Comic Blurb: So that’s it.

After six years, a restaurant burning down and who-even-knows-how-many bottles of beer, The Space Between is done.

“Done” is the key word. Clearly it’s not “finished”. I stopped mid-dialogue, leaving the comic on a pretty substantial cliffhanger. So before we talk about the “why”, let’s resolve that one: C.J. ended up moving in with Jack rent-free, helping her quit the cosplay burger joint and getting her other finances in order. Sam made Frank help renovate the record shop, renamed “Little Round Mirrors” and had a stage built-in for local bands to play, including Sam’s (forgot about that one, huh?). Everything goes fairly well, just some shenanigans.

So with that out of the way, why am I deciding to end it here? Well besides the fact that I’ve spent most of the last four-plus years on hiatuses, I just can no longer justify continuing this comic. I’m literally beating a dead horse, and honestly, I only kept going because I felt obligated. I mean, all this time without updates and STILL there will be a few people reading this. Clearly you guys enjoyed my work, and I’m honored and proud I could entertain you as much as I did. But in doing this comic, I’ve learned a few things.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is I CANNOT do a long-running comic series. I very much enjoy creating characters and comic up with new ideas, and for most of the last five years I kept coming up with concepts for other comics, and at a certain point I began counting down to the end of Space Between so I could move on. I just picked the wrong genre of webcomic do to that with.

Successful slice-of-life comics can easily run into the thousands of pages (see: Questionable Content), and it doesn’t seem like they ever have to end. Space Between was only meant to be a bridge comic, taking me out of my inactiveness following Jelly Bean Sniper and building a small readership to hopefully carry over to my other project, Grocery Clerks, which I thought was going to be a big hit.

Grocery Clerks never happened, and probably never will.

In retrospect, I should’ve taken this comic more seriously. The conception of the idea was in October of 2009, and literally three and a half weeks later, the first comics were online. I’ve mentioned before how the characters swapped personalities, but really they STILL aren’t developed. Sure, I know the characters very well, but they’re from my head, and they take on traits from my own personality; Jack’s love of football and journalism, Frank’s love of video games, Sam’s inferiority complex and huge feeling of self-doubt, and C.J.’s… well, okay, maybe nothing in C.J. But you know… for a half-baked idea, it sure went well, eh?

I met a lot of people doing this strip, a lot of which are still friends even though most of us aren’t doing a webcomic at the moment. I even got to meet some readers at the conventions I went to. Speaking of which, I went to conventions! I had never even THOUGHT about going to one before all this, yet I ended up having a table at three, as well as attending a few others. I have merchandise! There are people out there RIGHT NOW wearing a shirt with my name on it. That or it’s tossed in the back of the closet. I had a readership in the thousands, WAY MORE than I ever thought I could achieve! Sure, I never made any REAL money off of it, but that wasn’t why I did it.

The Space Between was a comic used to not only try and establish a name for myself before I did a “real” project, but also to kill time when I switched to the graveyard shift and had nothing else to do on my nights off at 3:00 in the morning. That void later got filled by a more active social life, a girlfriend (now fiancee), and ultimately my little girl who thinks her daddy is a fun dude that dances with her.

This comic did more than exceed expectations or even just kill time. It gave me a confidence boost, made me feel better about myself than I had ever felt before, so even when I had self-doubt, hated my art and wanted to scrap it all, I didn’t. I kept going because you guys loved it and I loved doing it.

At the end of the day, this comic will always be special to me, even if it’s incomplete. Even if I never colored a couple of pages or even inked them. Even when I changed my art style and then decided to go with inking done by hand. Even when I did chapter one and have regretted it to this day. Despite all of that, this comic taught me enough about myself to know what I want to do in the future.

That, of course, is more comics.

I have a rough idea for one in mind, and eventually that will happen, though I’m not expecting anything before 2017. Once my daughter is a little older and I can have a little extra time, I’ll be able to do comics again. For now, I’m gonna take another shot at the whole YouTube thing (depending on how this whole "YouTube Red" thing works out) and see if my second run at videos can go as well as my second run at webcomics.

If you wanna keep tabs on me and see what I’m planning on doing, follow me on Twitter (@jellybeansniper) , or just check jellybeansniper.net if you don’t want to listen to my ramblings. Also hit me up on Twitter if you have any questions regarding anything about the comic or just what my thoughts are and I’ll be happy to answer (don’t bother with the e-mail listed below, Dreamhost shut it down for some security reason and I can’t be bothered to reactivate it).

Thank you to all of you who ever read this comic, those who kept reading, and even to those who thought it was shit and closed the page. I enjoyed it more than you’ll ever know, and I hope to hear from some of you again whenever my next project starts up.

Until then, I have to go chase the little human I created. She stole my ice cream!