Postlude

And that's it!  The end of Chapter 4.  Come back on Thursday and I'll have Hrölf's Walter's File up.  In it you'll find out just how he's still alive and kicking, and get a glimpse into his ultimate transformation into a washed-up superhero.

Now, if you'll indulge me for a few minutes, I haven't had a good rant in a while.  And this could be the last one, so I'm going to make it count.

My friends, I have reached a crossroad.  The road on the left leads to Chapter 5 of Super U., onto Chapter 6 and so on.  The other road dead ends my ambition to create comics.

I've been struggling with this for a long time.  I love drawing comics.  But my life is in a strange place; a place where things have the potential to look very, very different in the near future, and I need to ask myself if it's worth it to pursue my aspirations of having a successful comic.  I never expected, or even wanted, to get rich or famous from this.  In fact, I'm positive that I would continue indefinitely if Super U. had even a small,  loyal audience who never gave me a dime.  I have managed to retain a few readers, and even pick up some new ones, and for that I am extremely grateful.  But let's face it, despite my efforts this comic hasn't even gotten off the ground.  It's lost in a sea of comics, many of them superior, and I don't appear to have what it takes to enable it to float to the surface.

I've grown up believing that being mildly intelligent and reasonably talented would take me places.  Instead, I now find myself getting older, in financial straits and unqualified for absolutely everything.  What's more, I find myself surrounded by a world I don't understand, where money alone makes it turn.  Where art and storytelling come second to marketing.  Where you will never make it as an artist unless you've mastered digital art, social networking and are adept at coding.

But most of all, I have a family that depends on me, and I can't continue to ask them to support this dream of mine.  I know they would without question, and that means more to me than anything, but that doesn't make it fair.  I need to take a hard look at myself and discover what it is I am capable of, so that I can give to them as equally as they do for me.  I have been a burden on them for far too long.

In other words, it may be time to put away the pencils.

I have a strange opportunity arising.  I'll reserve all the details, but it will likely involve farming.  It will involve being as separated from the modern world as realistically as I can manage, and you know what?  I think I want that.

I don't know if that life will have room for comics.  Maybe there'll be an opportunity to keep pursuing this, not for the sake of success, but just for the love of it.  Maybe the comic will take on a new form.  Maybe it'll be drawn with a muddy stick on sheep skin; I don't really know.  I can't pretend to have an answer to that yet.  All I ask is that you check back, from time to time, and see if I posted anything new.  Sign up to get e-mail updates.  Maybe I'll surprise you.  It's equally as plausible I'll only be able to deny my desire to make comics for so long.

In the meantime, I'll see this bit through to the end.  I'll be compiling the next book (Chapters 3 and 4), if only so I can have a copy of it myself, and maybe I'll put together some new merch for good measure.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading, and if after Thursday I don't communicate with you again, I wish you all the best that life has to bring.  If I do communicate with you after Thursday, I still wish that.

-Matt

Eavesdropping

These will start being funny again.  I promise.  Of course, we still have to deal with the awkward relationship forming between Raine and Aiden, where she begins to have feelings for him at the same time he dies and forgets his feelings for her completely.  Surely there's comedy to be found in that.

But, I don't know, maybe you guys like the narrative stuff?  There was a lot to get through these last few weeks.  Next week, I'm going to go into something I like to do every chapter, and that's walk you through a typical day at Super U., class by class, as it were.

If narrative is your thing, go check out the Saturday Super Stories.  Jason just recently updated, and the new story happens to feature Mr. Walters, the Dark Avenger.

Lastly, I wanted to give you a quick heads up that I won't be posting anything the last week of this month.  I'm gonna go disappear for a while.

Reminder

What's the best way to spice up boring expository in a comic?  Have a character precariously and unwarrantedly dangle another in the air with weird superpowers, and follow it all up with a vulgar punchline!  Bam!  Webcomic magic.

So next week it seems I get to divulge a bit of information on the Ravenswood family back-story.  I hope this is a thing you've been looking forward to.

The Blame Game

Back... to the future!  Which is the present.  As cool as the last few strips turned out, it felt good to keep things a little looser.  And not have to draw all that armor.

As you might guess, a word that can be used to describe the next several strips might be "expository."  I'm once again confronted with the dilemma of divulging lots of information while at the same time trying to keep things light and entertaining.  I hope you like the story that's being told so far, because there's going to be a lot of blanks being filled in over the next couple weeks!

Together Again

And there you have it!  The (dramatic?) conclusion of Chapter 3!  I'm happy with how it turned out.  I'm pleased with where the art went this chapter.  It feels a bit more natural, closer to my "style."  Plus, I was able to inch closer toward the meat and potatoes of the story that I want to tell, and I think I still managed to insert a lot of humor, so bonus.

