A lot of you are probably wondering what the story is with the long Hiatus. Well, truth be told, I think it's finally time to stop calling it a Hiatus and call it what it is.

The MPM Webcomic has officially ended it's production.

There's quite a few things that have gone wrong to prompt this curtain call. Firstly there's just the fact that I've gotten a full time job lately and I simply don't have the time I used to to work on the comic.

Before, not only was I fully drawing up the comics, I'm writing up the initial scripts, Working on promotion work, Uploading to the Site and DA 3 times a week, all of the management and behind the scenes work, ect. At some point during my vast unemployment I had turned MPM into a full time job. And now it felt like I had two full time jobs on my shoulders, and one of them was simply taking more than it was giving.

One of the things I took pride in in my management of MPM was my 2 week advance on the current week. I had a strict scheme - Monday, Drawing. Tuesday, Digital Outlines. Wednesday, Colouring. Thursday, Background. Friday, Shading and final elements. Saturday/Sunday, Overtime if I ever needed it. It never really got to the point that I used up all my overtime. If you were reading page 300 on a Friday, I was finished pages 301 to 306 and had just started on page 307.
However, while I was working at my current job I was slipping more and more behind. I wasn't able to finish comics until Saturdays, which eventually slipped back as far as Sundays. When the comics started to slip as far behind as WEDNESDAY, and I had to spend my entire day off just to finish up the last weeks comics AND catch up on this weeks. I working on my computer for 10 hours straight, and I still wasn't fully caught up to schedule.
I'm not proud to admit there was a slight sense of panic that day, too, and had completely burned myself out that night.

It came to the point where I simply had to give up either my job, or MPM.
And MPM wasn't paying the bills.


Another problem I've had creeping in the back of my mind as of late is the format of the comic. As you can tell it's gone through a lot of changes over the last 2 years, and that's simply because I'm just not happy about it. Some time recently I was looking through the MPM pages when I realised that this isn't what I imagined for MPM. I loved MPM when it was an RP Forum, and I've always wanted to make a webcomic. So I thought it should be natural to bring them both together. I realize now that probably wasn't the best idea. MPM was a text based adventure back then. What I really always thought of MPM being was more of a novel format, other than a webcomic. When I read some of my favorite Series - The Kingkiller Chronicles, The Innocent Mage, The secrets of the immortal nicholas flammel, The Black Magician Trilogy - They remind me of MPM more than reading other webcomics. As much as it pains me to say it, I think I birthed MPM into the wrong format.

Hopefully some day in the near or distant future, when myself and the editor can stand to be in the same room as each other, we'll see to possibly correcting this. For now, The Webcomic has officially ceased it's work.


I'd like to take this last section of this massive blog post to give a very heart filled thanks to anyone who has read and has been reading the comic for any period of time. If there's one thing that's really kept me going through the last few months of severe stress it's been reading the comments and talking with you guys, and even seeing the occasional fan work.
And of course a thanks to the actual people of MPM for letting me use their awesome characters in the comic.


So with all said and done, I hope to see you guys buzzing around the comment section of any other projects we may come up with in the near future. And I'll leave you with my all time favorite line in the webcomic to this date, and rather fitting, too.

"Wouldn't it be nice to put a neat little bow on all of life's little Fairy Tales?"
-MPM page 64, Neat little bow.

Brief history lesson: Metal Phone Mouse started off as a RPG thread on a Swedish website called spogg.com. Most of the characters (all of the main ones at least) in this webcomic are based off participants of the thread.

Got that? Good.

So I was mucking around the Internet, when I found this:

https://sites.google.com/site/mc2718/files/spogg-join-dates

Dates of when members of spogg.com joined (from when the website started up to 2008-10-26).

I joined Spogg on the 20th of Feburary, 2005.

2005!?!

I was playing runescape for about a year before joining the site (and it was the first game I ever played on the Internet/ on a computer), so I've been semi active on the Internet (in some form or another) for about 9 years... Well, that was a quick decade.

So how long have you been on the Internet?

Various other MPM members start dates are on that list, though I don't feel that I should be the one to post it for them.

On Hiatus until further notice.

Just wanted to wish folk a happy new year, however they decide to spend it!

- Maria.

It seems that a ridiculous amount of popular media (as we know it) is to end in 2012.

The Nostalgia Critic (I'm a massive fan of Doug's work, and I'll provide a link for all of these at the end), Assassins Creed (of which I'm not so keen on, but Shadow is) and, the one that catches me out is CAD.

Things ending isn't so bad - it frees up time for the creator for them to replan and make content that they feel passionate about. Doug's new shows aren't bad (certainly, they're not Nostalgia Critic in anyway, but they're still good) and Tim's just rebooting CAD.

Though it doesn't mean to say that we have to like it.

Personally, I'm hoping that World of Warcraft will cut it's losses and leave the MMORPG market.

I started playing back in BC (maybe a year or so before WotLK came out) and, to me, that's when it was at it's best (though to be fair, everything was still new and shiny to me). It honestly felt like you could play the game however you felt without being penalised for it - I liked just roaming around the areas looking at scenery, or swimming around the continents just for fun.

I went back to WoW a few months ago, and it just felt like you had to raid/PvP, or you weren't really playing at all.

Even then, the raids seemed a little weak sauce. When I was told that the group had to HOLD BACK on DPS or else they'd be debuffed on DW, I almost cried. Why not make the raid more difficult? If SO many people are finding it SO easy for you to debuff them, just make it more difficult. There's no prestige in holding back DPS with an OP group to kill him anyway - just make it harder all around.

(And no-one QQ that it's for casual players to get decent gear: I've seen how easy it is for people to get decent gear without raiding.)

I never played in the BC raids when they came out, so I can't comment... But I never got my LK achievement because the tactics were difficult. Groups could wipe because of poor tactics. I don't think the raid groups I were in ever wiped in DW (and I pugged it a few times!).

Anyone thinking about playing an MMORPG, I'd point them in the direction of Guild Wars 2. I've not played it, but you can't argue with reviews - even in principal it seems better in every way. (Especially in terms of paying for it... Why do Blizzard still insist on a monthly subscription charge?)

Final Fantasy is another of my pet peeves that I hope end this year: I loved 7, 9 and 12 (but not 13, it sucked). 8 probably was good, but it seemed more technical than the rest when I was growing up.

What was up with the difficulty setting in FF13 anyway? First 20 hours seemed insanely easy while the rest felt insanely difficult.

Well, that's my (rant) two cents anyway.

So what do you feel has had it's run? Is there anything you'd like to see go, along with 2012 (hint: MPM is not an answer).

Feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments below.

If you haven't already, join the MPM facebook group!

Nostalgia Critic/thatguywiththeglasses: http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/

CAD: CTL ALT DEL: http://www.cad-comic.com/

MPM Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/metalphonemouse?fref=ts

I just got my copy of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 back from getting the disk repaired and it works lovely. But when I booted it up it had a patch available. And I was glad to see they finally unlocked all the characters in the Roster for all to use now.

But they also unlocked all the swimwear outfits for the girls.

How out of ideas do you have to be to resort to something so cheap, so degrading, so-- What?

...

...Oh. Right. >.>

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Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Metal-Phone-Mouse/102136963221897
DA Comic Gallery: http://hiddeninshadow.deviantart.com/gallery/5701110
MPM Website: http://mpm.thewebcomic.com/