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This was a tough post to write. Today’s comic marks the start of something but I’ll get to that in a minute. First I wanted to let you know where my head is right now. Big life events often come with a reality check. If you’re lucky, things change in a positive way and you grow. If you’re unlucky it can drop you in a funk from which it can be difficult to recover. When my son was born in 2006, reality slapped me in the face. Before then I had no idea how much time I was wasting, which can happen when you go from having hours and hours of “me time” to none at all. But that reality check made me grow, pushed me to get serious about creating a comic and after a good bit of fretting over time management, As the Grass Grows was born.
Fast forward to 2011. My daughter was on the way and while I was having a lot of fun doing AtGG, my mind kept going back to a different story I wanted to tell. Having the experience of one time-sucking kid under my belt (I really do love my kids and wouldn’t trade them for anything 
), I felt the push to work on this other story. So As the Grass Grows went on hiatus and Sector Four began.
Once that got going and was humming along smoothly, I started to miss some of the jokes and freedom of an unconfined comic. So, feeling all confident and slightly delusional, I decided it was time to bring back Gnorm and the guys.
Things were moving along… the schedule for Sector Four was slipping, but I felt like that was ok since the page-a-week installments weren’t a great reading experience anyway. So whenever I could finish a page, I would put it up.
Here’s where reality came to smack me in the face again. A few weeks ago, I had surgery to fix a hernia. While I was laying around in horrible pain afterwards, I couldn’t sit up to draw, I was super unproductive and had a lot of time to think. I read back through a lot of the comics I’d done and realized that there were aspects of them that I would have loved to have done differently. The main problem I was seeing was that I was spread too thin. Between my day job, my freelance work and my comics, I didn’t really have time to sit back and take a critical look at what I was doing. I’d just finish one thing and move on to the next. This is a problem. Then I heard this on a podcast and it struck a cord:
“Do one thing and do it the best, and when that thing is a success, add a second thing.” – Dan Benjamin
I’m still not sure what I would consider “success” to look like for my comics. But I know one thing. I’m not doing either of them to the best of my abilities. I don’t think they’re bad, but I know I could do better. After looking at both of them, and with other ideas piling up in my head, I’ve made a pretty difficult and pretty big decision.
As the Grass Grows will be coming to an end.
The main reason is because I feel like I’ve been through a lot with these guys and I don’t really have any more stories to tell about them. I love these characters too much to give them a half-hearted effort and more and more I feel like my focus is shifting elsewhere. I’ve written an end to their story that I’m pretty happy with and I’m ready to move on and give my complete focus to Sector Four for a while to make that story the best it can be.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the support that I’ve been given for As the Grass Grows and I’ll be forever grateful to each and every person who has read, commented, enjoyed, hated, and sometimes purchased the work that I’ve done here. You guys have been awesome to me and I hope you’ll continue to check out Sector Four and whatever lies beyond.
Thanks for reading,
Brad
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