The Tourist is En Route

on September 16, 2021
Posted In: Dispatches From the Visitor Center

It’s here! As you might have noticed thanks to the big obnoxious advertisements, I released a small collection of one to two page Tourist stories in a big honkin’ newspaper format. I’m taking a stab at a new direction with Tourist Unknown by looking backwards. Meet Tourist Unknown: En Route. If things go to plan it’s gunna be a quarterly print release on 11×17 newsprint. It’s a format I’ve always adored and played with a bit in the Eve of the Ozarks days as well. Frankly, I miss how comics felt on newsprint and how printing artifacts and ghosted lines could make every single comic unique. No matter how many times it had been printed. I guess I’m also not immune to nostalgia.

But it’s not the only nostalgia I’m stricken with. Starting the first Thursday in October the webcomic is gunna return proper, but not in the format it had been posting in previously. Tourist Unknown’s weekly webcomic will also be En Route. Just a little later and slower. And not on that big crinkly paper. Like the old Sunday comics in the newspaper I also miss somewhat less serialized storytelling in my webcomic endeavors. I’ll level with you, I’ve never felt super great about just slapping up a page of a graphic novel week by week. I’m a bit of a pacing nerd and I can’t really think of a better way to murder a story’s natural rhythm than to release it page by page. Not to say I didn’t try to structure each page to have a complete beat and button at the end, but even then it still felt like some kind of compromise more born of my station as a hyper obscure comic artist than artistic choice. So, I’m looking backwards again. Weird you can do that with webcomics now too through fun and entropy!

Each update shall be one page stories with the occasional two parter (aka the centerfolds of the print edition!) I won’t say it won’t build its own running background plots or other internally referential stuff, but it will be largely new reader friendly and a sort of soft reboot in a purely structural sense. This isn’t to hint at a change in the comic becoming a gag strip either. Some of these comics are funny, some are sad, some are just little fun stories. Largely, it’s where I’ve started putting a lot of Tourist ideas that couldn’t hold up a full plot, but still hung around in the back of my brain anyways.

Of course there are also mercenary reasons for the shift. Now that there are the big collected editions of the full Tourist Unknown stories (available now in the gift shop) I wanted to have something less expensive available as well. Especially when you consider comic conventions. It’s always been to my benefit to have something at every price point on the table. In my experience people often want to support your work, but money can be a real breaking factor. Doubly so in expensive arenas such as self published books. And with the collected volumes of Tourist existing there likely won’t be single issues of the stories contained within those editions anymore. So the $5 issues of En Route are in part a way to make sure there is something more affordable and immediately accessible if you want to support my work.

Which planning these things around con tables in 2021 is… in hindsight… not my smartest maneuver. I’m sure I can just say I’m Arkansan and you can put together why. Anyways I have plenty in stock (again I stress that they are available in the gift shop) and who knows if I’ll get to sell them in person any time soon. I’ve largely dropped out of everything but the most immediately local shows, and my attendance is still very much hinging on where Arkansas is with covid in a few months. Which doesn’t look great! If you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet, please do so!


All that said, Tourist Unknown as it was isn’t over. Especially with how lovely y’all were with the releases of Volume 1 and 2 (seriously best first day sales I’ve had) Volume 3 is coming along at a fair pace. And I’ll probably be done with its first issue, Backside Air, either at the end of this year or early into next. I’m not sure how that will release will look just yet, but it’s a coming. It continues on the storylines from As Far As Far Away Goes and Goats Go to Hell as well! Rather more directly than previous stories even. So I’m certainly not abandoning the old ways around here, but I will be segmenting them. Once the new webcomic starts updating everything from the previous version of the webcomic will be partitioned into an archive on the site. Still available and without all the fancy updates in the print edition, just as it was initially released.

I’m getting long winded again, but anyways thanks to everyone who has been following. Thanks to any new readers who are reading old posts from the future. And I hope this all works out, and y’all enjoy where the Tourist goes next!

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The Cool Shades of Death

on July 2, 2021
Posted In: Dispatches From the Visitor Center

Heads up, if you haven’t read Goats Go To Hell yet. This post gives up the goat on some major plot beats.

Goats Go to Hell took a long time to make. Way longer than I’d really ever planned, but that’s how these things go sometimes. Initially it was going to be a pretty lean and mean book about the Tourist stuck in a cabin with an irredeemable and retired bounty hunter. As a standalone it was my take on the space western. Which isn’t a new concept in any definition of the word new, but I felt a space revisionist western was at least more novel. Now, as a series entry I saw it exploring the Tourist’s origin a bit more than we’d seen. Mostly through dialogue and mostly through paralleling Hitherto and the Tourist’s father. I also saw it rounding out at 48 pages max. In those drafts Android Etta was just another bounty hunter that showed up for a page or two to only get blown away by Hitherto. Funny how that works out. Some day I’ll write about that evolution. Suffice it to say I ended up taking an entire host of stories and jammed them together under one larger book.

One of those was a short called the Cool Shades of Death.

One of the earliest characters I started designing for Tourist Unknown was the mysterious woman who calls herself The Sightseer. Now obviously at this stage of the comic I can’t get into too much of her whole deal as that’s what the stories are for, but let’s say for now she’s someone who also has a habit of showing up anywhere and everywhere in the universe. So yeah, I don’t think it’s a wild reveal to say she is gunna come back.

