Sam and Fuzzy Q & A: Reinvigorated Friday Edition
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"What time does Sam and Fuzzy actually update? 3 AM? 4 AM? When I stay up past Midnight I never see the magical event occur." -Daniel

With rare exception, midnight PST. That's when the auto-updater runs, anyhow! Every now and then I'll clock in a little closer to one or two... usually because I was out somewhere and forget to set up the auto-updater before I left!

"So I noticed that this comic used a nice spacing out between the thin panels to add to the humor. Did you do this intentionally, or not?Just curious how much thought you put into the layout of the comics." -Danny

Utilizing the size and shape of panels, as well as the spaces inbetween them (which we comic book types call "gutters"), is something I'm really trying to work on.

It's pretty amazing how you can change the "feel" of a panel just by changing the amount of space around it. For ages, I just flipped back and forth trying to pick the one "perfect" gutter size to use uniformly in every comic. But treating it organically gives you a surprisingly powerful tool... you can alter the reader's perception of time and mood and all sorts of other strange and intangible things.

Here's another recent attempt that I was really happy with.

"Why aren't there any ninjas visible in the new chapter? (Other than Blank in "The Big Cheat".)" -Anthony

Well, you saw a few of them in the "Ninja Mafia Services" storyline. But the end result of N-M-S's current budget and staff cuts is that the comic is now considerably less... uh... ninja-enriched. Which is probably just as well! If there was such a condition as ninja-fatigue, then Volume 4 of Sam and Fuzzy would be one heck of a pathogen.

That's it for this week. See you on Monday!

-Sam Logan

M-O-U-S-E

As the followers of my twitter feed are all too aware, I'm pretty much completely obsessed with every slowly-trickling detail of this new Mickey Mouse game. That might seem like slightly... strange behaviour for a grown man, I admit. But consider:

• The game's concept art depicts a bizarre-looking post-apocalyptic steampunk world populated by nightmarish, razor-edged Disney cyborg people.

• The rumoured plot involves Oswald the Rabbit leading an army of obscure and forgotten Disney characters out from the miserable prison void in which they are forced to live to revolt against the mouse and company.

• And most mystifying of all, this madness is actually being directed by Warren Spector. Warren Spector!

Can you blame me for being so fascinated?I mean, how does a project like this even exist? What Disney executive actually signed off on this project? "Hey, you know what the kids will really like? A Warren Spector-directed game where Mickey battles a dark army of mutated Disney extras in a steampunk nightmareland." It's like it's been beamed in from another dimension. It is not from our reality.

-Sam Logan