So, after this, I'm back on hiatus.  Aside from the things I mentioned before I want to work on concerning the comic / site / merchandise, I'm also taking some time to look into online college degrees.  In what, you may ask?  Well, I'm trying to locate a degree in Forestry, actually, but I'm finding it impossible to find that specific degree to be offered online, which makes sense, because it's hard to learn about forests when you're sitting at a computer.  Barring that, a degree in Conservation would make sense, but I'm running into the same problems there.  Right now the best I can find is an online degree in Environmental Science, which sounds good, but they seem to have a heavy focus on green technology, and while I'm all for going green, it's not what I'm going for.  If anyone reading has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Why a degree in Forestry, you ask?  Well, so I can spend as much time as possible in forests, and in contact with as few humans and as little technology as possible, silly.

I anticipate this hiatus to be short, but once again I have to do some soul-searching and ask myself if it's worth continuing the comic.  I love to draw comics, and I love these characters, but I have to measure the time and money I put into this endeavor against the regular audience I attract from it, and that regular audience remains primarily in the single digits three years later.  It's tough, man.  The internet is tough.  Breaking into webcomics is especially so.

As always, though, to my readers who have remained faithful, I'm doing this as much for you as I am for me, and thank you many times over for continuing to be interested in my stuff.  I'll be back soon.

-Matt

P.S. And on a completely unrelated note, go play The Last of Us.  It gets your nerves the way Resident Evil did the first time you played it, and it tells a compelling story to boot, albeit a sad one that I just do not see ending well.  Still, it's gorgeous, plays well, and is easily one of the best games every made.

P.S.S. Thanks for the Amazon gift card for Christmas, mom.

Summons

Come back on Thursday for the conclusion of Chapter 3!

The Straw

I sketched this one out a couple days ago, but I never came up with an idea for the third panel.  Even after I'd completed the final versions of the first two panels, I still didn't know what to do for the third.  The best I could come up with was a Mr. Walters rage-face.

Yeah, well, they can't all be winners.  Shut up!  Get off my back.

Anyway, the point of this strip is to lead into the next two, which are the last two of Chapter 3.  We rarely see the siblings together, as Time Lass is usually off doing something by herself, and by "doing something" I mean pathologically stealing things throughout all of human history.

But now it seems SuperDude has gathered the three together... but for what?  Come back on Tuesday and see!

The Benefactress

What, is that... plot?  That's plot, all right.  I've been looking forward to introducing "The Benefactress" for a long time.  Aiden's world just got a whole lot more complicated.

Also, I love that SuperDude sings the radio-edit version of Gin and Juice rather than the explicit.

Now that the school day is over, I'm changing the tone for a bit.  There's seventeen strips left in this chapter, and a good deal of those I've already scripted out.  In fact, most of them are going to be one continuous story, one that starts this Thursday.  There will be fisticuffs.

I don't usually write stuff out that far ahead, to be honest, but in the last chapter I felt like the E.P.I.C. thing was a little too rushed at the end, so this time I'm making sure I have room to give all the big events their due.

I did another Google Hangout yesterday, and there's a video of me drawing the first panel in today's strip.  As always, you can find it on my Google+ page, but for shits and giggles I'll throw it on here today as well.  FYI, it takes a little over a minute for me to find the screenshare button, so you can skip past that.

Daddy's Girl

This was another fun one to work on.  I think I'm about 87% back to comic-style.  

My poor kid's sick again today.  She's spent the majority of her life relatively sheltered from other kids, so as soon as she started school it's like a new illness every week.  I sent her to school this time, though, since she's already missed a day this month.  I'm not sure what the protocol is supposed to be.  Ideally, you keep a kid home from school when they're sick.  But they only get a designated amount of sick days before they get in trouble for missing school, and this is only September.

So, even though I don't have any money, I bought Grand Theft Auto V the day after it came out, because Grand Theft Auto.  This game is amazing.  As with the other GTA games, there are minor holes in the plot, and some of their story-telling could be executed better (the dialogue though, as usual, is top-notch), but overall I find myself compelled to go from one mission to the next because I really want to see how things come together and escalate.  I have actually spent very little time doing all the extra things there are to do in GTA games, which is unusual.  In previous games, I'd do a mission or two, but then I might go look for hidden packages, or stunt jumps and so on.  Not this time.  I'll but upset when I realize I've just beaten the game.

The three-character dynamic adds a wonderful twist to the game, and it's done perfectly.  The characters are very different, but each of them is enjoyable to play, and each has a specialty that sets them apart.

