Remember the ‘wassup guys’ from the Budweiser commercials? They made a political short film. A pretty damned good one too.

I just got back from Crystal Beach a few hours ago. Hurricane Ike destroyed everything east of Rollover Pass and a good majority of Crystal Beach. Cabins were either washed away completely or took severe damage. My family was luckier than most. My dads cabin and my aunts cabin, for the most part, only lost their downstairs areas.

I uploaded the rest of my photos I took down there to my hurricane Ike flickr gallery so check them out there.

As screwed up as things are down there, rebuilding seems to be happening very quickly. If you notice from the my pictures, the power lines are already rebuilt. The streetlights are even on at night. From what I heard, the peninsula will have running water again in about 3 weeks.

I’ve decided to go to hurricane-ravaged Crystal Beach for the weekend to see if I can help out and take some pictures. I’ll have to put my webcomic process on hold for a a couple of days.

Sword in Hand is a webcomic I started back in 2002.  It tells a fun fantasy story set in a crazy world.  It was always my intention to make people laugh while also keeping them interested in a good story with good characters.  Well, the comic did pretty good for over two years.  It got lots of daily hits and had a nice readership community.  I really enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, when I moved to California, it really put a strain on the progress of the comic.  It slowly destroyed it over several months.  I couldn’t keep up with the updates.  I let all the fans down and the site eventually dwindled to a completely non-updated website with no new content.

Since the last strip of the story ran in 2004, I had since tried to set things in motion again a few times.  Unfortunately, something always got in the way.  Everquest 2 didn’t help.  Warcraft didn’t help.  Moving to Austin a getting a new job there didn’t help.

But now, after all that, I’m ready to resume the story.  It may be 4 years later, and a lot of the old readers may not be interested in a corny fantasy cartoon anymore, but I’m still interested in doing the work.  I’ve began work on the next several strips in the story and I’ve also started a major overhaul of the Sword in Hand website.

Here is a sample of one of the next strips in the story.

I can’t wait to get this all running.  I’ve decided to use this website as sort of a personal blog and a base of operation for any of my other projects.  I’ll try to have my photography website up and running within the next few days as well.