You guessed it – my wife and I had our first child a little while back… just go along with the notion that the above characters are not Topo and Mari… kinda like how Miyazaki’s characters all look the same.  That is Swoop, however, standing in for my cat, who was too jealous to be a part of the family moment.

We’ve got our hands full at the moment, as you can imagine, but it has been an incredibly rewarding experience.  That said, I am actively working on roughing out the next chunk of the story.  It’s all there in my head, but I want to get it right, since a few big reveals are juuuust about to happen. Seriously.

See you guys soon!

Well, it’s only taken a little over a year… okay, okay, nearly a year and a half. But here it is. One new page! I’m hopeful I’ll be able to maintain a slightly quicker pace now that things are finally settling down at my day job. Big apologies to everyone for stopping the story just when things were really starting to develop. Additional apologies for going back to the computer generated font…. truth be told, a minor part of the delay is just not having the time to even do the Ames Guide lines for the hand-drawn font. My plan in the near future, however, is to take my own font and digitize it so that it at least looks a little more natural. For now, I think we’re all willing to tolerate a little inconsistency in lettering if it means moving the story onward and upward!

I’ll have more updates (comics and unrelated coming soon as well). A lot has happened this past year! If you’re the kind that likes his or her news as fresh as possible, feel free to follow my “Swoops” on Twitter (@duttonart).

Thanks for sticking around everyone!

Things might look a little different…  a little rust here, a little bit of experimenting there… but hopefully we’ll pick right back up where we left off in no time. Thanks for hanging in there.

Hello everyone…. long, long, long time no see. As most of you know from my last blog update, I’ve been working at a new full-time job…. which has been incredibly awesome and rewarding, but with the downside of me not being able to work on any personal projects the past few months. I am hopeful this will change soon.

In the meantime, it breaks my heart to see the comic languishing so badly, and rather than continue to let it slide any longer, I’ve decided to share a few pages from my sketchbook based on a trip to Greece my wife and I took last year.  To keep things fun and playful, I’ve cast Topo, Mari, and Swoop in the roles of myself, my wife, and well… Swoop. I know this does nothing to advance our story, but I hope it’s better than nothing. Please enjoy!

Sorry for the very long absence, gang. The past few months have been a whirlwind for me, wrapping up my first kids book, traveling to Korea, and - most of all - starting a full-time job at Google as a logo designer (the team that does those fun homepage doodles).  I’m finally settling into a stable routine and getting the hang of things, so I’ve started working on drafts for the next installments of ‘Swoop’.  I’d apologize a hundred times over for the delay, but I think the only way to make it up to you all is to just get back on the workhorse.

Thanks for your patience, especially to those with the thin-wearing kind.