While we appreciate the gestures of kindness from many of the fans of the webcomic and the story, we can no longer provide the adequate time that this comic needs in order to continue. In the background, we have spend countless hours tweaking the Xanny’s Curse storyline and trying to ensure that we cover all the bases and deliver something special to you. Our team was committed to bring back the story more so than ever before.

Several factors have led to this difficult decision, but mostly because of our other site at Games and ME has proven to be more successful and, as such, has take up most of the time dedicated to Xanny’s Curse. I’ve been personally pre-occupied with talking with our gaming community, creating podcasts, and doing the recordings for Games and ME that it leaves little time to even play games and lurking in forums that I used to frequent - which ironically was the impetus for creating such a site.

So instead of proclaiming empty promises and wishful sentiments, we are announcing that Xanny’s Curse will no longer continue and the story will never be told. We have attempted to revive this webcomic several times over the course of the past six years and no one had the right combination of passion and time to continue such an endeavor. Granted, many people have declared that the story of Xanny’s Curse was worth telling - but no one really could follow through.

I suppose this is also an apology to anyone who was hyped up by the comic’s potential return and I’m sorry for leading you on over the past few years.

While the journey may not be known, I can at least assure you that Xanny’s story ends well and in a manner well suited for the life he’s had to go through. I’ll leave that to your imagination to fulfill.

Thank you for supporting Xanny’s Curse over its 6 year journey. Thank you very much, from the bottom of our hearts.

So I’ve been playing a lot of Ouendan 2 lately since I just recently repurchased my Nintendo DS and found one of the songs in the game fascinating - namely, the song in the video embedded above.

While I still felt that The Brilliant Green’s “Rainy Days, Never Stays” still represents Xanny’s Curse to its fullest, I felt that Hitomi Yaida’s “Go My Way” took this similar idea and put in a more positive spin and made it ridiculously super bubbly and happy. The Brilliant Green’s song has a place towards the end of the series, but to jump start the series, I felt that it had to be accompanied by something really happy sounding and upbeat. It represents the ridiculous yet normal nature of the challenges Xanny, now Xandy, faces in his new environment, and speaks of what the future may bring.

That’s not the only reason why I’m mentioning Hitomi Yaida however. Because of this song, I think we have finally found our icing in the cake - so to speak - for one of the major plot points in the Xanny’s Curse storyline. While we have locked down character designs and what not, we have determined that there needed to be something powerful that needed to be taken care of mid-way into the story. Now, I have yet to speak with the individuals who are involved, but I have a feeling that they will love the proposal I just sent them.

To illustrate how “fresh” this idea is, I’ll have you know that I just came up with it about an hour ago and literally just sent the email prior to me writing this blog entry!

Our newest page is going along smoothly. We have to rescan one of the elements of the page and do the lettering and assembly pretty soon and we should have it up by the end of this week at the latest. I believe our artist did a bang up job with this, and the punch-line will most certainly be worth the wait! I do apologize for the delays as there’s been some problems with the designing of some of the characters, which led to the delay of the comic being done.

Also, this page needed the extra time - the punch-line has to be of utmost importance and we feel that if we ruined this moment, that it won’t be remembered several pages later. Our goal is to always have memorable moments here, and this page will most certainly be something to remember.

Now a few things of note… we are going to go on a seasonal basis for this comic in order to unwind. The end of the season isn’t coming soon as we’re planning the season to end towards the end of Summer, but we wanted to let you all know in advance before you guys think that Xanny’s Curse is on permanent hiatus again. This will give us time to work on some other stuff, and I believe we can talk to you about what some of our plans are.

We’ve been toying the idea of having a Xanny’s Curse Digital Graphic Novel similar to the Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel and posting it on YouTube. We feel that some of the key moments of Xanny’s Curse would be very powerful once the characters have been given voices. Frankly, we can’t wait to voice the first few pages of Xanny’s Curse and release them for you all to watch - but it will have to be accompanied with redrawn pages that allow for such an experience.

In any case, we can’t share too much of that project yet, but all you need to know is that Xanny’s Curse is in the minds and hearts of its creators and artists much more than you would ever think. I hope you enjoyed this little post and we’ll see you when the comic’s updated!

So how did you all like the new page? I hope you guys enjoy how we’re still keeping the tension of the situation even though we haven’t updated the comic in a while.

In any case, we wanted to talk about continuity in Xanny’s Curse, the character designs, and story plans. Don’t worry — we won’t be revealing spoilers in this post. We just wanted to give you guys an idea of where Xanny’s Curse is at in this point in time and to give you all an idea of what you may or may not see.

Since we’ve transitioned the comic to a new artist, we talked about how Xandy needed to be redrawn and restyled in order to fit the new artist’s style. What we didn’t talk about is how we needed to do that for every single character that has or has not appeared in the current comic at all.

Thanks to our outline (yes, your English teachers told you that outlines help right?), we managed to find the situations where we would introduce certain characters into the story and have the ability to add new characters. While adding characters sounds like a ton of fun, we were aware of the fact that people didn’t like it when there were huge casts of characters that existed throughout the story. People became easily alienated by new characters coming in and having to be forced to go back to older pages in order to determine who they are. In our artist’s design, we wanted to exemplify their personality in every single look that they have - so you can really tell who they are just by looking at them.

A great example is Xandy, which is arguably one of the more difficult characters to design since she has a “distinct” personality. Xandy, deep inside, has a male soul trapped for who knows how long. We had to figure out what approach would be best if we were to redesign her. From the onset, it was clear what needed to have happen: Xandy needed to look extremely feminine but dress up in normal, boyish type clothing. The decision was made early on to make Xandy your typical voluptuous blonde haired, blue eyed well-endowed beauty. The catch was, that Xanny would try to avoid accentuating these features by wearing more manly clothing.

With this decision made, we found that we needed to have some liberties as to how Xandy is drawn in the newer pages. With these guidelines clear, continuity had to suffer in order to provide a much clearer, visual picture (no pun intended) of who Xandy is and where she’s coming from.

So how are we solving continuity issues?

Continuity is a problem that’s caused only by the previous pages and we’ve already planned on rectifying that throughout the series. We are planning to go back and re-drawing some of the key pages of Xanny’s Curse in order to maintain a level of consistency throughout the story. Don’t worry though - not much will be changing in the pages and you won’t miss any important “new” parts to it. In other words… we’re not going to “George Lucas” the thing and make Greedo shoot first.

Since our artist is working on finalizing the character designs for the people in the first Act, we might take a little longer than two weeks to display the next comic. I understand that we have placed a timeline of two weeks for each comic, but we wanted to make sure that everyone knew this by going to this blog. I would highly recommend checking this blog to see new character designs and scheduled updates to the comic as we feel that this is a great vehicle to tell you guys when the new page is going to be up.

I wanted to give you guys a great opportunity to get something really cool from us here at Xanny’s Curse to celebrate our webcomic’s return… desktop wallpapers! To download the appropriate size, just click on the image with the appropriate size label beside it and it should take you directly to the image itself. Or, you can just right-click and select “Save As…” and download it to any folder on your computer!

Finally, if you can email me at xandy[at]xannyscurse.com and show me your desktops with this wallpaper, we’d highly appreciate it. We like seeing other people’s desktops and, in this case, it’d be real cool if our artist can visually see that people are downloading the wallpaper that they’ve worked real hard on.

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Thanks for welcoming back Xanny’s Curse and we’ll see you with an update soon!

During the period when Xanny’s Curse finally had its own official site, there was one song that has since become the unofficial theme song for Xanny’s Curse. That song is “Rainy Days Never Stays” by the brilliant green.

At one time, the lyrics and a mp3 sample of “Rainy Days Never Stays” existed on the main site, but since we redid the design with the one we have now we haven’t been able to restore all the other pages. I felt that the song had a lot to say about the general direction of where I wanted to take the series. I rediscovered the song again today while at work.

The song has a very nice melody to it - illustrating the ups and downs of the subject matter that they’re singing about. Speaking of subject matter, I never really delved upon the meaning of the song until today when I looked up somebody’s translation of the lyrics. Below are the translated lyrics for the song, along with the entire song embedded (requires Flash).

