sure which days to put 'em on, any preferences there? I'm thinking one will be at the weekend, since hardly any comics seem to update then. Other than that, I guess this site deserves a bit of a refurbish in places.

Bit of a lazy page this week. ^^; Story should be hotting up a little bit soon, though. And say g'bye to Goldstein, since this is the last of him for a little while.

All the time I saved by only doing four panels was more than taken up by writing the dialogue for this thing... 'Dura lex sed lex', by the way, means 'the law is tough, but it is the law'. Latin has such good parallelism at times! It's so much more efficient than English. And hey, new speech bubbles! Bellyfeel prolefeed doubleplusgood, yes? Oh, I should so provide a Newspeak translation for Subterforge. That would be a first. Anyway, I'll eventually go through and change all the old pages to have speechbubbles like this, much to the expense of my patience and wrists, but don't expect that any time soon. ^^

Oh yeah, and Quincey finally has his cast page image; he's been needing that for ages. Enjoy!

Mazeburn out.

Okay, take a poll of the general attitude of each of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and then average that out, and you'll have a pretty good estimate of what this last week's been like for me. I'm aware this page sucks. I set myself the stupid challenge of doing all the colouring in two and a half hours (about half the normal time), and by jove, I did it. Badly and roughly and scrappily, but - it's done. Writing's subject to change, but I just want to get this thing out of the way so I can think about other stuff.

Okay, here's the page! All nine damn panels of it; there were originally ten, but then I remembered I'm a hack. And I apologize sincerely to all those who use 1024x768 for this horizontally-expansive monstrosity of an update; I feel I've been awfully unsympathetic to smaller resolutions since getting my TFT. I'm sure the site looks horrible, and for the stegosauruses viewing this comic over time-travel-Internet (patent pending) on 600x800, it's probably broken your monitor.

Yeah, I know, lynxes don't have long tails like that. But they look so cool! Maybe Goldstein's not all lynx.

Okay, first of the month, meaning it's time for some fresh vote incentives! What joy. What joy indeed. Somewhere high up in the stratosphere, angels' voices ring out in ineffable glee at this very moment, a sound which holds more tremendous glory than this mortal Earth can ever know. Tragically, it's only noticed by one guy at SETI, who no-one believes. Probably for the best.

Okay, this is an Absint month, I think... First up, TWC has been blessed by a brief audience from the mad god hisself, quoting a line from Shakespeare which I just love, even though it's got very little relevance either in or out of context. Whimiscal! I draw characters talking to birds too often. I talk to birds too often.

As for the incorrigible bCx, Absint's reference sheet, fresh off the press I wish I had. Enjoy, damn you!

Erm... If Monday's page is late, blame Valve for being so damn freakin' awesome.
Mazeburn out!

Finally, Carter's back in the game! Long time no see. And he's not the only one with a free-form filing system...

Very early update; this page has actually been done since Monday, and wasn't meant to go up till Saturday... But, uh, I pretty much just wanted to try out the news system again. Minor shift in the style here; I'm back to pencilling the lineart rather than digital ink.

Minor update to the Extras section, in the form of this wonderful piece of giftart, from a friend of mine. So props to him.

Well, I've finally gotten my act together and set up a functional news system. It's not perfect yet, but at least I'm not editing a damn text file anymore. I owe credit to half a dozen tutorials and some code left over from my Computing project, so it only took about three hours to set up. Three mind-numbingly repetitive and dull hours at that, but such is life. Time to test this thing out! There's also a comment section now because I'm egotistical. Feel free to say what you like and have me delete it if it carries communist propaganda and the like. Hmm. Wonder if HTML works with this thing. Space-spiders.