Eight years ago today, I posted the very first HijiNKS ENSUE comic on this website. Roughly (if not exactly) one year from today the comic, as it currently exists, will come to an end.

Short Version:
When I rebooted HE in 2012, I had ideas I wanted to get out and stories I wanted to tell. Once those ideas and stories are out in the world, I am going to put the comic to rest (or at least on an indefinite hiatus). Staring today HijiNKS ENSUE will update once a week is, on Mondays, and it will end in about a year is on hiatus while I work on how and when to end it properly. I will be launching a new comic that will run 4 days a week on June 1, 2015.

Long Version:
When I started HijiNKS ENSUE in 2007, it was just a pop culture commentary strip. I put myself and my friends into it and tried anchor the gags around this core cast of characters. That turned out to be mostly a mistake for the kind of humor I wanted to do. The writing I did back then wasn’t about characters. It was about jokes and ideas. Trying to shoehorn every joke into coming out of these 3 characters’ mouths turned out to be very limiting on my writing. That’s when I started just doing strips “out of universe.” If the joke was about a movie, I would just draw the characters from the movie. Then, when that strip was done, I’d bring the characters back. Sometimes, I wouldn’t do either of those things and I would just do a geeky pinup/mash-up. This actually wasn’t a HUGE problem until I started experimenting with story lines.

The non sequitur humor and the on-going story lines both using the same characters eventually seemed very schizophrenic to me, and probably to you. I was taking far too many liberties with what exactly HE was, and the audience got confused and shrank accordingly over time. So I decided to give up the gags and tell a story about my life, my family, parenting, etc. I wrote an outline for the basic story lines I wanted to address in the first year of the rebooted comic, finished about three of them, then sort of accidentally went back to writing gags using my characters (only now the characters were myself, my daughter and my wife). The difference is this time the gags weren’t about specific episodes of TV, instead they were about things going on in my actual life. The strip almost accidentally became a hyperbolic auto-bio comic without me noticing.Continue reading→