Hello and good morning, internet.

It’s been a heckuva week, but we sailed through it with minimal damage. Catastrophes were all averted, and though my blood pressure has raised 10 points during the process, the site now runs silky smooth.

The updates will come regularly on Mondays now, supposedly at midnight, but due to that being a very heavy traffic hour for Comicpress, it will more likely be up around 2am, along with the Top Web Comics vote incentives.

May I start out with a great big thank you: Brian Hykes, you are a darling and a prince for giving up a few evenings to help out with the templates, Mike Cuccaro, again thanks for the hours and the effort, the colors and the text look awesome, and Casse L, your pixel pushing has paid off because everything looks spectacular. Oh, and Dad, thanks for helping me install everything.  I can’t tell you how grateful we are. 

You computer people, you are pretty awesome. 

As for the State of the Tempest this morning, everything is looking good. Anne is back to her normal schedule of page producing, and we are experimenting with her doing more than one page per week. We’re going to try it for a few months and let the buffer run up and if it seems to be working, we might consider going up from a Monday update to a Monday/Friday update. We will wait and see.

Also, I want to say THANK YOU to all the readers: out of over 9,000 comics you managed to put the Tempest at #167 with your votes over at TWC, which is incredibly exciting for us. But we need the support, so please, continue clicking that happy little button and let’s get us in the top 20!

In another piece of news, I did some web surfing and found two new comics for you:

1. If anyone is interested in the horrifically wonderful world of H.P. Lovecraft, I highly recommend Larry Latham’s Lovecraft Is Missing. It’s well written, it’s creepy, the art is fantastic, what more could you want? Plus, Larry is a swell guy, so go check him out.

2. Also, if you’re an American history buff, I just ran across what has to be the most adorable comic ever about civil war re-enacters called The Battle of Dovecote Crest. It’s not very far along yet, but I’m already quite in love with it. Hailey Bachrach and Bridget Underwood are a fantastic author/artist duo, so you should surf over and visit them.

That’s all for now. See you next Monday.

Jen

Good morning, everyone.

I have no honest news, so you will have to excuse me, and entertain this plug instead.

We’re doing a bit of online advertising, and I’m happy to say all of our numbers are up, and our readership is steadily growing. Hello and welcome to all the new faces out there, glad you could join us!

Now we need your help.

We do not do any paid advertising, we do everything here for free and we like to keep it that way. So we need your help in order to make our comic grow. See that little vote box up there? Every time you click that bad boy it puts us up another vote for the Web’s Top Webcomic. The highest we’ve ever been is #147, and we would like to beat that. Last month we wound up around #200. This month, let’s shoot for the top 100!

We cannot do this without your help.

Now you ask, why is this important? Well, aside from making us feel pretty good about ourselves, the higher our rank, the more free press we get from TWC. People will notice us, surf on over, vote to see the side sketchies, the cycle continues.

So vote early, vote often, pilgrims. You have our eternal gratitude.

- Jen

What’s that new button on our sidebar you ask? Why it’s our store!

Yes, that’s right folks, we have a store now. There’s not much there, but you can find prints (glossies, mattes, and lustres) of comic pages and original character art, magnets, and postcards - plus a mug featuring the ad for Perdition! Be the first on your block to get some of this premium swag! Impress your friends! And most importantly, help feed us and our cats, so we can keep making comics!

When something new gets plunked in there, I’ll post and let you know.

Also, with June coming to a close I’ll ask everyone again to get out there and vote via the button up top! We really want to be 200 or better! Remember that you can vote every day, because you’re all amazing fans, and you’ll do that for us.

See you next week!

- Jen