Saffron and Sage

And that’s the end of chapter three! What did you think of it? Vote now on your phones!

Once you’re done voting (and leaving comments with your thoughts!), it’s time for that announcement I teased last time, and it’s a bittersweet one. This is the final page drawn by Sofia “Sabu” Lopez, who is now leaving the project. Sofia is a great artist, and will always be a friend of the comic, but her day job was making it difficult for dedicate a full day to drawing Saffron. Drawing comics takes a long time! We already have a new artist lined up to start with Chapter 4: Carlos Ruiz! Carlos does a lot of experimental comics over at asequentialart.com, but long-time followers of my blog may better recognize him as the artist of my old comic, Legend of the Hare. And if you never saw that comic, trust me

He’s really good.

I’ve worked with Carlos for a few years on LotH and other projects, and we have a good chemistry, I think. I write scripts differently for him than I did for Sabu, and to be honest, I enjoy the panel-by-panel scripting more.

Between Sabu’s job causing her to not be able to make updates and my (now resolved!) losing my apartment and needing to replace it causing a hiatus, there hasn’t been a lot of Saffron lately. We’re still out-updating Dresden Codak, but that’s not where the bar for a SpiderForest comic is, and I haven’t been happy with it. Since we’re ending the chapter and switching to a new artist, I want to take one last short hiatus for Carlos to build a buffer, and resume Saffron and Sage on May 7th, with a new storyline, “Hot Cross Buns”, after which I’ll be in a good financial situation, the script will be fully written, and Carlos will be able to dedicate more time to working on it, and you’ll get two comic pages a week. That’s right, two! One new page of Saffron, and one page of Legend of the Hare in syndication. That’s right, I’m exploiting my back catalog of comics pages, and LotH will be back on a new site, re-uploading comics pages every Thursday with author commentary on what went wrong, what went right, and what I learned.  Just wait until we get to page 11, it’ll be great!

I think we’re finally near the end of all the weird issues Saffron has had this year, and ready to get back to updating weekly like a real comic and not missing updates all the time. And they’ll be good updates, too. I don’t want to spoil to much, but I’m having a blast writing Chapter 4, and I’m the most excited for Saffron that I’ve been in months.

See you soon!