DCR.5 primary assets are 90% complete as of this writing. I still have some plot- and cover-critical assets to develop – these don’t otherwise appear until a few pages into the chapter, so I’ve taken the {!un}usual step of starting rendering work. At the moment, pages 5.01, 5.02 and 5.03 have been rendered and are ready for line art, and panel one of 5.04 is 89.3% of the way through the reference render. I don’t need the cover assets until 5.05, so there’ll be a natural production break after the renders for 5.04 have been generated.

I haven’t drawn any of the rendered pages yet – my head has been elsewhere with Work-work, I have other drawing obligations, and I’m mentally hung up on starting work on a chapter that doesn’t have a cover. So, what’s probably going to happen is this:

I’ll render 5.04, not work on the comic for a few days, prep the assets required for 5.05-5.17 and the cover, render the cover, then draw the cover and get it prepped while 5.05 through 5.whatever are rendering. Either the cover will go up and a few pages will follow in a batch allotment a few days or weeks after that, or the cover and the first batch of pages will hit all at once. I like working and posting in batches – drawing and processing a few pages in parallel makes much better use of my time, and as to posting them… I know there are a few readers who’d prefer regular updates, but I don’t live that kind of life and this isn’t that kind of comic. If I could clockwork it I would – as it stands, I’m uploading pages as soon as I consider them finished. I’d rather produce DCR.5 as four or five (probably six or eight) big updates as opposed to 20 individual page dumps.

So. Pages are in the pipeline, though it’ll be at least a week before any of them are ready to post. Probably two or three, as I want to get the cover done first and a couple of pages in the first batch are fairly complex.

All told!