Updates (i.e., why there's no comic this month)

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned at the end of December 2023, I was laid off from my job of 20 years. This has caused some disruption of my life, to say the least.

Disruption can be a good thing. In this case, I think it is. After several miserable months of attempting to look for work in corporate America (long story short: It sucks. Hard.), in April I decided to say "To hell with it."

Candi and I are starting our own business. We're calling it Oblique Adventures.

I'm not going into many details right now, since there are a lot of things we need to settle on. The nature of the business, though, is that we're going to be a 3rd-party content creator for table-top role playing games (TTRPGs), most notably Dungeons & Dragons. 

It's very exciting. Very scary, too, but in a way much less horrifying than the prospect of going back into another corporate hellscape. I have not felt this eager and energized about work in a long, long time.

I'll be keeping you up to date as developments develop. 

This rather enormous lifestyle change has made April a dizzying whirlwind, which is why I didn't find the time and energy to finish the next strip. I have no intention of abandoning Thunderstruck... but I may need to ask for some slack here and there as we get Oblique Adventures up and running. 

 So... that's the big news! Wish us luck, and I look forward to sharing our work with you in the coming months.

Comic 810 -- Jude's Story, Part 8

 Jude has taken over the comic!

I really didn't plan for Jude's story to take quite this long. I believe we're approaching the end of this Biblical saga, though.

Hang in there, everyone...

Comic 809 -- Jude's Story, Part 7

 Here we go. Sorry about the delay...

Okay, so... in spite of Thrud's confusion here, one could make a case that there was a creature loosely described as "part man, part horse" about which Asgardian goddess might have known. A nasty one, too, called the Nuckelavee.

Described in the folklore of the Orkney Islands of Scotland, this grotesque thing was like a horse and rider fused together, with some extra mutations, no skin, and extraordinarily foul breath. A real charmer! Owing to the nature of the way such folklore is passed down, it isn't clear if the Nuckelavee story was part of the culture while the Vikings were inhabiting the islands or not. 

For the sake of the comic, we will say Thrud did not know about the Nuckelavee, and thus produced some fanciful notions about what this "centaur" thing might look like. Sometimes, I go with the cuter option.

Breif Delay

 Never could get the hang of February. The new strip will appear this weekend... apologies for the delay.

Comic 808 -- Jude's Story, Part 6

 More thrills and spills from the ancient world...

Reconciling lots of different mythologies is tricky business, both for the characters in the story and the writer. Many of Thunderstruck's plot elements arise from the fact that the magical world is a crowded place, and some folks want to simplify it for their own purposes.

In other news, the search for work continues. It sucks, basically. I'll let you know when something improves.