Goodbye Blotto Street
Whatever happens, I will NOT be carrying on with my comic when I go on to Winchester. Had things gone according to plan, it would have ended naturally and formally a month from now.

Instead, it ends today. Just as soon as I have finished writing up how this storyline ends, and putting together a "The End" image.


I'm sorry. It stopped being fun over a year ago. In fact, it stopped being fun when my scanner gave up the ghost. Occasionally, inspiration struck, and for a few wonderful days, I enjoyed creating with the mouse.

But then it became an ordeal. I struggled to regain the joy I felt, the pleasure in writing the stories, the sheer enjoyment in whooshing my pen across paper, and then slapping it in the scanner, instead of laboriously and uninspiringly redrawing the same black lines with my mouse again and again.

I really thought I could bring it back. But my scanner still shows no sign of being restored.

And when something stops being fun, it's got to stop - I need release. When I get an operational scanner again, I shall definitely do random drawings and cool stuff. But an online comic? Probably not. We will see however, I'm not full out denying that I'll ever do one ever again.

But this is driving me mad. The strain of thinking "I have a responsibility." The knowledge that what I'm doing simply isn't the best I could do. I can't handle putting out something second-rate. I don't enjoy this any more. I hardly ever hear from my readers. I have no presence in the webcomic community any more. I don't even believe in the webcomic community any more. I'm demoralised and pretty much disillusioned, and I only wanted to do something that was fun and not to be taken seriously. But Fate obviously doesn't want me to do this.

Or is it coincidence that the Blotto Street years have coincided with a TON of major life-suckage, including some pretty serious illness, and a rough time at University? I don't have nice associations with the comic. It kept me sane and gave me life focus during a time when I REALLY needed it. But now it has become like a crutch - something I don't need any more, which no longer gives me what I need to function, but which I have become emotionally dependent on in the sense that it is seriously inhibiting my ability to enjoy what's going on in my life right now. It is giving me guilt trips, and wearing me down.

That's why I need to stop doing it, formally, officially. To draw a line and say:

"Right. That's it. Thank you for reading. I appreciate all your support over the last three years. I hope to see many of you around and to cross paths with you in the future on a purely friendly basis.

At some point in the future, maybe I shall once again draw a bewildered spiky-haired boy and a blonde girl with a bolshie Siamese cat. I hope that some of you will be here when that happens again.

Goodbye, friends.

Daniel, aka Maboo"