Rainy Days Never Stays
by the brilliant green

I always took the easy way
Just sit around and say complaints
It’s now time to say goodbye

I softly pour my gloom
and regrets into the clouds

I will find the answer in my heart so…
No matter how many worlds break,
Unfulfilled desires rain down into my heart

“Raining all day” going away
Step out to be myself again
I want to chase it, It’s an amazing day!
“Raining all day” has gone away
Just like that one summer My dream… Be by my side
I’ll find you

My wounds are healed by the
dull sunshine and dull waves

In my deep breaths, it soon turns to rain
and then melts into the sea

My regrets change shape and become fears; Even on bad days
don’t forget to be strong; don’t get caught by loneliness

“Raining all day” I was scared
to let go of my old dreams
“Raining all day” There are some cloudy nights, but
Little star… I notice that
Rainy days never stays

“Hurry now it’s time to say goodbye, goodbye
Sun is waiting for you to arrive, alive
Hurry now it’s time to say goodbye, goodbye
Door is open for you to……”

“Raining all day” going away
Step out to be myself again
I feel the kind wind
“Raining all day” has gone away
My dream that sleeps in that summer… kiss me once again
I’ll find a better way

“Raining all day” going away
Can’t wait to go and spread my wings
Blowing a kiss to me, hello amazing day!
“Raining all day” has gone away
Sunshine of mine, just be with me
Keeping my heart warm as today
Rainy days never stays

Well, it’s been exactly a week since I updated this blog and much has changed in Xanny’s Curse behind the scenes since I updated this.

For starters, we now have the next set of pages planned out. This is, in Xandy hours, all the way up past lunch time. Time has been somewhat of a theme for Xanny’s Curse, both in the actual narrative itself and its actual production and we felt that we should really pick up the pace of the series as soon as our new artist and co-writer took the reigns.

Throughout the week last week we began poring over the ever-so-sacred Xanny’s Curse manuscript and filled in more detail as to what the direction of the webcomic was to be heading. This was a very intense process… we needed to ensure that the characters would serve their ultimate purpose, but also be able to shape personalities for every single seemingly unimportant character and make the world as plausible and as believable as possible. We feel that for people to love our characters that we need to make each scene and each activity relatable to our audience. Rest assured - extensive research was placed into these situations - well, except for the whole thing with Xanny turning into a woman and all heh.

So how complex is the storyline? Well, when we filled in Xandy’s timeline, we realized some important things that were missing from the whole piece. The story is multi-dimensional for both the reader and us - so imagine our surprise when we realized that Xanny’s life didn’t have enough backstory in the original manuscript to work on. Of course, not that it was going to be fully utilized in the creation of scenarios in Xandy’s lifetime, but it would be nice if we had some sort of reference in case something ever occured in Xandy’s time that we can rationalize using Xanny’s previous life.

During our second weekly meeting, we ironed out the design of one of the other characters. I’ll have to apologize if I’m being very vague about this, but we want to make sure that even if people read this blog that they could still get a sense of surprise or excitement once a new character has been introduced into the fold. In these situations, we had to talk about the character’s eventual role in the series and what their wardrobe would be. We also had to determine how the characters would react in several different emotions so we have a reference to use for later. Imagine this several times over and you get the idea of what our new artist had to go through.

We also tried to pin down what Xandy lives and decided that we needed to make it as ambiguous as possible. Again, this goes along with ensuring that people can relate to Xandy regardless of where she lives. I joked around with the team that Xandy’s town is going to be more Main Street USA than Main Street USA in Disneyland/Disneyworld.

Well, I hope you guys read this and have a good grasp as to what’s happening in the world behind the scenes of the Xanny’s Curse comic. As of now, we’re still planning to post comics every two weeks, but we’ll most certainly let you know if that ever changes here on this blog. Stay tuned… the wait’s going to be well worth it.

The discussion went from what motivates Xanny to do what he does and then drilled down onto the central conflict of the storyline. After identifying the central conflict (and it’s not what you think), we had to figure out how the current planned story elements would evolve into becoming integral parts of the storyline. I identified that while the comic had gags in and of itself, that there were specific purposes as to why certain things were told in certain ways. These were all laid bare for our artist and co-writer to play around and look at.

Our artist then discussed with a friend of ours what direction we should take Xandy’s design and came out with some really important aspects of her personality that would stay true and stick with the new design. We then discussed the character roles and their purpose in the story and tried to give context as to why such character is motivated to do said action. The problem with Xanny’s Curse as I identified it was that while the characters served a purpose, they didn’t have much of a personality that the audience could identify with. Our co-writer then wrote some notes down and looked at our time outline to see the significance of each action.

