The first new Elf Life pages in a long time are coming. To avoid plot entanglement, they occur at a chronological mid-point, deep in the elf forest, with very little in the way of story. We open with Baughb recounting recent events to his scribe, Mudyard Stipling, as Filis, Airek, and the Sprite look on.

Mid-point would be right after Baughb is rescued from the goblins, and before Glynhial appears. If you’ve never read the comics, all you need to know is that this is an uncharted lull. The elves are still kicking around the forest. Filis still thinks Baughb is a jerk, but is starting to fall in love despite herself. She’s started taking sword lessons from him. In the previous comics, Filis goes off to a dress shop and is confronted, from behind, by Glynhial the faerie, and STOP! We’ve gone too far! This all happens before Glynhial, before. If we want faeries, we have established that Ryley and Valencia are living among the elves disguised as elves.

Keeping this loose, because production of the comics has always been a problem. The first run of Elf Life comics, I had no choice but to literally draw and ink comics on the backs of other comics. I was drawing and inking on a feeble little folding TV tray. With no chair.

Paper and other supplies remained a problem through the years, because I’ve consistently failed to, as they say, “monetize” my content. But now my kick is to do every bit of the comics digitally. So that keeps costs down somewhat.

Besides the cost, I can see ways to make the process more sane and efficient. In the past, If I ever made rough layouts, they’d be disorganized, and I’d lose track of stuff if not drawn right away. So I’d wind up doing a lot of work for nothing. Now, I can make many roughs as layers over a template in MyPaint, all with appropriate names. So, for example, I started out drawing some other Elf Life story before realizing that it’s a bad idea to do it right now, but it’ll be easier to find the roughs later when it is time to do that story. In between Elf Life pages, I’m doing stuff for my racier comic, Tanktop, Texas, which has also hit the skids lately. If I get stuck on both of them, I can doodle some other idea or other. It’s an endless pad.

Well, not completely endless, of course. It’ll be a good idea to find a way to catalog them, maybe start with a fresh “pad” every so often. It would be nice if there was a way to output a list of layers from an application like MyPaint. I’ll have to look into that.