Comic for Thursday April 15th, 2004

"Taking way too long" Wednesday - April 14th, 2004

I'd love to be able to chat more about the Battle of Spirit Finals and today's comic, but between going out shopping for soccer stuff and this being a bigger and more ambitious strip than usual, I'm barely able to finish this and get some sleep. I'll be sure to put up a regular post right here Thursday afternoon or night. So be sure to check back if you feel the need got listen to my thought about random thing and Ninja Spirit in general. Hope you guys enjoy this one though!!

River

River is all sorts of exhausted.

"Making Up" Thursday - April 15th, 2004

Okay... like I promised here's the regular news post. Sorry it took so long, but like I said, I was a little behind and getting the comic precedes everything including the Battle of Spirit. Since I'm sure that's what's on most people's minds, let's discuss that first and foremost.

The Battle of Spirit Finals took place yesterday and for most of the day it looked like Dave was going to run away with an easy win. However starting at around 8 or 9PM, a bunch of you Hello Kelly fans jumped on the site and starting voting away. So much so that by the time we were an hour away from the polls closing, Kelly had closed the gap and was now threatening to take the lead and win. I'll precursor the following by saying, I have gone back to check IP addresses of the votes and after deleting some votes that seemed to come from too close an IP address, a clear winner has emerged.

Now before I go blabbing on about the most popular character in Ninja Spirit, let me discuss the big Spirit 100 Contest that has been running concordantly with the  Battle of Spirit. For those that might have come late or weren't following the contest at all, I'll explain briefly by saying that each contestant filled out who they thought would win each match throughout the Battle. Everyone did a great job, but by the time the Finals came around, the field had been whittled down to two players. One was TMBGeorge and the other was Kurt. TMBGeorge held a commanding lead over the rest of the field and had picked Dave to win it all. If Dave won the Battle, TMBGeorge would have the easy victory. However, since Kurt was the only one within 3 points of TMBGeorge and had chosen Kelly to win, if Kelly DID win, Kurt would overtake TMBGeorge by a point and steal the victory after what was one of the weakest first rounds out of all the contestants.

So to return to the actual Battle, it was around 11 or so and Dave clung to his miniscule 2 vote lead  like Kate Winslet clutching onto a floating box. By the time twelve rolled around the winner was in. Dave Btwys-y-Cawr had  barely won...  but since the votes were so close, the need to authenticate the winner was needed. Enter the IP address checking. Would the authentication process strip Dave from his win and therefore give Kurt the necessary points to overtake TMBGeorge?

So without further ado... after tallying up all the legal votes, Dave Btwys-y-Cawr has been chosen by the Ninja Spirit fans to be the Champion in the Battle of Spirit and claiming the title of most popular NS character. The final score was a tight 12-10 in favor of the former Lord Hawk. By proxy it means that TMBGeorge is the winner of the Spirit 100 contest and the winner of an autographed Special Edition Spirit 100 poster. Congrats George!!

You all might be wondering just what this poster looks like. The Limited Edition will be available from the NS cafepress store for a limited run starting from the Monday coming up will the end of May. You'll also be able to catch a sneak peak of a low res pic of the poster in mid production if you vote for the comic tomorrow on the bCx list.

Now on to the comic itself... like I mentioned in my short post above, it took awhile to get down. Overall I'm happy with the way it came out. The scenes with Beth were good even if the first panel of her is kinda off. Everything else though came out pretty much how I wanted it and the extra time that went into making this one was worth it in the end.

As for the contents themselves, I figure they'll answer some questions while producing some new ones. Keen readers will be able to figure out who Beth is and why she is talking about when she refers to "him". On the other hand why is she talking to Yuki in a dream and why does she now that information about Yuki? And if you're wondering just what dream Yuki is referring to, he mentions it after waking up in the second strip of Chapter 2. Be back Sunday as we get to see if Yuki really did gain the ability to use his Spirit and if he'll be able to defeat Tenko!!

Vote for Ninja Spirit!!

River is sorry for the delay.