we are working hard to finish this book, me and my two (!) assistants. yes, I picked up another assistant, his name is Aaron. the first one’s name is John. i’m working hard, they’re working hard, my life is a chaotic mess!!!

i’ve been slightly run down with a cold the last few days, and now our furnace is busted again.

I went to Montreal last week to work on the video game. It’s gonna be so good! I wish I could tell you more. It’s in the very early stages but we made a lot of great progress, and the team is awesome, and I love Montreal.

I remodeled radiomaru.com slightly (maybe you saw) in anticipation of a full-on redo of the site, coming soon. Also because the picture up there was very wintery, and it’s August.

There’s also a brand-new scottpilgrim.com redesign coming v. soon. Maybe even tomorrow! I’m almost finished with it.

I’m going to be appearing at the West Hollywood Book Fair in, uh, West Hollywood, Los Angeles. That’s October 4th (a Sunday). All my crazy LA fans will no doubt be happy to hear that.

Otherwise, I’m about done for the year and it’s time to hibernate and make this comic book happen.

EDIT: I’ve been reminded that the new Scott Pilgrim shirt and “Knives Love” shirt are available on Oni Press dot com. Note: The “Love” shirt is already sold out in Small, but other sizes are still available. It won’t be reprinted (it’s a limited edition).

Amount of work I’ve gotten done in the past week: not much

HOWEVER! I’m going to the gym and getting my ass in shape. I’m also sitting on that ass and playing a lot of Far Cry 2. Plus I bought some comics: the marvelous second (final) volume of All-Star Superman, the new issue of Seaguy, and the first vols of Viz’s translated 20th Century Boys and Pluto. This rocks because comics rock! Viz’s editions of the Urasawa books are friggin’ beautiful! I am very happy about this! Exclamation point!

In conclusion, we have a giant tub of salad in our fridge right now. Salad from a restaurant. It was catered to a thing and nobody ate it and a friend took it and left it at our house. I like the giant tub of salad. The end.

Vs the Universe might be in your local comic store four weeks from today, February 4th. I have no idea, and I can’t get too excited about the whole thing. Volume four took weeks and weeks to get into everyone’s hands, and I was depressed.

This time I’m keeping expectations low.

Some of you will get it sooner than others, and it’s not my fault. Amazon isn’t planning to sell it until February 18th, for example. (Although that does mean you could get it at the same time as Street Fighter IV…)

I’ll be in New York from February 3-8, and I’ll tell you all about it as soon as it’s all figured out.

Meanwhile, I try to keep busy, but it’s tough to go from fulfilling a comics script for 8 pages a day to being completely untethered. For the second half of last year I was sticking to the plan, and now the plan is done, but I don’t feel all that accomplished and I haven’t really relaxed, although there’s definitely a load of stress off my back.

I’ve started playing Chrono Trigger on DS, and it’s fun as ever. I don’t understand the need for the extensive script re-tooling – it seems like they just purpled up the prose a little – but whatever.

I resolve to:

1. cook more food that isn’t Korean food
2. start baking again
3. exercise and stop eating so much damn pocky
4. have a major hollywood motion picture made from one of my comics (but which one?!)
5. never have a freakin’ deadline over the holidays ever again
6. rest my eyeballs (esp. the left one, I think it wants a vacation)
7. play a video game
8. go someplace
9. eat more beets so my pee turns totally red
10. write down some of these ideas in my head so i can turn them into stories someday
11. finish the last freakin’ scott pilgrim book? god, i hope so…

This will probably be my last post for a while, because I have some traveling lined up. (I mean, theoretically I’m still on hiatus, but…)

The weather here has been really lousy, and we can’t wait to go someplace else. I hope to see some of you in New York this weekend, and I also hope to both eat and shop until I drop.

There is now a line of “Mr. Men” t-shirts and merchandise. Has anyone seen these? Like, at the mall? I bought a “Mr. Noisy” shirt. It actually has a Mr. Men tag and everything, they’re a branded set, it’s not a cheap knockoff, so that’s nice. It’s weird to have my childhood co-opted by someone other than me, but at least it’s a cute shirt.

Here’s an ad for the new book.