“I told you…stop calling me that.”

Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

HI EVERYONE!  Nate and leveL are back after an extended absence!  For those of you that noticed, I’m sure you’re wondering ‘Where have you been?’  Well, December/Janaury kinda kicked me in the butt. Holiday travel, my sister getting married, moving to a new studio AND moving to a new apartment occurred all at once.  As such, my work time and energy kind of puttered out.  I should have taken a leave of absence from the comic for it all but to be honest I didn’t realize how insane it was all going to get.  HOWEVER I am not here to make excuses for scheduling, I’m here to draw a comic.  Which brings me to my next point…

Folks may have noticed that the update schedule has been…inconsistant at best.  That’s a pretty bad thing for a schedule to be.  In fact it’s the opposite of what it should be.  When I started the comic, I had a big buffer of completed pages and pre-production work for the following chapter, so the two-week deadlines were easy to hit.  As time went on, not only did I eat through all that content, but the pages themselves became more elaborate productions.

leveL isn’t and never has been a comic that’s well suited for short incremental updates.  You lose track of what’s happening in the story, the moments don’t play out as they are meant to, and (worst of all) as my schedule has become more rushed I’ve been forced to put out work I’m not happy with to satisfy the schedule.  Shoddy work goes out and deadlines get missed.  Nate gets unhappy.  The skies darken.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

As of today, I’m scrapping the update schedule.  Instead of every other Thursday, I’m going to be updating the comic in larger, more complete chunks as they are finished.  Entire scenes and story beats (don’t worry, there will still be cliffhangers.)  Not only will I be happier with the work I’m producing, it’s going to make for a better reading experience.

Now before we start going all mob-mentality about this, let me promise promise PROMISE you all that this doesn’t mean I am quitting the project, or that I will be working on it any less.  That’s not even a little bit true.  This isn’t a breakup letter, if ANYTHING this is gonna have me working more on it because now I have the freedom to do what I want.

If anyone is bummed by this, I promise you we’re going to get a better comic out of it.  There is some seriously awesome stuff coming up in this chapter, and for as much time as I’ve put into it I sure as hell don’t want to rush it and put out something lackluster.

So how will you know when the comic is updated?

You can follow any of the following:

the tumblr
the twitter
the facebook

I’ll be posting all leveL updates, news and sneak-peeks as well, so do that if you haven’t already!

Also, with the original incarnation of leveL, I had a little status bar that showed what stage the next page was at (sketched/inked/etc) so you had an idea how close we were.  If that’s something you guys would like let me know and I can impliment it.  For that matter, let me know ANY thoughts you have about it.  A passionate outcry for the return of a set schedule could make me reconsider (you’d have to be really convincing tho), but this is definitely a community and your thoughts and ideas hold a lot of sway with me.  Speak up!  Be heard!

(Also, I wouldn’t mind hearing what you think of the update.  Crazy about that stuff with Cael and Wryn, huh?  What’s up with those two?)

Alright, I’ve blabbered enough.  I will see you all in the comments section and also see you SOON with more pages!  Exciting things are ahead, so stay tuned!