Posted In: comic

A few of you asked what happened last week that caused me to miss the update. I talked about this over on Discord, but I’ll share with the rest of you.

This week we were expecting to get the new Yeld book in. This was a huge order. Nearly 5 tons of books, shipped from Hong Kong. To get ready for this we (my brother Nick and I) had been rushing around trying to get things done on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, so we could be ready for the books on Weds. Because the books were too heavy to store in our 2nd story office, our mom had very graciously volunteered her garage. Mom lives waaaay over on the other side of town, so our plan was to pick up a Uhaul truck* on Weds morning, drive over and be ready for the delivery at 8am. Our delivery window was 8pm-5pm. We arrived and waited… all day. Finally, a call came letting us know the books wouldn’t arrive that day. They’d show up on Weds. So we took the Uhaul truck back and went home.

*Why’d we have a Uhaul? our plan was that after the trucks were unloaded at our mom’s garage, we’d take a certain number of the books (about 50 boxes) back to the office.

Thursday morning, we get the Uhaul truck (again) and arrive at my mom’s by 8am. We get a call at 2pm telling us that there’s been some problem and they had to split the order into two trucks. One would arrive soon, but the other wouldn’t be there till 5pm. The first truck arrives a few minutes later and the driver unloads 2.5 tons of books into the garage using a pallet jack and electric lift, nice and easy. But the 2nd truck never arrives. 5pm comes and goes. Then 6pm, 7pm, 8pm. Finally around 9pm the 2nd truck arrives.

However, the driver says he hasn’t been paid to unload the truck. And we can’t unload it. We don’t have a pallet jack or anything, and besides his insurance won’t let us. So we get on the phone and argue with the shipping company (who the driver does not work for. He’s a contractor). We insist we paid for unloading. We have a receipt. The shipping company claims we didn’t, then claims they can’t honor the agreement because the shipment was larger then they expected and had to be split into two trucks. And then make a vague threat not to release our books if we didn’t pay them some additional fee. I had to point out that they didn’t actually have our books any more. Half of them were in our garage and the other half in the driver’s truck, who wasn’t their employee and who they had decided not to pay. They argued with the driver for awhile, trying to convince him to unload for free, then trying to convince him to ask us for cash under the table (the driver let us listen to the conversation on speaker). Finally, the shipping company just hung up. So the driver left with our books, telling us to contact him when we resolved the issue.

We took some of the books we had received earlier in the day back to the office in the Uhaul, dropped it off and went home around midnight. I wrote a late night email to our printer, who had arranged the shipment, asking for help.

During the night, the Hong Kong printer sent their legal department after the shipping company, and around 8am I got a call telling me that everything was fixed, the delivery would arrive at 9am and the driver would be paid a bonus for warehousing our books overnight.

Back to my mom’s house at 9am (no time to eat or shower) on Friday. Nick and I are both exhausted. The truck arrives and unloads the other 2.5 tons of books. But all the floor space in the garage is taken up, so the pallets are sat in the driveway. Nick and I spend the next several hours shifting those boxes by hand into the garage. We’re finally done Friday afternoon, and absolutely exhausted. I make it back to the studio in the early evening, but by then I can barely keep my eyes open to get anything done.

Anyway, that was our week. I was just too exhausted for a strip. But books are secure and stored away.

I did spend a little time working on this pic of Modest dressed like Gundam. I might do a Zaku to go with it next month.