We were at both Megacon and Katsucon this weekend and had a bunch of people stop by the booth! Thank you all for visiting us and for your kind words! You make doing the comic so rewarding.

Sorry we weren’t able to get you guys a new comic page last Friday but with two cons to get ready for, we just didn’t have the time. It’s going to be a busy month for us from here on in and sadly, after this Friday we’ll have to take a brief hiatus while we make our move up to San Francisco. The good news is, we’ve got some guest art lined up from some VERY talented people to hold you over through the two weeks while we relocate.

We were recently lucky enough to participate on the podcast run by our very good friends at Supaa Kaizoku Cosplay! For those of you who complain at us in the LiveStream for leaving the mic off, here’s an opportunity to listen to us rant endlessly with the added bonus of a little too much booze. (Don’t drink and podcast, kids.) With our friend Astel, we talk about our experience on the cosplay circuit (yeah, we used to do that. A LOT.) and about the origins of Shounen Fight and its process. Thanks for having us on, Kaizokus! You can listen to our madness here.

And lastly, in spite of having to miss last week’s page we did put up a new voting incentive on TWC and we’ll have another this friday with the new page.

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No, ‘extra goodies’ isn’t the title. But these ARE some extra goodies for our readers! We’re happy to release an illustrated short story to give you the lowdown on how Alex and Yuki met. This is something that will remain available indefinitely but we ask you do us a favor in return! You can get this extra story by giving a permanent link to MahouShounenFight.com on your web page, blog, LiveJournal, Tumblr — even your signature on a forum! As long as it’s a link that will stick somewhere, you can use this form to show us where the link is and we’ll send you a message with the story which includes three illustrations.
Enjoy your holiday or your disgust!

Well this was an undertaking. In the process, Dusty downloaded 150 new fonts. (And zip file of 5000 of them that I haven’t even touched yet.) DELICIOUS TYPOGRAPHY.

Next weekend we’re double teaming you, east coast! With conventions, that is. We’ll be at both Katsucon in Maryland (Dusty) and at Megacon in Florida (JD). We’ll try to get a new freebie button done for those of you who visit us at the booth. Any requests or suggestions?

As promised, a new voting incentive is up when you vote for us on Top Web Comics! Also, we’ve been fiddling with the site layout lately so let us know if things aren’t working properly for you!

And now, enjoy your first combo attack.

2/16 Bad news guys!

Sorry to say we weren’t able to get this week’s page done before we had to leave for the two cons we’re doing this weekend. The good news is, if you’re going to be at Katsucon or Megacon, we’ll be at both of them! Dusty will be at Katsu and JD will be at Mega AND we did a very small run of the last free button design w/ Raji in schoolgirl!drag. If you want one, come by the booth and tell us your reading the comic — but do it early cause we only have about fifteen of them at each con. We’ll be sure to have a new voting incentive on TWC on Monday for you.

The OTHER good news is that this week we kicked off a new feature on the site. We’ve now made available an illustrated short story to give you the lowdown on how Alex and Yuki met. This is something that will remain available indefinitely but we ask you do us a favor in return! You can get this extra story by giving a permanent link to MahouShounenFight.com on your web page, blog, DeviantArt, LiveJournal, Tumblr — even your signature on a forum!  If you fill out this form, we’ll send you an email back with the story attached. Hope you like it and we’ll see you next week!

We put up a cute Raji and Olly pic on the first to kick off the month on Top Web Comics! We’ll leave that up until Friday night and then we’ll put up a new incentive. Thanks for voting, guys!

Larger version of these two pages is on DeviantArt.

Before anyone asks, NO THAT IS NOT A SKIRT. It’s short hakama.

I think we must be going easy on Yuki because compared to the last two transformations, this turned out downright tame. But that’s not really saying much, is it?

We’ll probably add some sound effects to this later but it’s nearly 4 AM so probably time TO SLEEP.

WHOOPS, forgot to link to TopWebComics where there’s a new incentive when you VOTE for us!

