No Need For Kaide has finished. For some reason, the story took me to the point of ending a really nice run on the web and in print with a poop joke.

This comic was fun to make. I met a lot of great people, and in the process, I also managed to improve my skills (kind of hard to showcase using NNFK, though; a 3-panel comic is very limiting in terms of what you can put in it).

I’m going to be moving on to other things right now; If I ever come up with a story I myself like enough to write, maybe I’ll come back to making comics. But anyway, just wanna thank you guys for reading, and for giving this comic a chance.

What happened to the book?

A few months ago, some of you were asking if there was going to be a book, and I said I’d try. I talked to a couple of printers, gave them a spec sheet and asked for prices. I had the money and was serious about the endeavour, but apparently, they didn’t seem to be. To put it simply, I had bad experiences in dealing with both printers. Both were generally unprofessional, so after a few weeks of trying to deal with them, I just decided to drop it.

Anyway, thanks again for reading! You guys are great.

While I’m away, I’d like to direct your attention to two of the best comic strips (in my humble opinion) that also run in the Manila Bulletin:

• Life In Progress by Julius Villanueva
• Bokswagon by Bok Hong

Tell ‘em I sent you. Or not. Well, it’s up to you, really. Uh… yeah. So, like, bye and stuff. Again.

So what’s up with NNFK not appearing in the past few Sunday Bulletins?

No one’s really sure. From the Bulletin’s end of things, there seemed to be a bit of confusion as well. I was told that the strip wasn’t canceled (whew), and that it should have been printed the past few weeks. Something likely just got mixed up somewhere there.

I was told that they will be running the comics I sent in that weren’t printed, so I’m still trying to figure out the update schedule beyond this week’s update. I’d still like to maintain that one week buffer between print and online updates.

We’ll figure something out. In the meantime, please enjoy this week’s comic strip. Or not.

This is because I usually post last Sunday’s comic strip from the Bulletin as the Saturday webcomic version. NNFK didn’t appear in the previous Sunday Bulletin because I missed the submission deadline. I missed the submission deadline because my mobile Internet connection was terrible (courtesy of SMART communications, who – as we know from advertisments – is the best, because they said so), and I was in one of the northern provinces on a business trip, away from good coverage, so while the comic was already finished, I couldn’t upload it.

I hope that made sense. Errrh… so, yeah.

The comic in question will be printed in tomorrow’s Manila Bulletin, so check that out. NNFK resumes next week on this space!

UPDATE: Okay, I just checked this week’s Sunday Bulletin and NNFK isn’t in it. I’m kinda confused now.

Last week’s Manila Bulletin comic was a random one that I had to come up with due to a really bad headache I was experiencing; I had to come up with something easier to do to meet the deadline, and so that one wouldn’t continue the current mini-story-arc we’re doing right now (Hot Legs). This will only affect those who read both the online version of the comic and the MB’s print version.

Online-only readers will not see an interruption of the current story-arc. As a consequence, however, for the next few strips, both the online and print versions will have the same comic strip. This will only continue until the current story-arc finishes, then it’s back to having the Manila Bulletin having the newer strip, and then the online version having the prior comic.

Hope that wasn’t confusing. Anyway, see you all on Sundays for the next few updates, hope y’all understand!

Oh, and I am also working on some significant improvements to the site, which I hope to roll out sometime in the next month. Isn’t this current design just an eyesore?

Our white Nissan Urvan bearing the plate ZED 886 was stolen this Sunday Morning, as it was parked right outside our apartment building here in Makati City.

Please help us find it! If you spot a vehicle going around the city or anywhere at all with the plate ZED 886, please inform the nearest police officer or traffic enforcer that it is a stolen vehicle!

We would greatly appreciate it if you could provide us with ANY information regarding our vehicle. Also, if you could retweet this or replurk this, it would be a great help.

Please keep an eye out for the vehicle if you can! Stolen White Nissan Urvan, ZED 886.

Thanks much.

Addendum: Identifying Marks

1. The van has fog lamps in front and some square lamps at the back
2. The van may also have DILG and DOTC placards displayed in the front windshields (or it may have been stashed or disposed of… but still).
3. The rear door has noticeable dent around the license plate area.
4. The rearmost seats have no head-rests; in fact we have them right here… mementos from our stolen vehicle (how ironic).

