Today is the day! Sakana No Sadness is now officially active and updating regularly at SakanaComic.com! As such, this is probably my last news announcement on this site. All future updates on my adventures in Web comics will be posted on the Sakana site, since that's now my official active comic. I highly encourage everyone to subscribe to my new comic's RSS feed right here, in order to stay up to date and follow my new comic (which I'm really excited about!)

One last time, thank you for remaining a fan of The Artiste Manquée! I'll see you on the other side.

- Simon

Oh yes, this is it. On February 1st, my new comic will premiere on its own website, www.sakanacomic.com. That's all I'm going to say here, because if you go to the site right now you'll see a longer message with more details.

I hope some of you who were fans of The Artiste Manquée will stay on as readers of Sakana No Sadness. Other than that, there's not much left to say. One more update left for this one, then stay tuned for commentary. Cheers until then!

Well everyone, the end of this comic is almost upon us now. This isn't the goodbye speech just yet, but an announcement about what you can expect to happen at this website after the story ends. Most of you probably expect a prolonged state of stagnation that will last until I no longer feel like paying for the domain name, by which time you'll have forgotten all about me. You'll delete your bookmarks and RSS subscription the minute you've read the final strip and never show your face here again. If that's your decision, that's okay, but you'll be missing out on all the great new content here at the-artiste.net!

Say whaaaaaaaa?! But how can there be new content if the comic is over and done with, you ask? Well, an awesome idea occurred to me in the last day or so: Go back to the beginning and re-release every single strip... with author commentary! Yeah, you know how right after watching a movie on DVD, you just can't wait to immediately watch the whole thing again, but with the director talking over everything the whole way through? Don't you just wish Web comic authors did the same thing? Well after this trend I'm starting catches on, they will... they all will!

So in all seriousness, here's what will happen: Every few days an "Author's commentary" block will be added to each comic, in order. Basically a paragraph, varying in length depending on how much I have to say, with a bit of background info or any other thoughts or recollections I have about that strip, or about the comic in general. I'll try my best to make it actually interesting, and you'll get to learn a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have been comfortable revealing when the comic was active, so consider it a reward for sticking through to the end.

All this will begin a week or so after the last actual comic update, with a frequency of 2 or 3 times per week (now if only I could publish actual comics that often!) If you're a feed subscriber, you'll receive these automatically. So if you enjoyed this story and are curious enough to dig a little deeper, stick around after the show.

Yeah this is kind of embarrassing, but I only now just realized that I missed an update yesterday, which I'm now officially chalking up to the fact that it was Christmas this week. I may put up the strip that was supposed to appear yesterday sometime in the next couple of days, just to avoid pushing back the end of the story. Lately I've been concentrating all my effort into planning the launch of my NEW comic, and in the meantime this one hasn't been at the front of my mind all that much. If it interests anyone to know, there are very few strips of The Artiste Manquée left now... The last one will appear sometime in January. Cheers and Happy New Year!

I was torn between announcing it well in advance and keeping it hush-hush until it's apparent just from reading the comic, but I decided that doing the latter would make it way too sudden. So here it is: After nearly two great years, I will be stopping The Artiste Manquée within the next couple of months. I don't mean going on "indefinite hiatus", I mean decisively ending it. The story (as it were) will be concluded... and although I won't say how, I will hint that, for better or worse, the end may eerily resemble the beginning, in more ways than one...

Alright, enough formalities and cryptic foreshadowing. Yeah, it's kind of a shame, and I will miss drawing Janet, whom I've really grown to love as a character. But I think I've said all I need to say with this comic and need to move on. It might seem sudden, but given the episodic and largely improvised nature of the way I wrote this thing, I always knew it could end quickly at any time. Like, I was never building to a huge climax or anything like that. Hm, I hope I'm not forecasting my own ending as weak or predictable... I can't honestly say it'll be Earth-shattering, but I can promise you that there will still be at least a couple of unexpected surprises between now and the final strip, so don't leave before the house lights turn on!

...But there has to be a silver lining here somewhere, right? Well actually there is! Here's the good news: One of the major reasons why I decided to end this comic now is because I'm planning to start another one. The details of that project are strictly confidential at this point in time (so much so that I don't even know everything about it yet! ;) but if you stick around for a while after TAM ends, you will hear more when the time comes (and by stick around I mean don't delete your bookmarks, unsubscribe from the RSS feed or de-follow me on Twitter!)

So that's that. It's been a great experience doing this comic, and I hope someone out there was entertained by it, maybe even identified with it a little. Enjoy the remainder of the story, and we will undoubtedly meet again.

Cheers,
Simon