Wow, it’s been 3 weeks since the last blog post. Blame the move. My only internet for the last 3 weeks has been my cell phone and it’s hotspot. 🙃

I have good news! I have bad news! Let’s go over it!

GOOD NEWS! Torbeth stickers are in!

These stickers have been added to the merch store. There are multiple packs, 5/$1, 15/$2, or 40/$4. If you want more than 40, each additional 10 are $1. Shipping is included within the US.

If you haven’t checked out the merch store yet then you should! I don’t expect anyone to spend anything. Really, the merch is for you, to show your interest in the fandom or do whatever else people do with, merch… my profits are negligible and anything I do make goes right back into projects for the Candy universe.

MORE GOOD NEWS! Poster #2 is underway! After July’s unfortunate Photoshop crash +28 hours of work was lost on poster #2. Any time you lose a lot of work on something it is hard to begin again and even harder to make it as amazing as it would have been the first time. But I promised you a poster #2 with +30 characters and that’s still happening!

To keep things rolling smoothly I’ve assigned Seasan, the artist behind the Rico Comic series, to complete poster #2. This will take a while to complete. It has 30 fully rendered characters! Plus extra characters that are partly rendered. I don’t want to make any promises on a delivery date, but I am projecting sometime in early October.

A special blog post will come out with the poster’s release to explain the story, but for now just know this: There are over 30 alt universe Elizabeths here to help our Elizabeth battle the Ricochet!

Like I said before, I don’t expect anyone to spend any money. But options are available, because these projects take a lot of time and money! Here’s a quick rundown on how the poster will work:

• A 5 megapixel version of the poster will be made freely available to everyone.

• For $5 you can buy the full sized file. It’s 70 megapixels in size. You’ll also get access to the .PSD layered Photoshop file, so if you have Photoshop you can see some extra details, like entire characters blocked from view behind others, or details like body parts of characters you can see, that are blocked by others normally. 30 characters are fully rendered, regardless of how much of them you can see normally.

Here’s a sneak peak of the poster. A very, very rough draft for where the girls will be positioned. Keep in mind in the final poster a few of the girls on the left will be blocked from view by the Master Ricochet. This isn’t just to drive sales of the .PSD, it’s part of the story of the poster.

And for a little more fun, here is a preview of the first character Seasan has drawn for the poster, our Elizabeth! This is the main Elizabeth, the one from the universe we see in the comics. She’s a bit older, about 13 or 14 years old here. And her hair style has changed a bit too, but it’s her!

Now for some Bad News… Elizabeth the Compunctious was supposed to end hiatus tomorrow, September 1st. Unfortunately this is not possible. The drawing computer I use (mostly for editing at this point) was never delivered after my move. Because it was so expensive and fragile I used a special shipping service through UPS, not my regular moving company that took all my furniture and stuff. They screwed up though and have no idea where that computer is. So I’m SOL. Additionally, my artist who cooperates with me on this series hasn’t said a word to me since the poster #2 failure, over 5 weeks ago.

So really, I have no idea what’s happening here. I will say the series will continue, one way or another. I have major plans for this story. Even if it means throwing away all existing pages, over 2000 hours of work and over $2000 in art (for both commissioned and in house) would be wasted, and a new artist would be hired to start all over again. But I will do it if needed. The story must go on! And the old work could possibly be held back for some future behind the scenes work… maybe I could produce a video or something about the stumbles we’ve made and sell that to make back a bit. 🙃 We’ll see. But more comic pages will come, eventually.

Don’t worry though! Even without new comic pages there will still be more content on the way! This is the Candy Universe after all, it’s about more than just the comics… more blog posts, more fan art, more merch, all sorts of stuff is coming. But the blogs will be the most important, as I release a new series of posts explaining the Candy Universe more.

And more Bad News! The other comic series, the Rico Comic, is also on hold for now. In this case, it’s because Seasan was redirected to poser #2 after the failure 5 weeks ago, and he’s one guy, so he can’t do that and the comic at once. He’s also in college, with a thesis due this semester, so his available time for Candy Universe work is reduced right now, right when he’s been handed the single largest project yet. 30 Characters! I've made it clear to him to focus on school first. He can work on the poster slowly, one character at a time, both to prevent another +28 hour loss of work (Photoshop is less likely to crash with one character per file, and even if it did you’d lose at most, one character) and to make the physiological load less on him.

Let’s look at more Good News! Discord Voice Chats are back! Due to reduced bandwidth and poor connectivity I haven’t been able to VC for the last few weeks, but now I can! I’ll be online for VC at least a few times a week, if not more often, over the next few weeks.

Finally, one last plug of the merch store. To celebrate the launch of the merch store all digital items were on sale for the last month or so. That deal is over now, but to celebrate Labor Day weekend a new deal has been launched! Starting this weekend, and for a limited time, buy any physical merch and get 10 Torbeth stickers free!

Ok, enough merch store shill. I’m just happy you’ve managed to read this far. Keep an eye out for new blog posts!

Some new fan art is on it’s way, including an interesting poll run by Senior Fan Artist Yshanii. Keep a lookout on Discord for that, in the next few days. She’ll be posting two versions of the same drawing in very different styles of hers, and looking for feedback on which style to use in the future! Here is a sneak peak:

I think that’s enough announcements for now! Have a great day!