The Adventures of Terrik Zion

Hey everyone, I’ve got bad news. If any of you reading this follow the TerrikZion twitter then you already know what’s up; if not then here’s the update: TATZ 6 will not be finished. The trouble is time. I keep meticulous records of how long I work on which project, for every day of the year in a Google sheet, in addition to several other sheets which track my progress on comics, commissions, etc. So I have a really good set of data going back a bunch of years, which I can reliably use to predict how long a project will take given a set of circumstances.

Last year, I managed to get a whole lot of TATZ 6 pages pencilled, inked, and flatted, ready to be colored. A handful of pages remained to be pencilled etc, along with the cover. And of course, it would need to be lettered as well. So far, TATZ 6 has about 195 hours of work put into it, with an estimated 115 left to go (each issue of TATZ so far has clocked in almost precisely at 310 hours of work). I looked back through my 2022 records and calculated that only 4% of all my working hours were able to be put towards TATZ coloring work (or pencils for those remaining pages). Extrapolating things, I discovered that at my current rate, it would take me almost 3 more years to finish TATZ 6, which is (in my opinion) untenable.

So, I’ve decided finally to abandon the project. If I had known the workload would end up like this, I wouldn’t have even started coloring the pages in the beginning of this year. What I will do is release what exists of issue 6, as-is, soon after issue 5 wraps up. As it stands, Issue 6 has about 5 pages that are fully colored, about 15 more that are flatted, and then I think there’s one page in pencils, and the rest exist only as rough thumbnails. So my plan is to letter what exists without any additional finishing work on the pages; lettering should take roughly 4.5 hours.

If anyone is reading this and is saddened by this news, I apologize. Terrik Zion readership never grew more than maybe a handful of people; I can’t tell exactly by the stats this website gives me, but even on update days it rarely broke more than double-digit page viewership, and single digits on other days. It’s not viable for me to continue from a time or money perspective, and even though it was never meant to be anything more than a passion project, now that my sole source of income is from commission work, I cannot sacrifice any more working hours to this project.

So I’ll update the last few pages of Issue 5 and then see about getting Issue 6 lettered, I haven’t decided yet whether or not to release them weekly or just dump them all at once. It doesn’t really matter since there won’t be any more to come and I don’t need to be employing any sort of readership strategy for it anymore. We’ll see what I figure out.

See you, Space Cowboy…