Franklin reminds me a lot of CJ from San Andreas, which is not a bad thing.  It might even be the same voice actor; I don't know.  He's from Grove Street, and even the very same block CJ was from makes an appearance in the game although, strangely, CJ's house is gone.  I was disheartened to see that the Grove Street gang didn't have a bigger presence in the game after the events of San Andreas.  In fact, it's like they've nearly wasted away.  Franklin feels like the "good guy" of the three (right up until you start assassinating people left and right), and that's probably why I play him the most.

Michael is a little bit Tony Soprano (complete with a shrink and a dysfunctional family), and a lot bit Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, but his violent antics are coupled with a guilty conscience.  He's the true professional of the trio.  I see that most players favor him, but I think I actually play him the least.

Trevor is great.  He's like a perverted, redneck Heath Ledger Joker, complete with incoherent grunts and an unsettling stare.  That in itself should be enough to make you enjoy playing him.  He seems conflicted, though.  Most of the time he seems genuinely without remorse for the things he does, but occasionally he'll turn around and do the good-guy thing, which is always unexpected.  It's hard to say whether this is intentional, like that was the plan all along, or if the writers decided at the last minute that maybe they should give this guy at least an shred of admirable traits.

There are always things that happen in these games that are done for the shock value, and you won't be disappointed with this one.  Some of the recurring characters I've come across are treated with zero respect.  I get that this isn't their story anymore, but damn, the exploits of those characters basically get thrown out the window.  That's all I can say about that.

Just about all the best features from the previous games are back, and then some.  There's a hilarious and elaborate in-game internet complete with a GTA-ified version of Facebook and Twitter, TV shows (and this time, movies to go to as well)... Rampages even make a triumphant return.  You can even play an imaginary stock market, and I believe you can download an app for your actual smartphone to check the imaginary stocks outside of the game.  There's a dog-training app on its way, apparently, for Franklin's dog.  Unfortunately, the dog is pretty much useless until this app launches.

I'm looking forward to online play for the like the first time in a game ever.  I don't particularly want to play against others, but there's an elaborate crew system in place that will allow you to play with your friends, and I can't wait for that.  Jason and his brother and I are already in a crew, just chomping at the bit for the online to go live.  It sucks there are features of the game that still can't be accessed; I imagine they're still being perfected.  On the other hand, it's better than the alternative: having to wait even longer to play the game.

I'm enjoying the hell out of it, and apparently, so is everyone else.  The game hit profits over a billion dollars in three days.

Super U. Strip #61: The Prodigal Son

Super U. Strip #56: Staff Infection

Super U. Strip #57: Eulogy

The Walters Files: SuperDude

When creating the characters for the Super U.-niverse, SuperDude was the easiest pick for the president of the university.  Obviously he's the biggest knock-off character I use, and I like to think he's symbolic of my feelings on the DC Universe.  

His hair is based off of that laughable era when Superman was "ElectroSuperman", and he was rocking that mullet.  When I made SuperDude, and I put the mullet on him, the idea of the surfer / former amateur pro-wrestler thing came to mind, and the character was born.

Prodigal Son

Click to Enlarge

Hey, welcome to the very first Tuesday edition of Super U.!  There's a fair amount of new traffic to the site, so you may not be aware that this strip formerly only updated on Wednesdays.  But starting this week, the strips are going to start running on Tuesdays and Thursdays!  Rejoice!  And if you are new to the site, you can catch up by going to the Archives over there, or, even better, watching all of Chapter One in movie-form on the Super U. YouTube Channel!  Thanks for coming!

I'm not entirely sure why I gave props to the Rage Face in this week's strip.  I don't really even like that shit.  Well, except the Troll Guy.  That guy's pretty cool.

The ad campaign seems to be working well.  For example, apparently, I now have more Russian people coming to the site than Canadians.  Crazy, right?  I just may have to add a translate button.  I ended up trimming the campaign down to save expenses, and for now I'm only being advertised on 6 different sites, but each of those sites has been getting Super U. a lot of visibility.

Snap!  Have you seen that DLC that came out for Mass Effect 3 on March 5th?  I highly recommend it.  The actual story mission that accompanies it is pretty short, but all the bells and whistles make it worth it all by themselves.  Arena fighting games, throwing highly-amusing parties, lots of additional dialogue and interaction with characters from across the entire trilogy... not to mention an arcade full of mini-games that I haven't even tried out yet.

Something about the Mass Effect trilogy always gives the impression of infinite playability, but with this new DLC, that impression is more fully-realized than it has been before.

