I know cartoonists who spend four or five hours on a strip. I am not that cartoonist. Once in a rare while I will spend as much as two hours on a strip, usually because there is a crowd scene or lots of background detail or perspective. I'm always pleased with the results when I do, but I don't feel a need to do that every day. And that's good because these days working two jobs and running the Overdue Media business I have an hour, max, to draw each stip.

And that's why I recently consolidated on Adobe Photoshop as my drawing program. I had been doing a two step process of sketching and "inking" in Alias Sketchbook Pro, then importing the strip into Photoshop where I lettered and did postproduction. Sketchbook is a the best sketching program there is, and I'll continue to use it for just that. But it is deadly slow on high resolution files. So even though I don't like the pen responsiveness or line quality of Photoshop as much, it's good enough. And I just eliminated around ten minutes of overhead switching between the two. And that adds up fast.

Also, you may have noticed my lettering situation has stabilized. I found what I think is the right pen thickness and lettering size and spacing, and now I'm pretty much used to it. I could make a font out of my handwriting but at this point I tend to think that would take just as much time as doing it by hand. So I'll keep going the old-fashioned way. Except for full-page comics, like Empire County Strikes Back, where the shear amount of lettering makes it worth doing on a computer. In which case a handwriting font might be a good investment.