Sometimes, folks disappear. Pretty regularly, even; there’s artifacts of creativity and commentary that are lost to us forever. Occasionally, they come back, and that’s a useful thing for which we should be grateful.

If you do a search (over there in the box, underneath the archives drop-down) for “Xaviar” or “Xerexes”, or “[X]X-man”, you’ll find a stack of references — mostly more than a decade back — to the words and activities of the pseudonymous Xaviar Xerexes, who held for at Comixtalk for a considerable period of time in the heydey of webcomics. Being a lawyer has taken more of his time for the past while, but he was always a welcome contributor back in the day. He even did webcomics himself, c 2002–4, before he concentrated more on the writing about webcomics.

I think you see where this is going:

I am posting LIFE IN FOUR PANELS all this year at http://XaviarXerexes.com. Technically some of it is a repost of the same comic I created from 2002-2004 but I‘ve revised it quite a bit to be more like the story I originally envisioned.

I have plotted out a year of daily LIFE IN FOUR PANEL strips and am updating Monday through Friday at http://Xaviarxerexes.com

I’ve got all of January already done on LIFE IN FOUR PANELS and loaded to the buffer at http://Xaviarxerexes.com so I’d be grateful if everyone could check it out at their convenience. Thanks!

Now before you go rushing over there, keep in mind that this is less here’s a continuation of my webcomic from way back when and more I figured out how to do what I wanted to do way back when but didn’t know how:

At first, I was just going to re-post the strips here, but in re-reading them I realized that I hadn’t really hit the story that I had wanted to tell when I started it. So I’ve taken a lot of the original run and sorted it around so that something closer to the story that I envisioned plays out over the course of 2020.

Fifteen years is a heck of a hiatus, but XX-Man’s got the entire thing plotted out for M-F release through the whole of 2020, and if there’s one thing that being 50-ish has over being 30-ish: you’ve got a better appreciation for big pictures. As for LI4P itself, the first few (I’ll confess, if I read it in the early years of the century, I’ve forgotten) have a feel that feels like my memory of the early runs of strips like Three Panel Soul or perhaps Three Word Phrase — and given that LI4P is from before The Threes launched, it’s a bit embryonic in comparison. Or as Xerexes puts it:

I had been reading Jim’s Journal and other “anti-humor” comics at time. The idea that a comic could be kind of “eh” was pretty freeing for me at that time in terms of trying to write.

So it anticipated some other webcomics, maybe? It’s a look back at some old-school sensibilities? It’ll let you see what an intentional design from somebody who’s thought about these things for a long time looks like? Or maybe it’s just a place to see where XX-Man’s head is these days. In any event, I thought I should mention.

Quick note: I’ve got EMT stuff to do tomorrow, it will likely keep me away from computers all day, so probably no post. If I don’t see you before Monday, have a good weekend.

Spam of the day:

Ultra Wifi Pro Boos

Spammers never stop, not even when they’re ghosts.