Eulogy

I'd blog today, but the shorty wants to get on the computer.  That's how it goes, folks.  As a parent, whatever it is that you want to do, you must share or outright relinquish it instead to your offspring.  It doesn't matter if they are, say, watching TV, if you begin using the computer, your offspring will immediately want to use the computer.  Furthermore, if you then go and do something involving the television, the likelihood that the offspring will then alter her or his desires to involve said television is quite probable.  

I pulled the strip out of my ass this week, but you know, I like how it turned out.

Staff Infection

Doing a little better this week.  Got out this weekend to Bok Tower, which is about an hour from my apartment.  And my wife ran across this incredible thing that we are planning to make a whole weekend out of during their "Hatsume Fair," which I gather is some sort of spring festival.  We had no idea such a place existed in Florida, let alone only a few hours from here.  Knowing there are things like this outside of Tourist Hell, Florida is helping me to come to terms with the reality that I may be living here for the next third of a century or so.   It's nice to have something to look forward to.

A short strip this week.  I had some ideas where I would introduce Dean Clobber, Disciplinary Head, in the third panel, and I wanted to give him a ridiculous "It's Clobberin' Time!"-esque catchphrase, but I drew a blank.  But, nevertheless, I like how it came out.

I think once I hit the end of Chapter One on the "official site" I'm going to ditch Interrupted Reality.  It looked promising at first, but it has yet to bear fruit.  I still plan on, after the end of Chapter Two here in another 23 strips or so, taking another hiatus to YouTube-ify the Chapter, with the goal of 2 movies a week, I think.  Maybe I'll spread them out to trick myself into thinking the sites are getting more attention than they truly are.

Anyhoo, please help to spread the Super U. love.  "Like" and / or "+1" this page with those little buttons over there, and "Like" and "Share" the links on your preferred social media sites.  Doing so will result in your gaining my utmost admiration.

Pep

First off, many thanks to those of you following the strip.  Everyone can help me out, too, by sharing the link on Facebook, and / or Liking it.


So... still playing Skyrim.  I have no idea how many hours I've put into it, or if I'm even close to beating it.  I don't even know, really, which missions you have to do complete the game anymore.  All I know is I'll be maxed out in ten levels, so I must be doing something right.  Or not.  But I've done some things now that seem like they are pretty monumental.  Well, you know, monumental in the sense that I accomplished these things by hitting buttons and wiggling sticks while reclining on my lazy-boy at 3 AM.
And I hope this isn't a spoiler, but I am finding it a little lame that, after taking over the Thieves' Guild, you are still treated like the new guy.  Most of the dialogue doesn't even change when interacting with your underling thieves.  What's up with that, Bethesda?  Where's the virtual respect, you know?


Things are starting to... change... at my real job.  My company is introducing a new kind of artwork to sell at a new location, and I'm thinking by the summer, when the kid starts school, I may start doing it.  I'm already picking up two miscellaneous shifts this month doing it, with my boss there to guide and / or make me feel inadequate.  It should be known I've met my boss once ever in the year and a half I've been with the company.  He's been a professional artist for at least 18 years, and when we met before I failed to produce in his presence due to nerves.  It was embarrassing.  So, yeah, anxiously awaiting this new opportunity, with anxiousness closely resembling anxiety.


But hey, this strip is the fifth, meaning it's a month old (wow, this was a long month), so that's reason to celebrate.  Non-artists / writers hate when people like me say this, but honestly, the strip creates itself.  If something every becomes of Super U., I may end up feeling like I'm somehow cheating at life.


This strip owes a lot to my Awesomeness Consultant, J. Klemm, even though I solicited him for a punchline and then didn't use anything he gave me.  In gaming, this has happened more than I care to remember, generally by him.  He's the sort of player that makes a GM cringe: the Loophole Locator, more commonly identified as the Intentional Plot Disruptor, or IPD.  Still, it's all gravy. 


-Matt

Click on the image to enlarge.  Or squint.  It's up to you.

The Power

I'm coming to terms with the fact that it's going to take me the better part of 6 months to beat Skyrim.  It seems I can play this game for hours and not only achieve absolutely nothing, but find myself tasked with ten more charges than I had previously.  Still, it seems my tiger-ninja is well on his way to taking over the Thieves' Guild, so I can't complain.  And honestly, in this day in age when most games are beautiful works of art that take exactly three sittings to complete, I have not right to.
Besides the Christmas season doesn't hold much promise for the games industry this year, so I'll be happy with what I got.  Normally, at Christmas time, I beg for games from my family members.  This year, the only thing I can think to ask for is the LOTR trilogy on blu-ray, which has *drool* something like 26 hours of behind-the-scenes footage.  Twenty.  Six.  Hours.


Today's strip gives us some further insight into our protagonist, Aiden, and also introduces us to the head honcho of Super U, SuperDude.  

Click on the image to enlarge.