Well, that’s it.
I just wanted to take a minute to write a little something. First, I wanted to say a giant THANK YOU to my wife. Without her this comic would literally have never happened. The support and encouragement alone were huge, not to even mention the ideas she gave me for it. Also to everyone who has ever taken the time to read it, that really does mean a lot. People will tell you that they’d keep making their comics just for themselves even if no one cared or ever looked at it. I find that really hard to believe and for me it’s not the case at all. I really enjoy making comics, but when you tell stories or jokes without an audience you might as well be that crazy guy on the street corner who smells like pee and talks to his invisible friend. So what I’m trying to say is thank you! The support, kind words and criticisms really kept me going on this and meant a lot.
Just a quick note on the ending. I’ve actually had this idea in mind all along. Way back since the second comic (yeesh, sorry about the art back then). I wasn’t quite sure of the exact details of how I thought it should end at the time, but I knew the general direction I wanted it to go and I’m really glad I got to end it like this.
As far as what’s next for me, I’ll be taking a little time. The first story arc of my other comic just finished up as well, so I’m going to spend time getting caught up on some other things before getting back into comics (hopefully not too much time, though). If you want to keep up on what I’m doing, please follow me on twitter.
It’s been a good journey with Gnorm and Jack and I feel like I’ve really grown a lot artistically and in my story telling ability. These guys will always be a big part of me and I hope you’ve had as much fun reading about them as I did creating them. As always, thanks for reading.
-Brad
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
Just wanted to give a quick update on some of the things going on that will affect the comic, but first an announcement. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to go back to one As the Grass Grows strip a week for a while. This wasn’t an easy call since I really like the momentum of more than one comic a week, but life – as it’s known to do – tends to get in the way sometimes. If you read my other comic, Sector Four, you’ll notice that it hasn’t updated in quite a while. This really bothers me, especially since I’m so close to finishing out the first story arc. So in order to handle the other commitments in life and also get back to a comic that I’m still really excited about, I decided that I had to cut back my time on As the Grass Grows.
One of those life things I need to handle will be having surgery in July. Nothing serious, thankfully, but I’ll definitely have some miserable down time where I’m not going to be productive at all. And there are also some good things that have been going on lately that have just taken more time than I expected.
So new plan… starting this week (6/26) As the Grass Grows goes back to weekly Wednesday updates. On July 15th August 5th (had to push it back a little bit), Sector Four will be back to a weekly schedule until the first story wraps up. Then it’ll go on hiatus while I work on the second story arc and finalize my plans for a new format for the comic.
Also somewhere in there, websites will be redesigned and some other things I’ve been working on will launch before As the Grass Grows settles back into it’s multi-comic per week update schedule.
-Brad
On May 4th, I’ll, once again, be at Comix Connection in the West Manchester Mall in York, PA for Free Comic Book Day. The guys at Comix Connection really do a great job with this event so if you’re in the area I strongly urge you to come check it out. They’re also working to support the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank and the York Rescue Mission, so they’re giving away an additional free comic for every non-perishable food item you donate. Not to mention the great guests they have for you to come and meet (ahem, yours truly). Check out more details here.
I’ll have copies of Gnonsense on hand for $10 and I’ll be giving out free sketches and postcards. I’d love to see you there.
-Brad
It seems like it’s taken so long to get to this point, but I’m really glad to be back drawing and posting strips on a regular basis. Getting back into these characters has been so fun. Part of that fun has been allowing them to develop since we’ve seen then last. There are going to be some pretty big changes but at their hearts these characters are still the same and I didn’t realize how much I missed them until I started hearing their voices in my mind again.
So let me fill you in on the plan. Today’s comic is up right now and there’ll be two more next week, Wednesday (2/6) and Friday (2/8), then we’ll settle into our regular weekly schedule every wednesday. This is only temporary, though. I’m planning to continue to make at least 2 comics per week and once I have a nice stock pile, I’ll start posting them every Wednesday and Friday. I’ll probably take me a couple weeks or a month to get to that point, though, so for now we’ll just stick to weekly.
Also, Sector Four isn’t going away. I’ve gotten a little behind on it but now that things are rolling here at As the Grass Grows, it’ll free me up to get back to Sector Four as well. As of this post, there are 9 more pages of chapter two that will close out ‘book 1′ and then it’ll go on a little hiatus while I try to get a big chunk of chapter 3 done.
Thanks for reading and welcome back!
-Brad