20131201, 11:46 – Sunday updates worked out pretty well for Water. They should work pretty well for Air, and even if they don’t there’ll be a page next weekend at the very least. The full script for Air weighs in at 44 pages. Nineteen of these have layouts, eleven of them are rendered, and as of this writing one is ready to post and the remaining ten can be made ready to draw on short notice. Counting this cover that’s 12 pages, which on a weekly release schedule is approximately three months of updates. I know I’ll be able to get the first three or four pages out the door, but at this point I can’t see clearly beyond that. How December and January shape up won’t just determine the production pace of this chapter – they’ll likely determine the rest of my life. Overly dramatic but accurate!

Air is the first installment of ATC to have most of the key scenes and all linking material written sober, and it is the first installment of ATC to be laid out sober. As such the material has required fewer revisions than previous “wet” work, and if the chapter is executed as envisioned it will (as usual) be the Best Ever. Only for Really Reals this time, as Air doesn’t just move the plot along, it also dips a bit into ATC cosmology.

Less than two months of downtime between installments (or two months and a week if you don’t want to count the cover). While that’s not a record for the comic it is something of a record for the modern (post 2007) era. If production goes well there should be even less of a gap between this installment and the next, though that’s almost a year away if I stick to weekly updates. I’d like to update more often than that but at this point weekly should be doable no matter how weird things get. More than that and the comic starts eating into time that needs to be converted into money.

Today: the installment cover and template shakedown. Next week: THE STORY CONTINUES!

Oh, and here’s the full cover spread: