It is with great sadness that I must announce the end of Chasing the Sunset.

Chasing the Sunset was always something Alien and I did together and ... a few months ago Alien decided to break off our relationship of 15 years. I am not going to go into the reasons other than to say I understand them and that it isn't about me being trans.

I'm sorry for not letting you all sooner ... it's been an incredibly hard time for me as I'm sure you can imagine.

Samantha

Edit:

I'm sorry I, was rather short in my message because of the pain in me, so I forgot to say something:

I want to thank every single one of you who have read us througout the years, and especially everybody who has commented or otherwise interacted with us. It is you who have made this project one of the very few things in my life that I'm proud of.

Thank you so much everybody, and I'm so very sorry it is ending like this.

Samantha

Like the past two years, Alien and I have made a little story for our kid's upcoming birthday. We print these out and hand them out to his classmates in lieu of the traditional candy.

Last year's could not be translated due to bad dutch puns, but I have managed to translate this year's. It's not my best work since I started work on it too late (and thus Alien did not get time to illustrate all of it), but I hope you enjoy this little interlude while waiting for comic to resume.

If you want more info about comic update and who this samantha person is who is signing this message, red the news item below this one.

Samantha out.

Uhm.

Hi?

It's been a while hasn't it? Sorry about that. Here's a new comic for you to make it a bit better. This one has actually been half-done for ages. Just couldn't finish it ... but now I have.

I'm not sure when the next one will be, but consider this a step towards resumption of comic. In the past few weeks I have dusted off the website, cleaned out some spam and reconstructed the plot for this chapter. And now I've uploaded a comic. Progress! It was tougher than you might think.

I want to think all of you who have stuck around and especially those who have tried to contact us. I'm sorry that I have not answered you.

To those of you worried about me or Rune, here we are:

Alien not in the picture because I needed her to press the button, but she was smiling too.

Oh and for those of you who speak dutch and who remember the children's story we made for Rune's birthday last year, here's this year's version (sorry no english version):

De Kabouterpiratenschat (PDF 2.2 MB)

So, what have we been up to? Well, I've often seemed to hit the metaphorical wall running. I've been pretty good at picking myself up and to keep going. Sometimes the wall wins. It's ok though. I'm alive. And I finally coloured that comic.

Sorry for delays in getting comic out. I've been in too dark a place mentally to work on it. I'll try to do it soon.

Update: It will be up thursday morning. We found an error in some previous strips and had to do some graphical retcons, causing delays.

Hey all,

Sorry about this, but monday's comic will be delayed by one or two days. I'm simply not feeling well enough mentally this weekend to finish it, and I have some video editing work I have to finish for a non-profit either way.

Siri got a bit ill, and with Easter and clocks changing and stuff we have a slight delay. Comic will be up tuesday 7 AM GMT/UCT (so 9 AM Europe time). Sorry about this, we're still getting used to a new process of making the comic, which is making everything be a lot more work for now.

Hey all,

I'm currently pondering refreshing the site design, because the current design is from 2006 (with an update in 2009) and a fair few things have changed in the meantime.

Back then, there were no tablets, so the site doesn't really support those. Features like the magnifying glass and the "appearing in this strip" thingy currently don't work at all on tablets.

To help us out, please let us know how you read our site:

Hey all,

Now that the Dragon Tea Party has finished, I've moved it out of the main archives and into a separate section of its own. You can get there by clicking the archives button at the top (the weird map kinda thing) and then going to the right chapter. Or just follow this link.

On that page you can also find a set of high resolution PDF files in both dutch as english for those who want to print their own version of the story.

Today Chasing the Sunset officially resumes!

Yay!

We decided to jump straight back into the main story instead of doing a short side story as originally planned, mainly because I remembered what I had planned for the main story a lot better than I did for the side story.

I hope you enjoyed our little children's story. I'll be putting up PDF files with the high resolution versions in dutch and english soon (maybe norwegian later).

Starting today, we'll be running a children's story on our site, as a warm-up to resuming Chasing the Sunset.

The Dragon Tea Party is a story I wrote for our son Rune's 5th birthday (which was a bit over a week ago).

Some background: here in Belgium it is traditional for kids to give out something to their classmates on their birthday (that is: the kid having the birthday does the giving). Usually candy is given out, but the school and many parents don't like that much, so instead I wrote a children's story and Alien illustrated it, and then we had it printed for Rune to hand out to his classmates.

Before putting him to bed that day, we asked him what had been the best part of the birthday. His answer: giving the gifts to his classmates. :)

You'll be able to read an english translation of this story (the original was in dutch) over the next six weeks. After it is done, we will put up links to pdf versions in English, Dutch and Norwegian.

Keep in mind that this was written for four-to-five year olds, so it's a bit of a younger target audience than our normal comic. Still, I hope you'll enjoy it. I'm sure some of our readers are parents themselves.

I'd put up a picture of the books as they came from the printer, but don't want to give spoilers, so instead here's a picture of Rune's birthday party instead:

Hey all,

Some of this news post is a bit mushy, scroll down for a TL;DR; if you don't want to read the context to our very long hiatus.

Mithandir here.

It's been a very long time since we've made any updates, and I know some of you have been worried about us. I'm very sorry. I tumbled into a rather deep depression for a prolonged time and am only now getting out of it. That depression killed off my creativity making it impossible to work on comic. Over time it became painful to even think about comic let alone visit the site, because it was yet more proof of my continuing failure.

I have kept my depression pretty secret, even from friends and family (if you are one of those and finding out only now, I'm sorry. I never had the strength to admit problems or seek help), which is one reason I didn't even post any news updates.

I'm slowly getting out of things. For Rune's fifth birthday I finally created something again: I wrote a story for him, which Alien illustrated and I coloured. It was something I had been planning to do for years, and in fact started writing for his fourth birthday, but due to the depression couldn't finish then. However this year I got it done, and I will try to use this accomplishment to restart my other creative projects, including comic.

Over the next 6 weeks we will be publishing a translated version of that story here, at a rate of two pages/week (monday and friday).

We'll be using those 6 weeks to create a buffer for a Chasing the Sunset short story we started during out hiatus about Leaf teaching Myhrad to fly properly.

After that ... we hope to resume the main Chasing the Sunset storyline.

Oh and a bit of housekeeping: commenting now requires recaptcha and we've cleaned out a lot of spam from our archives. It's possible we deleted some existing comments and that some spam remains. It was a bit of a mess.

--- TL;DR; ---

- 6 Weeks of an illustrated story we made for Rune's fifth birthday, Starting monday and running mon/fri
- After that, short story CtS comic
- After that, CtS main storyline resumes

Mithandir out

Rune suddenly got quite sick yesterday, with 39.6°C fevers (103.3°F) even after anti-fever medication and a lot of pain to one of his ears. We suspect the poor little boy has an ear infection but doctor will be able to tell for sure tomorrow. Either way, it means comic is delayed a bit, sorry.

Hey all,

Tomorrow (saturday), Alien, Rune and I will be at the Elf Fantasy Fair in Arcen.

Monday ... we should have a new comic up (I say should, because Rune was a bit ill today).

Update: Will be monday afternoon, with taking Rune to school, it's tricky to do updates in the morning.

This morning, this happened for the first time:

Now that he's going to school, we should have time to resume comic again.