That’s all for now, folks.

I’m sorry to say that Tom and I have come to the conclusion that we’ll need to put regular Chelsea and Millie updates on hold for some time, as to be perfectly honest I currently just don’t have the time available to devote to working on the comic, as I am currently doing a very intense computer-related course (gonna build me that matrioshka brain someday, dammit), and the 30+ hours per week required to produce these pages are having a serious impact upon my study time.

That and after having invested a huge chunk of my life over the past seven years into producing comics I am rapidly approaching burnout, and after much pondering upon this I’ve come to the realisation that i could really use a break.
It’s just not as fun for me as it once was.

I moved to the middle of nowhere at the end of 2007 in order to focus my time and energies on my freelance illustration and comic writing/drawing career, and last year the isolation, the extreme work hours and a bunch of other, personal stuff got on top of me, which lead to me suffering some sort weird quasi nervous breakdown.
Hence my decision to move back to an area of far less extreme isolation, and get myself some education in non-illustration, computery type things.
Plus after all this time I’d very much like to pursue having a proper social life again.

But enough of me blathering on about the sacrifices I’ve made in order to make comics at this level for so long — how’s about some info when this comic will start up again, eh?

Sometime next year I wager.

Between now and then I’ll still be working on Chelsea and Millie (and its peripheral projects — me and Tom and some pals/collaborators have some really cool stuff in the works for when C&M returns, but that’s all hush-hush for now, because we are sneeeeeaky like that), just at a reduced rate.
I’d like to stress that I haven’t given up on the comic, I just need a break from it for awhile. I’m still very much enthused about the comic, the characters, and the stories Tom and I have yet to tell through it (we have a bunch of storylines and scripts for those storylines all written out and ready to go at such time as I can put into doing the art for them).
But rest assured we have lots of cool C&M stuff planned for the future.

So, what I propose we do in terms of letting you guys know when we shall be gearing up for producing/updating C&M again is thus: at some point over the next few weeks I’ll set up a mailing list for readers to join if they so wish, and I’ll periodically email updates, pre-production stuff, and the such like to those on this list, plus of course details on when the comic will start up again when we’ve sussed that out.
For now, if you’d like to sign up to that list send us an email at chelsea[dot]and[dot]millie[at]gmail[dot]com (with the subject “Mailing List”) and we’ll add you to the mailing list when it’s up and running.
Plus you could always follow Tom and I on Twitter/Tumblr, and me on Facebook, if ya like.
Oh, and Chelsea and Millie on Twitter. Heeheeheeeee.

In closing, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to you guys for reading our comic, and for the comments we’ve received on it. It really means a lot to Tom and I.
Cheers :)

Maxwell V.

Epilogue Page One of Two.

She’s a kind, thoughtful little sweetheart, that Millie.
I didn’t even realise this until yesterday, but Chiquita in panel three is doing a bit of a “Martin Sheen rising from the water in Apocalypse Now” kind of thing.
I happen to think that’s pretty funny, hahahaa.

If you recall, they were originally set to go upstairs to fetch their Scrabble game.
I’m rather good at Scrabble.

The way I framed panel three has a bit of a Jim Jarmusch vibe about it. There’s a really cool shot in Only Lovers Left Alive in which Tom Hiddleston and Anton Yelchin are ascending Hiddleston’s character’s stairs, and this is my homage, of sorts, to that.
Just a little bit of inside info for you on this day.

Two more pages to go after this one and that’ll be this story done and dusted, chumbos.

But yeah, she’ll be back.

…I can assure you Millie is not moonwalking in panel three.

Welcome to the darkest panel to appear in a Chelsea and Millie comic thus far.
Many many thanks to the fascinating Vas Littlecrow for translating the Spanish for me on this one.
Check out her stuff I say, and see what I mean when I say “fascinating” (contains links to some NSFW material).
Tom and I are currently sorting out taking on board a regular translator (who comes from Mexico, woot!) for Chiquita’s occasional forays into her first language, but I wrote the dialogue on this page before this came about.

There is… a lot going on in this page, and although I’m not big on explaining my work too much (I much prefer to leave it up to readers to draw their own conclusions on the layers and general content within my comics — the readily apparent, and the more hidden things, etcetera), I’d like to mention here that Ju-on: The Grudge is one of my favourite SpookyFilms, and panel one is obviously* a (dark-hearted) homage to the classic onryō antics goin’ on within that film.

“Excuse me ma’am, do you have a moment to talk about the Lord?”

For added flavor I have prepared for you an edit of a certain tune (and a bit of a rough edit at that, hahaa) that I was first exposed to when I was around 16 years of age, as said edit contains an approximation of the vocal sounds Chiquita is making as she looms maliciously over that poor little baby.

And now I shall leave you with an excerpt of an email relating to this page that I emailed Tom a while ago (I tend to email him loooong emails about C&M), which goes into more depth about what is presented here. Text has been censored slightly to fit within the PGR-rating of this site. Ahem.

“At that time in which this panel took place [Chiquita’s] mind had gone to the point where she was often seriously unhinged, and motivated by cruel, brutal and nasty intentions that had been slowly poisoning her mind for a long bunch of years.
A combination of extreme loneliness, no-one to confide in or understand her pain, cabin fever, plus all sorts of other psychically-eroding crap over the decades has pushed her right off the edge of reason.

