About Sugarskull Comics' Current State of Affairs

Hi, guys. It’s a little embarrassing to show up after so long, but there’s a few things that need to be adressed. As you might already have noticed, we are currently undergoing yet another (agonizingly long) break. We don’t want to try and justify ourselves, but we feel like we need to explain our lack of activity:

• Our main artist’s tablet stopped working: It sound like a lame excuse, and it probably is. We were able to fix this and it’s currently working now, so we might start over and retake the projects we had going. The hard thing about this is that our main artist is right now our only artist, so if anything comes up with them, Sugarskull is brought to a halt.
• We’ve been having trouble with the software we use: Namely, Manga Studio EX 4.0. We are still reviewing this, as it is not completely fixed. It refuses to do several things that were vital for us and on top of it, it corrupted the files for TOP 10 Skeletons, so we are going to have to do those again.
•  We temporarily ran out of ideas as to what to put in Andy^2. We figured it was a very global and general idea that we could keep making short gags for during a very long time… But truth be told, as of now, there’s not a lot of kids in our families, and our main artist doesn’t work at the museum anymore (where some of the dialogues and outrageous funny lines came from).
• Our main artist wanted to focus on other things for a moment. It was rude, just leaving like that, but there are a lot of situations going on and we would appreciate if you show some support. Because that’s not only our main artist, but our only artist, it’s basically a one-man-show, and what goes on in their lives affects Sugarskull greatly. And, as of now, there are a lot of predicaments they need to handle.

Of course, we don’t want this to be just us giving excuses, so we’re going to tell you about the solutions we have in mind right now (feel free to suggest any of your own):

• Finishing the TOP 10 Skeletons however we can. We loved the use of Manga Studio because it is easy to use and our artist trusted it a lot with bright flat colours… But if we are not able to fix it, they’re going to move to either Paint Tool Sai (which they absolutely despise) or Corel Painter (which is their main tool right now, but takes longer and is not great with flat colours), which would change the whole artstyle greatly.
• Halting Andy^2 at least temporarily. We have no more ideas for it currently. We do have a few more strips, but that’s the problem: they’re just a few. After we post them, the Andy^2 strips are probably going to end at least for a short while.
• Reworking the schelude. Once again, this is another problem with our artist: they cannot always post stuff on Mondays. Not only that, there are weeks in which they are busy everyday, and other days where the situations they are undergoing completely stops them from doing this. The solution they proposed was posting once or twice a week, but not on an exact day, as it is not possible, but the idea is for Sugarskull to post more often, even if it’s not on a definite day.
• Finding more people to help out with Sugarskull Comics. From the start, what we wanted was to have a team that started with four or five people and could start growing and growing to have a lot more artists and writers that wanted to be part of us. We currently have a few people in mind, but we need to do a few arrangements before we can have them here for sure.

With this in mind, we’re pretty sure you’re going to have a lot of questions, so we’re going to do our best to answer some of the ones we find obvious. If you have any more questions, be sure to send them to us.

• What’s going to happen to TOP 10s if the schedule changes? The way we did our TOP 10s with Goth Girls and Skeletons was this: we made a few numbers down before we started to post them and worked on the rest of it as the time went by. As a result, we ended up running out of pictures by a posting date and had to pressure our artist to do it, rushing the drawing and going down on quality (like it happened with TOP 10 Goth Girls); or we had unexpected and unwanted things happening (like it did with TOP 10 Skeletons). So what we’re going to do is we’re going to work on everything and only announce we have a new TOP 10 after we have all the pictures done. This way, you guys don’t get impatient and we don’t have to pressure our artist so much. AND we get to post the results everyday for ten straight days.
• What will happen to Andy^2 then? It’s going to go away for a while. Sorry.
• If Andy^2 will be no more, then what will be posted weekly? We have a few more ideas for other comics. Some we have already talked about, some are just sitting there and collecting dust. Some are strip comics, some are series. We’re going to take a few of those projects all at the same time and posting them once or twice a week, alternating randomly between the ones that are going to be uploaded. Having only Andy^2 pressured us to think of stuff that could apply to only one topic, but having diverse comics will help us keep the ideas fresh and flowing.
• What is going to happen to Supernova, Ultimate Star Creators, and Noire? As of now, Ultimate Star Creators is not done, as it is being made with another tool that will take longer. When it is done or almost done, it will be posted to Sugarskull; we still don’t know if it’s going to be posted weekly, all together or a page a day. Supernova, however, is going to be one of the comic strips/pages that we throw in weekly, so you can expect that. Noire, on the other hand, is going to be an entirely different thing and it might not be part of Sugarskull Comics. Our artist really believes in this project and would like it published by an official agency of sorts, and we support that all the way and respect their decision of working on it on their own.
• When is Sugarskull Comics coming back, then? Soon-ish. We hope. We can’t tell for sure yet, but we do intend to have it come back as soon as possible. It depends on a lot of things, but we will be sure to let you guys know.

Sorry for the inconveniences and sorry for the long text. We do intend to come back to it soon and we will tell you immediately should any update appear. For now, you can send us your questions and check out our artist cosmicstunky on Tumblr and show them some support! We would really appreciate it if you send them some kind words of motivation! Thanks!

The Sugarskull team.