We updated the Top Web Comics voting incentive again!

And now for an impromptu Spanish lesson.

There’s been some discussion about our naming of the newest Mahou Shounen Fight hero, so let us clarify the word order thing– yes, typically the adjective comes after the noun in Spanish, however, there are a number of exceptions and for the purpose of naming this character, we felt it fit better to have the name form be adjective-noun. In certain cases, when the adjective expresses an essential quality of the noun it modifies, or when the noun is unique or one-of-a-kind –such as a person speaking of their “beautiful wife”– one would use the adj-noun order (Mi hermosa esposa). If they said, instead “Mi esposa hermosa“, it might imply that they have more than one wife and are clarifying that they are talking about the beautiful one.

Basically, if we wanted to say “Hey guys, look at that lovely cowboy over there”, we probably would say “gaucho guapo/a“, but since we’re saying “OH MY GOD, that’s THE ‘Lovely Cowboy’! Quick, ask for an autograph!”, we decided to go with GUAPA GAUCHO.

Well, we’d HOPED to have this up for you guys last night instead of this evening, but we have a friday update at least! And, as promised, a new incentive image when you vote for us on Top Web Comics. We’ve been keeping busy this week and after running a poll on DA, we decided to offer you guys a poster through our store! This image is one we made for the banner that we use at our booth at conventions but there were enough people interested in having it as a poster that we went for it. In the future, we’ll make some new images specifically for posters.

Last weekend was ALA and it was way too much fun. Anime Los Angeles has been our party con for a while now and this time was no exception. They asked us to provide some artwork for their program book…. which somehow, through some issue on their end, did not make it into the book. They have, however, assured us that it will be in next year’s book and in the meantime, you guys get to benefit from some random Shounen Fight art!

Also, check out our blog to get a preview of what we have in store for you Shounen Fight fans in 2012!

Lastly, there’s a new incentive sketch up on TopWebComics when you VOTE FOR US HERE!

2011 was quite a roller coaster ride for us. We don’t often talk about our personal lives, but we thought we might share with you all a little about what the last year has been for us as well as what we’ve got in store for you next year. We’d really hoped to be able to keep up with 2 pages a week on Shounen Fight but ended up doing far fewer pages than we’d been aiming for. On top of everything in real life that we had on our plate, we also started really trying to polish the look of the comic. JD started inking digitally at the beginning of chapter 4 and I’ve been trying to make my color more detailed.

To give you a peek in to the lives of the Scuttlebutts: we live in uptown San Diego in a condo. About a year and a half ago, a few months after we started making Shounen Fight, I decided to leave my office job to pursue self-employment. Now, we get by on a combination of commission and contract web design/logo work, going to conventions, and JD’s student loans. 2011 was the first year that we chose to really go for broke on the convention circuit to both help pay our bills and try to get word out about the comic. It was an incredible year and what an experience! We exhibited at nearly 40 conventions across the country this year. What that does, unfortunately, mean is a lot of time on the road (I had 12 weekends in a row that I was away from home during the summer) and a lot of time and energy put into planning and trying to make ends meet.

As winter approached and the conventions started to slow down, we had hoped to be able to concentrate more on the comic. We received bad news at the end of October that JD’s father had been diagnosed with cancer, and we didn’t know how much time he had left. We started considering our options and making a plan to move closer to him and the rest of JD’s family in northern California. Sadly, he didn’t have as much time as we’d hoped and passed away shortly before Christmas. He was a kind man and was wonderfully supportive of our career path in art/comics. He will be deeply missed.

Between this, the holidays and trying to stay financially afloat, it’s been a really difficult end to a really difficult year. But we’re starting off 2012 with high and positive hopes, ready to wipe the slate clean and tackle the world once more.

