Blitz the Comic Guy

Well, everybody else is writing think pieces and blog posts and trying to find new ways of being inspirational and alarmist and passive aggressive all at the same time; guess I have to as well.

But yeah. Don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a bit of a germ going around, so everybody’s staying put at home whether they like it or not. They might have said something about it on the news. So what does this mean for the future of Blitz the Comic Guy Incorporated? …not a whole lot in the short term. You hear all these people online joking about how they were “social distancing” before it was cool, but no, I literally mean it when I say my regular routine is virtually unaffected by these practices. The only stuff I was leaving the house on a regular basis for were church and anime night, and in of those is live streaming now while the other is looking into it. The twisted thing is that I’d been telling everyone I was looking into getting a side job for a little while, just to have a bit more disposable cash, but then I actually WOULD be greatly disrupted right now.

But that is the thing, right there. It’s no secret that drawing silly pictures for The Internet doesn’t exactly make the big bucks, and that’s when everything’s going normally. When a crazy disaster rolls through and suddenly nobody’s spending money on silly, extraneous crap they never actually needed, silly internet pictures become even less of a priority than they already were. So that’s a bit scary, I guess. As always, I hate to specifically ask anybody to donate on Patreon and totally understand if you can’t afford it right now, but if you’re in a position where you CAN help out it’d be especially appreciated right now.

But enough of that, what does Pandemicmania mean for the COMICS? Well, obviously, if I get sick with a horrifying plague then updates will slow down a bit, so let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But again, I have even less of a reason to leave the house than I already did, so I think on the low end of the At Risk scale. And anyway, Far Out There’s already in the limbo of archive re-posting hiatus, so it’s not like there’s a schedule to be disrupted there. Bursts of re-edited old comics will keep hitting faroutthere.com at random intervals as they’re done, with the occasional holiday comic going up on the old SmackJeeves site as well as Twitter, tumblr, and Facebook. April 1^st is right around the corner, so you know I gotta do something weird for that!

And speaking of April Fools, that’s been the traditional ConCONcon date, so what’s up with Conventional Wisdom? Obviously, if there’s one thing that WOULD be drastically affected by all this mess, it’s the anime convention comic. Insert “con crud” joke here. I had been on track to wrap up the Ichibancon 2020 comics by the end of March so that I could look into some new local stuff in April, but obviously ain’t nobody going to ANY conventions next month. As of my writing this, Animazement at the end of May is still officially on, though that obviously depends on how next month goes. And despite ALL MY GRAND DECLARATIONS LAST YEAR, I was actually looking at some plans that might have seen me going back to Otakon before all this blew up. Those plans were already tentative even before, so I have absolutely NO idea how things will play out now (especially since said plans involve other people who are in even greater limbo than me right now). If conventions are running again in August but the Otakon arrangements CAN’T be made, then I’ll probably try to do Queen City Anime Con instead. Again, it all depends on what’s happening and blah blah blah.

But in the IMMEDIATE future, what’s happening with Conventional Wisdom once the Ichibancon comics are done? Well, if I’m not going anywhere in April, that means I’ve got no excuse not to go full bore on ConCONcon comics next month. In a morbid way, this is the perfect time for it. Half the reason I expanded ConCONcon from an absurdist April Fools gag to a running comic was so Conventional Wisdom could have more regular content without me having to travel to more events. It’s kind of exactly what’s needed right now, so look for weekly ConCONcon 2020 pages to start going up at the beginning of April. I’d actually toyed with the thought of doing two a week, just to capitalize on the captive audience of congoers with cabin fever… but there’s still so much website re-building left to do, I can’t afford to give myself too much extra work, so one page a week it is.

But that’s possibly the biggest thing, right there. In the current, bizarre situation, us online content creators are in an unprecedented position. There’s a whole lot of people with a whole not lot to do right now, and a lot of the traditional means of entertainment they’d normally turn to are in flux. Not only do those of us cranking out free entertainment online have a rare chance to be seen right now, but we probably have a responsibility to do what we can to help keep everybody that much more sane. So, if nothing else, I’ll be doing my best to keep a steady stream of decent new content and re-posted old stuff coming out on Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom to try and make everybody’s isolation a little more bearable. And who knows? Maybe once the Crap Nobody Really Needs Emporium opens back up and more people have disposable income, maybe some of them will feel like sending a few buck my way in return?