Designs over the years.

The problem was always figuring out a story to introduce her in. There are versions all across the early stories where she was gunna pop up, or stories I kept bouncing back because it seemed too early. Of course,, I was also impatient. Sneak through the archives and you can find quite a few hidden Sightseers in the background. Especially the crowd scenes. Maybe all the crowd scenes? Enough that I’d forgotten about most of them until I’d find her tucked away in the corner of a panel while I remastered art for Volume 1. Never have quite left easter eggs so successfully for just myself. As the years went on I decided a short was as fine an introduction as any. It would aat least be a means to get the introduction out of the way so I could get to the good stuff in a full story.

So I drew The Cool Shades of Death.

Which if you have read Goats Go to Hell feels mighty familiar, right?

While I was drawing the Cool Shades of Death I was also in the process of shaping what would become the final form of Goats Go to Hell. Largely kitbashing a bunch of ideas that didn’t hold up on their own to my satisfaction. The most formed of those ideas was the story of the Tourist being in a single destination for a much longer period than she’s used to. Long enough to develop a relationship despite the tick tock threat of her inevitable projection. It just didn’t have a plot. Not in the fun vibes way, but solidly in “this is a drag” kind of territory. Luckily? Goats Go To Hell had a solid skeleton to hold that as a secondary plot. And that’s where what I intended to be a 48 page western exploded into a 132 graphic novel swing for the series.

I sat looking at the short I had drawn and looked back at Goats. Almost immediately I saw The Sightseer slotting in like a thematic puzzle piece. “What the hell, fold it into the book as well,” I figured. Sometimes stories are intricately planned and outlined from the start, and sometimes they are a bunch of loose pages on a desk that you are shoving into the same folder.

Where did that Tourist go anyways?

on June 30, 2021
Posted In: Dispatches From the Visitor Center

Let’s cut to the chase and answer that question. The Tourist is out there flailing around time and space and buried deep in some sad bastard sorrow. She has haunted a million booths in the back of countless alien bars repeating an increasingly blurry tale of heartbreak and androids. “Do robots even have hearts?” she asks herself at the end of every telling. Don’t tell her the answer. “No, not technically, but metaphorically!” isn’t the comfort you think it is. Anyways, she stopped listening an hour ago…if she ever really started. But some day, maybe soon, she will pull her bones up and get them to move to the door and out into this world and on to the next. Though, maybe more slowly thanks to the new weight above her brow.

Somewhere else in a place that looks a lot like here there are some big changes coming! It’s been a minute since Tourist has been updated regularly. And it’s gunna be a bit longer. But I think everything will be worth the wait. Some I can announce now, and some in ways I’m gunna wait to spill the beans on.

The big one first. Since getting Goats Go To Hell wrapped I decided it was high time to get these stories put together in a much more accessible way. So I’ve collected *almost* everything into two full volumes.

Volume 1- As Far As Far Away Goes. Which includes Transmissions From The Machine World, Livin’ The Dreamland, Rando, and most of the shorts. This book has been entirely remastered with new coloring, redrawn faces. Heck, almost all of the shorts have been completely redrawn from scratch.

Volume 2- Goats Go to Hell. which is all of Goats Go to Hell. Simple enough.

Both volumes will be available in Hardcover, Softcover, or Digital! And they should be available in late July. Don’t worry, I’ll be very obnoxious about it when they are fully for sale. If I had a solid carnival barker outfit I’d be putting it on.

But that’s not new information if you follow me on literally any social media platform. So what’s the deal? Where is the webcomic? It’s coming! It might be late summer, and it might be somewhere in fall. Though I’m gunna level with you, it will be in a quite different format than what preceded it. But it will be back updating weekly this year. And, if all goes to plan, without these sort of extended hiatuses between chapters. He says in the arena of webcomics where things go notoriously to plan.

If you catch a whiff of reboot in that last paragraph don’t worry. I assure you it’s a different odor entirely. Happy to tell you that I’m also hard at work at what will account for the first story of Volume 3 of Tourist, continuing on from Goats Go To Hell. Though it’s release is that magical and tenuous date of whenever it’s done. But heck, I’m about a third of the way done with the damn thing. So have a peak at TOURIST UNKNOWN- BACKSIDE AIR.

That’s right. We are going to a ski resort in space.

That all said, I don’t intend to leave the site completely dead until all of this drops. I’m gunna keep the blog section running! I’m not exactly sure of the full shape of it, but I do have some ideas in the pocket I want to try out. It seems to be a nice and low stakes way to get back into the habit of writing things without pictures as I’m sure twitter doesn’t really count. But you’ll probably get a mixture of musings on whatever I’m watching and reading, process stuff, and your general dvd special feature type things. You know, the kinda jazz that was the internet’s bread and butter a decade ago. Look, I’m nostalgic for the blogging era of the internet and this site has a built in blog.

Anyways, I know the internet is a graveyard of forgotten webcomics. Lord knows I’ve buried a few myself. But Tourist is sticking around awhile longer. And I can’t wait to show you all some of the wild stuff that’s coming.

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