My fellow Sluggites, I welcome you to PartiallyClips! I have been Sluggy Freelance fanboy for quite some time. I own all of the books, am a Defender of the Nifty, hang out on SluggyMARE constantly, and poke my nose into Sluggy.net from time to time. And of course, there's the Get Nifty card game which Pete and I developed around Sluggy, which I assure you we are still planning and working to bring to market.
A Singular Honor
Of all of the things I've done as a result of starting PartiallyClips two years ago, discovering Sluggy Freelance and becoming friends with Pete Abrams and Team Sluggy has been the niftyest. You can imagine what an honor it was when Pete asked me if I would like to sit in the Captain's chair and fly the big plane for a little while. (The fact that he first asked me if I like gladiator movies, and had I ever seen a grown man naked, is beside the point.)
The Week Explained
My strip is very different from Sluggy. I am not an artist, so it is built around the gimmick of using three static panels of the same clip art. The writing tends to be darker, edgier and more cruel than Sluggy. There are adult topics and adult language. It was a difficult thing to imagine how I would reconcile what I do with what Pete does. It became even harder given the way Pete asked me to do it.
He said I should use the entire Sluggy archives as a clip art resource, then do the strip as I would normally do a PartiallyClips. So it would use pictures of the familiar characters, but they wouldn't speak or act like the Sluggy characters we know. We both knew this would confuse the hell out of the Sluggites. I wrote a number of strips that way, but in the end I just couldn't leave the week without a Sluggyverse explanation for what is going on. Therefore, the first and last strips (Monday's and Sunday's) occur in the real Sluggyverse, and the rest are just images, explained (however lamely) within a Sluggy-specific context.
How I Could Exploit You (But Won't)
Obviously, a whole lot of people are about to flood in and see my strip for the first time. Although my traffic has gone up dramatically in recent months, by last count the traffic at Sluggy is still more than 100 times higher.
Now, PartiallyClips has never yet accepted donations or instituted any kind of premium subscriber content. I probably will add both of these things in the near future, but adding it specifically to hit up the visiting Sluggites for cash is kind of crass. So I talked myself out of that.
...But Please Help Sluggy, PartiallyClips, and Plan Nine
Instead, I am going to appeal to your Sluggite patriotism and ask you to support Sluggy, PartiallyClips, and our mutual publisher, Plan Nine Publishing all at once. For a limited time, both the DotN hardback version of the 8th Sluggy Freelance collection "Fire and Rain," and the first PartiallyClips collection "The Ball Is Afraid" are available for pre-order available in our store! at a big discount.
Please read my archives. If you enjoy my brand of humor, or know someone who'd like the book as a stocking stuffer, or would just like to show your appreciation for giving you some laughs and Pete a week off, then add The Ball is Afraid to your order for only $10.95 when you grab Fire and Rain.
One Other Thing
Do me a big favor and vote at least one time while you're here? No ads and no info are involved, just a little click to show you care? Banner is below, thanks.
