Awesome, cannot wait ^~^
I know exactly how you feel with the whole USD to AUD. It sucks, really have to watch how much ya' spend on commissions.

Look forward to seeing how the comics come out and yeah I can understand the expense it is becoming due to the strengthening USD.

Looking forward to the new comics, and can certainly understand commissions being expensive.

That's fine buddy!~ I like the sound of three comics. I hope they'll be interesting And it's very understandable, commissions and currency conversions are very expensive. Hope you'll get to go somewhere nice!

That's the mid-term consequence of the US increasing it's minimum wage. Increase your minimum wage - everything in your country costs more. The value of your products goes up because it costs more to make them, while the value of other countries products stay the same.

Thus, it now costs you more to purchase US made goods while it costs the same to purchase your own local goods - with varying amounts of impact based on the manufacturing and processing locations of products that are produced in multiple countries.

However, since few things are actually MADE IN THE USA anymore (seriously, when is the last time you saw THAT sticker?) and are then exported (Yes, we do still export things, such as coal. Because we like to think the rest of the world as being naughty on Christmas), shifts in the US dollar aren't as dramatic to the world market. Shifts in US demand CAN be much moreso. Which puts us in this odd situation where the rest of the world is kind of dicked over by our demands and we can just jerk our dollar around without much impact.

But, what are the long term repercussions of such?
We have become a lazy society that is out of touch with the world, and the impact of our traditional manufacturing doesn't have a place in the world market anymore. We've seen this time and time again as more and more jobs are exported overseas. What we can export to other countries are services and technical expertise - some of which our government has blocked us from being able to do (Obama lifted our Nuclear Trade Regulations so that US companies can bid on Nuclear Power Construction and Design jobs outside of the United States. It had been illegal for any US company to do this long before Three Mile Island, which ended up crippling our Nuclear Industry as demand for nuclear power design essentially ended after that partial meltdown.) Because business is business and people will pay the big bugs for big projects - we can make money on that. But other than that, what do we offer? We make brands in other countries and markets and employ people there so that we can produce goods at prices that can compete in those markets. The only thing that stops them from out-teching us is more honesty and business contracts than anything else. In terms of math and science education, let's face it, the USA is trending closer and closer to the bottom of the food chain.

I am afraid that the symptom of the US dollar becoming too strong for foreigners to make purchases as easily is simply a resurgence of that old symptom - a symptom that shows our economy is just as frail as it was before the economic recession/depression we just went through. Nothing has changed. And if US Artists want to get commissions, they'll have to start getting creative and making the same adjustments that the USA will need to make in future decades if it wishes to financially survive.

THe Dollar is Even Getting Stronger against Euro , i know your feel bud :s

It's up all across the board against other currencies, and CAD's been suffering in the general market with the price of oil.