There is no doubt in my mind that she ****ing hates that baby. To her its newborn purity/innocence and fleshy representation of life deserves to be tortured and tormented mercilessly via sudden outbursts of intense scaremongering that it is utterly incapable of processing. For this baby is a symbol of everything that fate took away from her, and how dare it mock her with its presence in her house.

[…] it’s a dark-hearted form of metaphysical solipsism that Chiquita Nereida Zapatero y Hernandez has fallen into here, and she probably ended up doing some life-long psychic damage to that baby.

If it’s any consolation though, nowadays she is extremely remorseful over her having most likely done such damage to an innocent little infant. She feels very, very ashamed of herself whenever she thinks about it.”

So, yeah, this little spook has a rather nasty dark side to her soul.
And a fairly eclectic taste in TV, too, of which I am merely scratching the very surface here.
She’s a complicated creature, that Chiquita.
She’s not necessarily good, not necessarily evil — the term I have coined for her role within the Chelsea and Millie comic series is that of an “agathokakological antagonist”. She is good and bad, like we all are. Whether or not she is driven by good or bad intentions at any given time though is not something one can predict with much in the way of accuracy.

If anybody knows what the butterfly on the crib’s head-board is a reference to, well then, you have my eternal respect.

Y’ get your kicks where you can find ’em, I guess.

Like how I just love drawing this sort of sinister Spookystuff. Eeh-heeheeheeeeeh!

A lot has gone on in the Gish house over the years. Not all of it… pleasant.
The Gish’s house’s official name is Ravenclaw Manor, after the Ravenclaw family, who built the house in the late 1700’s, when Lake Aklo was just a tiny little settlement — before that family’s patriarch Ephraim Ravenclaw parlayed the once expansive forest around the lake and its surrounding area into a fortune via logging it. The house’s address is 7 Ravenclaw Road (it used to be 1 Ravenclaw Road, but eh, some other houses have been built further down the hill upon which it is situated, in the years since it was built).
Harold here is the last of the Ravenclaw family line; seen here with his fianceé Melissa (who is obviously far more sensitive to psychic phenomena than her beau). Harold inherited the house from his Great Uncle Bertram, and eventually sold it to pay off his gambling debts. He sold it to a collective of shady characters who proceeded to use the house as a drop-off point for bootleg liquor back in the Prohibition days… among other nefarious activities. Ahem.

And I could go on and on, cos believe me, I have the whoooole history of this house pretty much all mapped out. I’ve been working on that for quite some time y’see.
But I’ll shut up for now, as I don’t wish to spoil any future storyline elements that concern this house’s history.

No playmates.

A century sure is a long time to go without ’em. Hmmm, yessss.
Maybe Chiquita’s visual manifestation to the girls has something to do with her attempting to rectify this. But perhaps not in the obvious sense…

Seems Chelsea is a little tired of having her personal space invaded. Personal space is very important to Chelsea.

My move back to the City was a success. I didn’t even manage to lose anything along the way, which is a first (“Not even your mind?” asked my friend Jon — “Oh I lost that ages ago…” I doth did reply).
Anyway, I recently discovered what is now my new favourite beverage.

I shall henceforth consume this sapid ginger-elixir in copious quantities until I am fat and bloated and dyspeptic.

Well whaddya know, looks like Chiquita was well aware of what Millie’s been up to this whole time.

Chiquita’s state of being trapped in the house (to be more specific, she can’t move beyond the perimeter of the house’s grounds — why this is so will be explained at a later point) is somewhat of (an exaggerated) metaphor for my own state of living in hermitude in a house on the Edge of Nowhere — drawing illustrations and comics and having a very sporadic social life at best — for the past seven years and two months.
I have sacrificed a lot for my creative pursuits, lemmie tell yoooou.

However, today I am moving back down to the City. In fact, by the time this goes up online I’ll most likely be in the middle of moving. Moving many many miles south from where I’ve been residing for the past buncha years. I uploaded this to the site in advance y’see, the evening prior.

It’s a… weird state of existence, having no-one, or very few ones, to talk with face to face for sometimes many weeks or even months at a time. I can empathise with Chiquita quite strongly, even though of course she’s had it far worse than me.
At least I can leave.

And it’s high time I did.

Although scatological humour doesn’t feature much in my work, I’m certainly not above bringing the narrative flow to a screeching halt in order to make what is basically a whole page’s worth of poop jokes.
It’s basically ontogenic of the “gunshots in the night” bit I added to Tom’s Rabelaisian japery in this page. Filtered through unsubtle allusions to harrowing existential horror. Huhuhuhuhh.

For a dose of my regular highbrow highfalutin pretentiousness, see the guest art I did for The Demon Archives which went up on that comic’s site today, as it contains a computronium-related über-nerdy AI-themed in-joke in the form of two modified versions of the Brus equation.
I… I don’t hear you laughing…

I discovered The Demon Archives a few weeks ago, and it is, imo, effing cool. Seriously, it’s a marvelously crafted exploration into messing with the conventions of hard sci-fi, and what makes the human spirit tick, among many other elements which I am still in the process of wrapping my impressions around.
Highly recommended.