We’ve still got a couple months of rough road ahead of us. We decided to go through with the move anyway and are going to be relocating to a small town in the San Francisco bay area. We’ll be closer to JD’s family and we have a unique opportunity to move into a house that’ll give us a lot more space to live than what we have now. We love where we live and love San Diego but we’ve definitely grown cramped in our little space here. It’ll be a huge change for us and it’s all pretty damn scary but we know a lot of really positive stuff is going to come out of it. Still, wish us luck as we move out of a busy city neighborhood peppered with gay bars and into bedroom town NorCal suburbia. If this isn’t a premise for a sitcom, I don’t know what is.

We’ll be moving in March and though we’ll still be going to a lot of conventions, we’re pulling back quite a bit on the number of cons we go to this year. We’ll still be going to most of the big anime conventions in the US and a few new comic book ones, but we’ll probably end up going to 25 or 30 instead of 40. We have a tentative 2012 schedule up on our about page now. Want to see us again at a convention not on the list? One of the best things you can do to help us out is contact your favorite convention and request us as guests. Making guest appearances lets us get some help with traveling to the convention, gives us exposure AND let’s us do fun stuff like running panels and contests and activities.

On top of making changes in our lives, we’re shaking things up a bit here at Shounen Fight and are hoping to give you guys more as our awesome supportive fans. We’ve decided to change our schedule and instead of scrambling to try to get two pages done a week, we’re going to dedicate ourselves to one page a week, updating regularly on Fridays. I know a lot of people have had trouble keeping track of our updates because we tend to be all over the place with our schedule so we hope that’ll make things more pleasant. It’ll also let us start to get a head start on our pages so that when things get super busy, we won’t have to skip updates.

Along with regular updates, we’re also going to start updating the Top Web Comics incentives on a weekly basis! In the past year, we’ve only put up three incentives because we were trying to provide something polished every time. What we’ll offer each week is a sketch or a bit of concept art or a silly doodle. Maybe we’ll start taking requests for those. What that means is that every time you go to check on the new comic page, you can vote for us on TWC and get a bit of extra art!

Another option we’re considering is something that our friend Alex, writer of Artifice, does– that is, taking donations and offering extra comic pages in exchange. You guys could contribute toward a donation goal and when it’s met, we’d post an extra page that week. This would let us provide you more content by easing up the work we have to focus on to keep up with our finances. The less we have to be at the grind to pay our bills, the more comic you get!

And speaking of getting you more content, we’ve got something particularly special in the wings right now. In the next month or so we’ll be offering a bit of extra back story. If you do a link share, you’ll be able to contact us and receive a PDF of a short, illustrated novel-style story of how Yuki and Alex met. Once we have that ready, we’ll give instructions on how to request it!

We’re also working on a couple of new products to go in our store! To start off, we did a poll to see if folks would like this image provided as a poster and the results were pretty decent! So we’ll be soon offering signed 10×20 posters of this. We’re working on another poster design to be released later. We have another couple of things in the works, including a very fun collab with another artist and possibly a t-shirt design. We’re always really glad to hear what you guys would like to see from us if you’re interested in merchandise – or anything else!

You can also support us by shopping on our Scuttlebutt Ink website – With over 150 different fan badge designs, we’ve got something for pretty much anyone there!

2011 was rough but it was also the most exciting, if sometimes terrifying, year of our 8 years together. We did some incredible things, climbed a lot of mountains, both figurative and literal. We saw dozens of new cities across the country and had just as many weird and scary and ridiculous experiences. We met so many awesome people and formed new friendships – we’re super happy to have met and gotten to know Emy and her hubby Dave from Trying Human, Chloe and Schumie of Two Keys, Kat and Kendra of SpaceJinx and many many others folks on the convention circuit and in the web comics world! We worked the hardest we ever have and managed somehow to scrape by and support ourselves without day jobs. Whoo!

The support we’ve received from our readers as the comic has been unfolding has been so awesome this year. Thank you all for continuing to read our silly comic and we hope your 2012 is the best year yet! 

This page kicks off our new schedule of one page a week on Fridays. We’re also going to make is a habit of putting up a new incentive image on Fridays for when you vote for us on Top Web Comics.

This weekend we’ll be at Anime Los Angeles to start the new year! Come find us in the artist alley!