Still plan on another comic for late Friday or sometime Saturday.

20pts for anyone who knows why he called her Miss Perfect.

Apologies for no update over the weekend. This comic went through, like, 4 drafts. Eventually I landed on this, and this is the chapter end. There was enough dialogue for two comics, which were originally planned, but since comics are a visual medium… when in doubt… go with the wordless concept.

And with the chapter end I’d like to say thanks again to all my loyal, die hard and/or casual readers for helping Shotgun Shuffle stay on its feet. I still get emails saying “Remember when you almost quit.” Yeah. I do. All the time. :) So whether your supporting me on Patreon, or just supporting me with word of mouth and viewing my silly comics, I thank you. It really does mean the world to me, and I’m more than happy to bring you Chapter 5 on Wednesday. If you haven’t noticed, I’m very adamant about each comic being upheld to a certain standard of work. No comic, no matter how much or how little it impacts the overall story, is ever phoned in. Each has to be my best possible work. It can be tiring, it can be stressful, and God knows, it’s time consuming. But it’s what you’re worth. Sure I want to be a better artist, and writer in the long term.. but it’s never about me. It’s about how the webcomic community deserves the best possible quality of comics their artists can produce. This is something I felt before I made strip one. It’s how I still fell about it now.

On a similar note, there is a comic that started almost a year ago I’d like to plug, which is entitled Nevermind. It’s cute, it’s different, and it’s also in relative obscurity. It’s only at about 40 strips, so it’s not hard to catch up… so if you’re into “adorably weird” (and if you’re reading this, you run a high likelihood) please throw some love at Azure by clicking the link and perhaps leaving a comment. One thing I enjoy the most is the use of colored word bubbles. I may steal that.

I posted the two sizes requested in comments for the airport wallpaper last comic. If you’d like to make your own, feel free to resize the larger version to fit your needs.

3840×2160

1366×768

Also, I can’t see any evidence of Society6 creating calendars I can sell, and I know calendars are a bit on the ‘goofy novelty’ side of merchandise nowadays…but I got an idea for one. Its been pretty well received among the friends I’ve asked, so I’d like to know if anyone is aware of a site or company that makes them. I need to know how large to make the images before I can start.

Should have next Patreon up tomorrow. Thanks everyone :D

The girls apartment is actually based on one I had in Lakeland with some roommates of my own. Ours was three bedrooms, but the two bedroom layout is practically the same. The blueprint for it is eternally burned into my head when drawing and setting up each panel contained within this environment.

UPDATE: Yeah I’m failing miserably at getting this comic done. I’ll have to push it to Monday, but it is 4 tiers, and it’s the content of all missed posts. My apologies. I had a rough time getting this one how I wanted. :\

Next comic will be up ASAP. Still have several hours of coloring left (at 10:00 est.)

This is Wednesday’s and Friday’s post together. I was running into a time crunch, so here’s both.

Next Patreon is about 40% done. :D

Next comic will be up Friday around noonish. Still fiddling with backgrounds.

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Got some great art from Andrei. Girls enjoying some presents from granny Buckingham or some distant aunt. :P

Nextsite comic and Patreon will be up today (Tuesday) sometime this afternoon.

You can check out some more of his work here.

UPDATE AGAIN: I… ended up falling asleep (I tend to do that, it’s weird.) Comics will probably be up early AM. Apologies.

Thanks for the patience. Really got in the creative weeds with these last two comics.

My sons birthday is coming up, and he’s obsessed with Mario, like many of us when we were young. He still runs around with his last Halloween costume every so often. We had to eventually throw the felt facial hair away when the adhesive got gross. So anyone familiar with children who gravitate towards this franchise knows that Nintendo charges a mint for their toys. Anything hard-plastic and action figurey will give all parents flashbacks to the last time they bought Legos. So to save money, I’ll pick him out a few plush toys… and to find something I know he won’t see at Walmart or Toys R Us, I typically shop on eBay. The selection is a million times better.

So I’m going through and looking for stuff he might want.. (hint, it’s all of it.) And they have stuff you’d never see at the store.
Like Chain Chomps..
Those ahole plants..
Some kind of plush toilet..

The things that throws its illegitimate children at you the whole level…

And I’m no mustache scientist, but uh…

Then there’s my all time favorite. This one is like gold (and priced accordingly.)

Just that face. It’s so doofy I can’t stop laughing.

Some of those sites are real. Guess which ones. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Sincerest apologies for being so late. This comic went through an ungodly amount of drafts, plus I had kids traveling out of state last week, and half my kitchen having to be replaced. I had a leaky faucet, broken sink, and an unworking garbage disposal and dishwasher. But yeah, we all have challenges.

On a separate note, I decided against an idea for a calendar I mentioned last month. I wasn’t happy with the options I found offered online, which were mostly templates designed primarily for “Grandma’s family pictures.” I wanted more control over the size and how it looked, and designing my own days for the months. Nothing overly elaborate, but something that conformed to the picture content of each month. If I wanted to delve that deeply into the project, I’d have to do a custom run of X amount, and etc etc. So I’m recycling the idea into just prints, and I’ll sell them at convention. You’ll see some when they’re done.

