I felt sad when I drew that third panel. Almost like I wanted to reach into it, give her a hug and tell her everything was going to be OK.

Something I’ve been noticing about the direction of the strip that worries me a tad is that it doesn’t seem to take much for me to fall victim to what is called Cerebus Syndrome. For those of you who’ve never heard of it, it’s the tendency of a cartoonist to start off all wacky and slowly end up very serious. Dave Sim is a cartoonist that is known for his comic book Cerebus the Aardvark, which was intended as a spoof of Conan but, over 300 issues, became a very weighty epic dealing with politics, religion and other mature matters. Don’t get me wrong, Sim did great work, but I don’t want MeatShield to end up like that, where it becomes like the D&D version of For Better or For Worse.

Don’t worry, only a little bit more of the serious stuff and we’ll get back to Dhur walking through a screen door or something.

Take care,

~Rob

P.S. In case you’re one of those readers that wonders how all these names are supposed to be pronounced, I recently updated the Pronunciation Guide with Mari and Sora’s names, as well as their titles. So, we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

Howdy, folks.

Just to clear up any confusion about Mari, since a) it probably won’t be mentioned in the strip, and b) people have been conjecturing about her: Mari is a full-blooded elf even though her ears are no bigger than Jaine’s. Elves, like all other humanoids, have two things that continue to grow after adolescence: their ears and nose. This is true in the real world – your ears and nose keep growing. Since Elves have much longer lifespans, they have more time for their ears to grow. ‘Nuff said.

Hasta,

~Rob

Sorry for the lateness of this one, folks. Time got away from me. Mea Culpa.

See you Monday!

~Rob

Can you tell what cartoon my daughters love? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

Hasta!

~Rob

The last part of this strip is almost autobiographical. My girls are like ninjas, sometimes.

OOH! Last weekend, I co-hosted the TGT Webcomics podcast with Kurt Sasso, where we interviewed Scott Christian Sava, the creator of the most excellent all-ages webcomic The Dreamland Chronicles!

Go check it out!

See you all Wednesday!

~Rob

Don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m looking forward to Wizards of the Coast releasing the playtest rules for D&D Next. I just hope that they haven’t dumbed it down, which was a common complaint when 4E came out – everyone claimed that it was trying to turn D&D into an MMORPG . One heartening thing I heard was that, as it stands now, the next iteration will not require the use of miniatures. The phrase I heard in one of the PAX East videos was  (paraphrased) “while we don’t want to require the use of miniatures, we want to support their use.” Here’s the link to that video, in case you’re interested in hearing more.

See you all Monday!

~Rob

…… aaaaannnnnd we’re back!

Thanks to all of you for the kind comments regarding my recent bout with artistic near-burnout. I get like that sometimes.

Also, thanks to everyone who sent me all the positive messages on Twitter and Facebook yesterday regarding my mom’s health problems. She’s doing better and they are keeping her for a couple of days at the hospital to make sure that her sugar levels stabilize and her kidneys return to normal functioning. What essentially happened is that the very powerful antibiotics they had my mom on after her knee replacement interacted with the medicine she takes to regulate her diabetes. It nearly shut her kidneys down and lowered her blood sugar level to 40, which is almost coma-inducingly low. However, today she is doing much better. Thanks again for the kind thoughts and/or prayers.

See you all Friday!

~Rob

UPDATE – 4/28/12 – I am extremely burned out right now, folks, as you can probably tell by the frequency of the strips lately. I will try to have the new MeatShield strip up on Wednesday. I just need a few days to recharge. Thanks for understanding.

Sorry this one is so late, folks. My local power company had a planned outage today that I… forgot about. *sigh* ADHD in action!

See you all on Friday!

~Rob

This goes a long way towards explaining why Noral held such a dim view of bards and music, I think. Go check out panel 2 in this strip to see what I mean.

~Rob

The minute I wrote that blog post headline, the theme song for Love Boat popped into my head… and now it’s in yours also. You’re welcome

~Rob