I finally decided to stop riding my own entirely home-made jalopy welded out of scrap and bought a used car off the lot in the form of WordPress /Comic Press / Comic Easel. Actually it’s not a used car and the system is very customisable. Critically WordPress is allowing for a whole lot of stuff that I just didn’t have the time to write on my own. I had to decide if I was making this website because I wanted to program or because I wanted to draw. Programming can be fun, but it was becoming a chore that got in the way of making good artwork. So here is the new site and I hope you guys like it as much as I do, or at least that it doesn’t get in your way which is all I can really ask of an interface.

I have received some questions already about why all the changes. In this first post I will answer some of the why. There are a few parts to that.

Early – Really? I drew this?

SailorsFreedom was initially started as a way for me to practice with a new Wacom tablet I got. The story took hold of me and I ended up putting much more work into it then I ever planned, but I continued to use it as a learning platform. I didn’t worry about continuity or consistency very much and treated every update as a little experiment. In some ways that adds to the experience I think. I can look back and see all the ways that my digital artwork changed, and I suspect some readers really like that aspect of the site. The downside is that as a whole it looked very amateur – because it was. Well, now I think I have figured out how to make a web-comic that looks good, tells a story, and really is the comic I want it to be. So I am making that comic.

Example 2 – getting better.

OK, that explains the format, but what about the content changes? Why did you take down all of my favorite comics?

The original SailorsFreedom was Not Safe For Work. This had a lot of negative consequences for me and the potential for more problems in the future. One, it was tough for me to share and get feedback from friends and family. By definition I couldn’t share it with co-workers. I couldn’t get a second opinion from my kids, and a lot of my friends and family would have no idea what I was doing artistically. Also my wife works for the State Department, and soon we are moving to a country where my old website might have been illegal by the local rules. That was a legal limbo I would just sooner avoid. So I retro-actively made the whole website something I can share with anyone, and I found that I didn’t really miss the comics that are gone. Yes, some of them were pretty good artwork, but none of them were truly critical to the story I really want to tell.

So now it’s SFW and I find myself pretty happy with the change. The old panels will still be available on another part of the site. If they aren’t there right now, I just haven’t gotten around to moving them yet.