Lastly, I’d like to hear some ideas for Pumpkin cosplays I haven’t done for the comic. This is just an “in general” and does not need to work into a storyline. So don’t worry about context before suggesting.  Male, female, any form of media, just not insanely obscure. If someone posts an idea you like, please like the comment of second their motion. That would help a ton.
Thanks everyone! :D

This is both Wednesday’s and Friday’s comic together since I was getting too late on posting the former. Panel 5 is actually one month of my trashed calendar idea I was talking about. It was basically a pinup calendar, but with selfies. So, maybe someday, but not as soon as 2016. :D

This story, like all the stories so far, stem from some real life event. I typically take said events, 2 dashes of exaggeration, and 5  gallons of artistic licence, and make a series of comics with them. Several years ago I had a female friend use a dating site. So she set up a page, and within less than 2 days, this was her inbox. She shared this screencap with me.

Now there is no way any human with a life can possibly keep up with this much correspondence. Like most of these sites, you have to pay something to ACTUALLY communicate with someone, and out of pure curiosity, she did one of their trials, then responded to a few emails. Each response she sent branched into 2-5 immediate replies back, minimum. Some replied back continuously until she ended her membership, whether she continued the conversation or not. In short, almost every guy she tried talking to had some mini excitement meltdown and emailed her multiple responses to her singular email to them. If she emailed them back again, the same reaction occurred. Like “You know what, don’t even answer me, I’ll keep this convo going for the both of us.” That’s her sentiment at least.

My friend’s in her mid-twenties, and a plethora of those “most insistent” were pushing 50. Not most, but many. If I remember right, her stay at this site was 3 months, and her take away from the experience was: “being completely overwhelmed.” So after alot of discussion with her, some other friends about their own dating experiences using these services, and some research on datebait (which some sites have been accused of) I came up with this story.

So if you’re a guy, and you’ve ever used one of these sites, and maybe never got much feedback from women, (or maybe any)… it might not be YOU. Your site may be miserably one-sided.

About two months ago I asked my friends Bart and Zach over at Ramen Empire if they’d be willing to fill in for me for a week. You know… so I could have some non-emergency-related time off. They were pretty excited to. I gave them free rein over the story and allowed them to be as ridiculous as possible, but there was a catch. I wanted my vacation week to be updated everyday. Considering I’ve had a few production delays recently, I wanted to over-deliver in my absence. What better way to make up for my own failings than to force it upon someone else! So thanks to them, there will be a comic posted everyday this week, Monday the 21st through Sunday the 27th. That’s 7 awesome guest comics before we return to our regularly scheduled storyline.

SO BE BACK TOMORROW!

And obviously, you should check out Ramen Empire by the fantastically eccentric Zach Stoppel and the arrogantly bewildered Bartholomew Klick here:

Howdy!

Bart here.

I want to take a minute to tell Chris that we’re really grateful he’s giving us the spotlight for a week. It means a lot to Zach and I, and we’re also thrilled to our marrow about how many of you amazing Shotgun Shuffle peeps popped over to Ramen Empire yesterday. We’re trying to mix the modern sensibilities of one-shot comic web humor with the engaging techniques that long-form strip writers in the golden era of the newpaper funnies used, so while the media itself looks familiar, the bones are fairly experimental (which will be much clearer over the next few weeks, once Skyler’s film-story and out-of-film story start colliding.) We hope you guys like what we’re doing over there, and that our treatment of the Sisters Buckingham over here brings you some amusement for the next week.

That said, Chris was nice enough to pass the blog’s reins over (Hah! See that? Flawless execution, “Thor” from the comments, if that’s even your real name) so that we could mention we’re cutting our teeth on this whole merch thing. We figured the least punishing way to do this would be on Teespring, which is basically the Kickstarter of T-shirt places. So if you want to wear this on your chest:

Then just close your eyes and click here. Actually, open them. You’re clicking all over the place.

Also, Zach says I’m an idiot if I don’t keep this thing at the bottom of the page, and that I’m absolutely not allowed to use it to Rick Roll anyone. =(

Hey everyone! Bart here again, writer for the guest comics and for Ramen Empire. I hadn’t super planned on hijacking the blog every post, but Chris, uh, actually had to go to the emergency room for a tooth infection, so that means pain, pain-killers, and antibiotics would all be  in more control of his blog post than he’d be, unless he just has some kind of super-human mettle. Which, to be fair, I’ve seen how he builds the backgrounds to Shotgun Shuffle. It’s nothing shy of a full digital painting every panel, every comic and there is certainly mettle involved in that.