Note: I realize all these things can be… worked around, for lack of a better term, by the thieves, but just in case they’ve overlooked these things, they may help in identifying our vehicle.

The voting period for the Komikon Awards this year will take place from August 10 – September 20. Voting procedures are TBA, until all the wrinkles are ironed out, I guess. Anyway, I will be updating this post once more information becomes available.

You can check out more Komikon-related media here and here.

UPDATE 1:
Voting Ballots will be made available in the following stores during the voting period:

Comic Odyssey:

• Robinson’s Place, Level 3 Ermita, Manila
• Robinson’s Galleria, Level 3 Expansion Mall,Edsa cor. Ortigas

Comic Quest:

• Lower Ground Floor Bldg. A, SM Megamall
• 2nd Floor Main Bldg., SM City North Edsa

Online voting polls to be announced.

For a full list of nominees for the Komikon Awards 2009, click here.

UPDATE 2:
Online voting is now active! If you have a deviantART account, you can log in and vote for the best webcomic by clicking here.

To see voting polls for other categories, click here.

If you do not have a deviantART account but would still like to vote via the online polls, hang tight – the guys are working on that. As usual, watch this space for the info!

On the NNFK website and through other means, some people have asked me if I would be coming out with a book or something. So now I have a question for readers (s’funny when you think about it – people actually read it!):

How much would you say is a fair price to pay for a 40-50 page full-color comic book?

Here’s what I plan to put in it:

• All the comic strips from the first year of print publication (October 2008 – October 2009)
• A good bunch of original new comic pages exclusively for the book
• About 3-4 pages of prose-form content, mostly some background about the comic and likely some expanded character dossiers
• Anything else you’d like to see? Put it in the comments below!

Of course, I want to keep the price as low as possible without sacrificing quality, say maybe Php75-100 (Around US $1.50-2.00) at the most. This price is primarily aimed at those in the Metro Manila Area, but I also want to do my best to make it available for anyone who wants it (additional shipping costs may be incurred of course, but I’m getting way ahead of myself here). But at the same time I also don’t want to run myself ragged by just barely breaking even (so ya see, it’s kinduva tough balancing act we gotta do here).

So once more I must ask, how much would you say is a fair price to pay for a 40-50 page full-color comic book?

Please tell me what you think!

If you do stumble across something that looks weird or something that you think might look better a certain way while using the website, please don’t hesitate to give me a heads-up on it (please also include the browser and version you’re using).

With regard to aesthetic issues, specifically the comment forms and link style quirks, I’ll be getting on those first.

Thanks and good reading!

To Regular Readers, welcome to the new website. I’ve finally settled on a decent design, thusly now implemented. I hope you find it easier on the eyes than the previous one; hopefully it enhances your reading experience. The sidebar should now be of more use to you, giving you several more methods of browsing through the past comic strips.

As always, Comics will be uploaded every Saturday, with the succeeding strip available immediately on Sunday with every copy of the Manila Bulletin. If you’re looking for incentives to buy the newspaper, look no further than the fact that Sunday Editions contain two comic sections, which both contain work from home-grown artists like Julius Villanueva (Life in Progress), Hazel Manzano (Callwork), Stanley Chi (Chopsticks), and Bok Hong (Bokswagon), among others (those are my favorites, so far).

That’s about it! If you have a feed reader, you can subscribe to this comic’s RSS feed so updates are delivered straight to you. You can also subscribe to the twitter feed as an alternative.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the comics.

Here you can find all the No Need For Kaide comic strips that have been published in the Manila Bulletin – from the very first strip right up to the current comics. To be fair, I wait around a week to publish the strip that went to print online. So, you can be the first to read the latest strips by buying the Sunday Editions of the Manila Bulletin, and you can catch up and reread all the past comics here on the NNFK website.

As for the website, I’ll be constantly tweaking things here and there, so please bear with me. This is a soft launch, after all. I hope you’ll excuse the current design because I’m currently really lazy a bit sick.

If you’ve got questions, comments, suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment here on this post or send me an e-mail through shinkaide [atzorz] gmail [dawt] com.