The hard drive failed in Fred’s main computer a couple of weeks ago, but fortunately he was able to recover just about everything. In spite of that delay, Fred did manage to get a good bit of work done, including some good work on the visual novel.

For the visual novel, Fred got the Yanagisawa drawings done for book 1, as well as about half of the Largo drawings on the immediate To Do list. Largo is so expressive that he needs a lot of variations drawn. We also realized that we were not being as consistent with the heights of the characters as we wanted. So Fred did a lot of scaling and reorganizing of layers in photoshop to make that all work better going forward. We’re not done with the Piro canon route for book 1 yet, but we’re getting closer.

The folks at Youmacon asked Fred to draw the tshirts for this year’s con, with a pirates vs ninjas theme. They turned out really nice. It took Fred a good 2 weeks to do these, what with all the extra cleanup, coloring, and vectoring that he doesn’t normally have to do with his comic work. This is the main reason why the comic, visual novel, and other projects were delayed some.

Fred and Thomas Knapp (author of the Megatokyo:Endgames light novels) will be at Youmacon again this year. If you are in the Detroit area, stop by and say Hi. Fred will be doing 2 panels and will have some advance copies of the Megatokyo Omnibus 2 and a bunch of Fine Art Prints for sale.

The Megatokyo Omnibus 2 is scheduled for release on 15 November, but it is available for preorder on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The Omnibus 2 includes books 4 through 6 plus bonus material and clocks in at a massive 752 pages. If Fred has any leftover from Youmacon, he might offer them through the Megagear store, but he’s not going to stock them. So you can wait a couple of weeks for your local bookseller to have them, or you can preorder now from the big online sites.

Fred also got working on a design for a new Miho blanket. The design isn’t finalized yet — he wants to add a bit of color, but needs to talk to the blanket folks yet to see what would work best. He should have these available for preorder through the Megagear store before xmas, with delivery early next year.

Fred is planning to start on the next comic today. You can watch Fred draw the comic, work on the visual novel, and do other drawing work live on Twitch. Join us for the live draws. They’re a lot of fun.

Sorry this is taking so long. Thank you all very much for your patience and your support.