The entire time Zach and I were working on these comics, the discussion kept coming back to which Shotgun Shuffle tropes to engage with. We toyed with having Ellie create a band of roving, rolling obese camels, with wheelchair ninja, with trying to wedge in the Ellie-never-signs-her-name gag, etc. (We also went full stupid, and have a discarded story outline wherein Tarragon’s hair turned out to be sentient parasite giving her awesome powers. Can’t win ’em all.) Montage is, by far, our favorite trope / gag in Shotgun Shuffle, so we knew that no matter what else we did, someone, at some point, would pop M.

It’s a really interesting drug, and I think it’s actually worth a bit of literature analysis. The meta aspect to it is humorous, of course, but if we’re reading the canon element of a work, it’s never fair to explain some element away as authorial intent–not to the author, but to the fans. For example, take Firefly. Why does everyone speak Chinese? And not just speak it through rote memorization, but cuss creatively and fluidly in it? The cop-out, boring answer is that Whedon wanted it that way because it let him write “Holy Testicle Tuesday” into a script. The interesting answers come when we assume Whedon doesn’t exist.

So let’s assume that Shotgun Shuffle was not written and take a second to figure out Montage. The meta element of skipping through a narrative goes away, because the spirit of this make-shift rule of considering another creative’s work is that we’re not looking at a narrative at all. Moving from that point (which I can already hear, like, ten of you disagreeing with, but whatever, I’m the one with an admin log in. Muahaha) we can pick up some other context clues to develop a hypothesis about how Montage might work.

One: Ellie owns a floating, sapient phone that behaves in a reactive way to her environment.

Two: Brand names are familiar, but largely different from those in the real world.

Three: There is at least some cursive evidence of Shotgun Shuffle’s world having a more advanced, more popular darkweb (or some sort of alternate internet) than we have now (thinking back to the recent Camera arc).

Four: Ignoring today’s guest comic (which has Montage work on more than one person at a time), the side-effects of Montage are basically nil, outside its intentional effects.

Hypothesis: Shotgun Shuffle takes place in a more technologically advanced world that we live in, or else the near future, and Montage is a nanite-based drug. The nanites invade the part of the brain responsible for temporal perception. If this is the case, it’s also likely to be the drug of kings among competitive MOBA players (Bonus points to the commenter who comes up with the best name for what League of Legends might be called in the Shotgun Shuffle verse), who take an inverted variant of the drug that slows their perception of time and allows them to make better decisions more quickly.

So as this tapers off into the comment section, I wonder if any of you are interested in playing along with me–Assume Montage was not invented with a narrative purpose by the author. How does it work and why do you think that?

Oh, and the song playing through the Montage:

I apologize for nothing.

Hi all. Bart again.

There was a lot of really interesting ideas in the comments section last time about how Montage works. If you missed it, you should go poke around and check it out. I’m sticking to *my* stupid fan theory, cuz stubborn. I’m also placing bets on how long some of that takes to work its way into the wiki, since I didn’t see an entry about the drug there.

—

When we hit on the idea of giving ISIS an absurd cartoon villain at its head, that’s basically when we told Chris that we were probably not trying to make a canon story (in case that hasn’t been answered for anyone yet.) I’m just a touch disappointed in how he turned out. ISIS doesn’t lend itself very well to absurd over-the-top super villains, so in the end, uh. Yeah. Ziggs.

Wednesday and Friday are our normal update days over at Ramen Empire, so there’s a new comic for you guys to eye-fondle over there, too. Ashlee can text all she wants about shameless self promotion, but I actually feel kind of bad and awkward about it. Not awkward enough to stop, but awkward enough to mention it.

So with just a modicum of shame, I shall set this link here:

Only two comics after this! How will it end!? Find out! …eventually.

Heya all,

Bart here. I suspect Chris is off celebrating his birthday, so I’m just gonna leave this here. I’m also going to leave this comic here, in case anyone is showing up late and is confused by the guest week.

Gonna take a second to explain the shtick to Ramen Empire. It follows a college-cum-indy film group that makes movies. It lets Zach and me make jokes about making and watching movies, when we want, but also it lets us change genres whenever we finish a story without actually throwing away anything that people have learned about the characters. In the first section, Afterglow, we followed a kind of kitschy romance that went parallel to the team making a bad Twilight knock-off. Now they’re a bit better at what they do, and we’re following Skyler as she tries to solve a mystery that’s emerged from their film noir project.

The end. Please don’t throw things at me!

For the last panel to make sense, I think you have to be somewhat aware that Chris and I occasionally have four-hour-long arguments about politics.

I’d like to point out that we manage to hold a quite a few diametrically opposed viewpoints and get along perfectly well. This is proof positive that my side is loving, tolerant, and joyful in spite of the hateful disease of differing opinions.

*Crisp, unironic nod.*

This is probably the last time that I’ll ever get to update Chris’s blog, so I want to leave you with something near and dear to my heart:

Also, one final plug for my comic, mostly in case anyone missed that we also try to be funny over there, addition to making super-cereal storytimes.

Bernie Sanders’ Hair must One Day Do Battle with the Mighty Trump Wig. That Is the First Horseman. So Mote It Be. So Mote It Be.