Suburban Jungle Classic

I received a message via Twitter today which, if I understand it correctly, boils down to “Will there be any more Suburban Jungle?” The short answer is, as it has been all along, “I’m sure there will be sometime, just not any time soon.” The long answer is of course more nuanced and has a lot of fiddly pieces … so let’s look at the pieces, shall we?

No Predation Allowed: Ten Years of Suburban Jungle

The ten year retrospective book is under construction and will be ready in time for me to bring it with me to Confuzzled, which is an awesome con and has named me GOH this year! (Plug, plug.) There is a (very) slim chance that it will be ready in time for Further Confusion, but I’m not making any promises there. That will include the Conrad and Drezzer bonus story from Orange Alert drawn by Bauske as well as some strips from Class Menagerie that constitute Vince’s part of “When Wally Met Mikey.” I would like to do a new bonus story for that as well, but at the time of this writing I don’t have one worked out yet.

ROAR! Vol. 3

My Squash and Stretch detective story, “Blackbird Singing In the Dead of Night,” has been officially accepted for the next volume of the ROAR! Anthology, which I’m both pleased as punch and tickled pink about. Hailing at roughly 11,000 words, it’s a whopper, filled with dangerous dames and shady characters. No ninjarazzi this time around, thank goodness! That should be appearing sometime early next year as well.

My New Comic

This, of course, is where Suburban Jungle hits a big snag: I’m going to be starting a new comic in early 2011, which is going to be filling the slot I expected the next series of SJ to go into. The details are still mostly under wraps until I get a bit more to show, but I will say that it’s a fantasy-adventure comic that will feature some furry elements, a liberal dash of steampunk, and a lot of daring-do! I’m currently committed to doing a minimum of two years on this project, and between it and the continuing work on NeverNever, there just isn’t the bandwidth to do any major new work on Suburban Jungle during that time. At the end of those two years, I’ll be taking stock and seeing where things stand then. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if I do the occasional SJ side-story or make artistic cameos in other comics during that time, of course, but right at this moment there are no definite plans for such things.

…So, that’s the longer answer. For myself, I’m very excited about the new comic and if you’re a fan of Suburban Jungle, I’m confident (and certainly hoping) that you’ll enjoy it, too. 🙂 More details to come as soon as I can arrange it!

-The Gneech