We then went on to talk about scheduling, which I admit I had mixed feelings. Based on the amount of work and information required to be tossed around, Xanny’s Curse would need to abandon its old former weekly updates for every two weeks in order to retain a certain quality to both the dialogue and the drawings. Our co-writer, the artist, and myself all agreed that we had to strive for higher quality per page rather than trying to fill each page with filler and quickly noted that Xanny hadn’t even lasted one day in his life.

So what does this mean? You can expect more things to happen in Xanny’s Curse, better dialogue, better art throughout. Each page brings us closer to the end and, while our artist and co-writer have indeed talked about the end, it’s still a long ways away in Xanny’s new life.

Again, I can’t help but thank the people who have seen and left comments on the Xanny’s Curse page:

Great Sage
leonard
hannah
Gravemind Zombie
V
Anifanatic
Tara
Ryan
Lawrence
Thennek Vashne
Crazy Cow Productions
and Paul Jutra

It’s because of the comments that you all left on the webcomic that reminded me of how important this comic was to everyone, including myself.

We promise that we won’t disappoint once Xanny finally comes out of the bathroom stall and starts living the life that we give him.

Welcome to the very first official update post here on http://blog.xannyscurse.com.

We decided that since we were going to be preparing for the inevitable return of Xanny’s Curse that we should separate some of the blogging elements of Xanny’s Curse from the actual comic itself. That way, we can show you more on what it takes to actually revive a webcomic and what it’s taken us to think of in order to make this transition of artists and writers as seamless as possible. Don’t worry though… I, Xanny, will still oversee everything that goes on the webcomic site itself and of course whatever goes on in this blog.

So early on, I wanted to give the fans an insight as to how we operate here at Xanny’s Curse. Currently, we have an artist and a co-writer who will be creating the art and providing the necessary elements that I felt was lacking in the original version. In this post, we will be focusing on how we’re transitioning the art from what currently is shown on the webcomic site to the new style that we’ll be using soon.

First, it was important for our artist to get a grasp on what Xandy currently looks like. Our artist rendered Xandy as close to the original version as possible. Our artist even remarked once that the original design was so good that we almost stuck with it throughout. Eventually, we realized that changes had to be made in order to inject more life into the character and to provide a better representation of the characters’ personalities themselves.

Click on the scan to see it in higher detail

The next part was to try to find a good, comfortable style that our artist can render Xandy. Since we’re in a phase where her personality would need to be locked down (we will be meeting with my co-writer tomorrow to discuss this further), I just had our artist focus on making sure that they’re able to withstand drawing multiple versions of said character. We wouldn’t want our artist to be fatigued by putting too much detail on Xandy on the onset, only to learn that it won’t be detailed throughout the comic’s life.

Our artist then went ahead and looked at other hair style possibilities. Now that our artist is able to render Xandy in her original form, it was important to be open to new hair styles to represent her.

Click on the scan to see it in higher detail

These variations ranged immensely and shows how incredible our artist can render the same character in varying degrees of mood and styles. While we haven’t locked down the style that we’re going to use, we’re showing you the fruits of our artists’ labor right here so that you can comment on it this early in development.

Finally, our artist moved onto rendering an early version of another character. Now, I’m not going to tell you who it is… so let’s make this a guessing game shall we? What character is our artist attempting to render below? We’ll post the answer in the next update.

Click on the scan to see it in higher detail

So why are we starting from scratch in terms of character design? And where in the storyline will Xanny’s Curse be updated?

We’re planning to ret-con (i.e. change parts of the story in earlier pages) by slowly updating older pages with the new art. Until then, we are going to be focusing on continuing the Xanny’s Curse storyline exactly where it left off. I figured, “Hey, I left these guys hanging with a cliffhanger, it’d suck if we restarted the entire storyline again from scratch.”

So yea, Xanny’s Curse will be back sooner than you think. Tomorrow, we’re going to be meeting up and finalizing certain details that should make Xanny’s Curse, overall, a lot interesting than what it already is. Above all, despite having people helping me, know that the story will not deviate from its original plan and that I’ll still be here to provide you all with information as to how we’re working on this great webcomic.