Follower will be returning from hiatus on October 28, 2020! It will resume its regular weekly update schedule on Wednesdays.

If you want to read the rest of the chapter right now, Patreon supporters at all pledge levels can read pages 25-32 in their entirety. For as little as $1, you can quell your suspense and find out what’s up in the camp before everyone else. (And help support the comic while you’re at it!)

I'm going to be streaming art for a while this afternoon at https://www.twitch.tv/radiochio and https://picarto.tv/bugbyte! Starting in about 30 minutes. See you there!

I'm livestreaming art today, in about 45 minutes, at 1:30 PM eastern time! You can find me on both Twitch (http://twitch.tv/radiochio) and Picarto (http://picarto.tv/bugbyte). I also put up a stream schedule for the month so you can see where and when to find me: http://www.radiochio.com/october-streaming-schedule/!

See you there!

Hey there! I’m planning to do some streams this week on Twitch (and possibly simultaneously to Picarto!) on Tuesday and Thursday the 22nd and 24th at 1:30 PM eastern time!

Follow me at https://twitch.tv/radiochio or https://picarto.tv/bugbyte for notifications when I go live!

Hey there! I'm planning to stream artwork tomorrow - September 10, 1 PM eastern time. The first half of the stream will be Patrons-only, and the second half (2 PM on) will switch over to Twitch for everyone to watch. More details here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41420520

I am no longer really actively using this site to post updates! If you'd like to keep up with my comics and art, here are some options:

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/radio_chio
Tumblr: http://bugbytedraws.tumblr.com
DA: http://bugbyte.deviantart.com
Weasyl: http://weasyl.com/~bugbyte

And of course, on radiochio.com, our new comics & art hub!

<3 <3 <3

I realized it's been a long time since I've posted any kind of journal! I should probably do that!

In newsy news, some art I made is going to be included in Gamera vs Zine-Ra, a book featuring comics and art from tons of super awesome artists! (How did I get in???) If you love comics and giant monsters and that kind of thing, back it on Kickstarter to get a copy! The Kickstarter is running through August 26th, so get your pledge in if you want a copy at a discounted rate.

I also contributed a comic to Blank Party's Earthbound anthology! I believe more information on that one will be up towards the end of August? I'm not 100% sure, but soonish!

I am working on a handful of small various comics in addition to the usual Follower/Messenger/Ask a Chio stuff, and hope to have at least one of them done early this fall to take to conventions. Right now I'm not sure what our schedule is going to be, but we're trying to sort out getting to Buffalo Comicon in October at the very least, and hopefully a few others. I've been applying all my work time to trying to get Follower issue 3 prepped for print, but I took a day off and now I'm behind! It's crazy how that works.

Other than that, I hope everyone's having a lovely summer! Stay cool!

Been a while since I've posted any kind of update, so I should probably do that!

UBCon last month was a blast, and you can read our report here. (Also hello if you followed me after grabbing a card there!)

Our current convention schedule is pretty slow for the summer, but we'll be back in October at Buffalo Comic Con! More details as that date approaches.

Follower just began Chapter 3, which I'm pretty excited about. We also finally received books for Chapter 2, which are now in the shop!

I may be opening commissions sometime in the next month after I catch up on stuff for Patreon, but we'll see.

That's about it for now, so thanks for reading!

========================================
Find me elsewhere!
Deviantart: http://bugbyte.deviantart.com
Weasyl: http://www.weasyl.com/~bugbyte
Tumblr: http://bugbytedraws.tumblr.com

Messenger: http://www.messenger-comic.com
Follower: http://follower.messenger-comic.com
Ask a Chio: http://askachio.tumblr.com
Messenger & Follower on Tumblr: http://messengerfollower.tumblr.com

We'll be at UBCon in Amherst, NY this weekend! We will have a table in the artist's alley and are planning to be there from Friday to Sunday, with books, mini comics, prints, and other stuff. I'm also planning to do quick sketch cards and commissions while there.

Hope to see you there!

Wow, so I haven't posted here in quite a while! I've been super busy and it's been tough to keep track of.

I am currently open for commissions! I'm trying to scramble to attend a bunch of conventions this spring to promote my comics, and having a little more flexibility in my budget would help, so here's what I'm currently offering:

Crossposted from this DA journal!

I wasn't planning on opening commissions, but there's an upcoming local comic con I'd really like to table at in addition to the other two events I'm doing, and it's not (currently) in my budget to be able to do so. In light of this, I'm going to open some quick digital commissions and see if I can make enough for the table fee! Going to another event would really help me be able to spread the word about Messenger and Follower and hopefully build a bigger readership.

Here are the options:

Painted style digital piece, 1 character (additional characters $5 extra), minimal background - $25
Examples: 1 2 3

Simple inked style digital piece, 1 character (additional characters $5 extra), solid color or simple background - $20
Examples: 1 2 3

If neither of those options catch your eye, I'm open to other ideas, too! Send me a note and I'll come up with a price. As another option, if you pledge to my Patreon before the start of March, I'll receive the payment in time to contribute towards the table cost. (And you'll get other bonuses!)

In order to keep up with my current comic workload, I'm limiting this to 5 slots. If you're interested, please send me an email at bug [at] messenger-comic.com! Thanks!

OPEN SLOTS:
1. Jacinto
2. JadoaEsraOhn
3. hailed-manic
4. empty
5. empty

========================================
Find me elsewhere!
Deviantart: http://bugbyte.deviantart.com
Weasyl: http://www.weasyl.com/~bugbyte
Tumblr: http://bugbytedraws.tumblr.com

Messenger: http://www.messenger-comic.com
Follower: http://follower.messenger-comic.com
Ask a Chio: http://askachio.tumblr.com
Messenger & Follower on Tumblr: http://messengerfollower.tumblr.com

Greetings friends! Can I interest you in some fine, handcrafted pixels?


Delade and I are going to be moving to a new, more economical apartment in the next few weeks, but being Christmas as well as the end of the year, money is super tight for us, as I'm sure it is for everyone. Even though we're going to be saving a ton of money by moving to this new place in the long term, moving is expensive. (Insult to injury, pretty much.) In order to help buffer the gigantic bite this is taking out of our bank account, I'm throwing a this-week-only commission sale!


$5 will get you a head-and-shoulders portrait image, suitable for use as an avatar practically anywhere on the internet!


$10 will get you colored artwork of a single character! (Additional characters can be added for $10 each.)


If you're interested in commissioning me, please send an email to bug [at] messenger-comic.com with "Commission" in the subject line, and any relevant info! Examples of my art can be seen on DA and Weasyl!



If you aren't into commissions, you might be interested in some of the comics I have for sale on Gumroad (currently on sale for 30% off as part of my Pixel Garage Sale! Click here and use the code garagesale at checkout!) or the rewards available through our Patreon!


Commissioned art makes a great last-minute gift for a friend, and I can guarantee my comics will look super great on any shiny new gadget you might get if you've made Santa's nice list!


Thanks for reading!

Check out this video message from Eldora for more!


That’s right! You can now make a monthly pledge for the amount of your choosing through Patreon, and get access to cool bonuses and rewards! The comics will always remain free, of course, but this provides some extras for those who want to help support us!

There are a bunch of milestone goals available, which will unlock new content for everyone by helping me be able to spend more time making comics.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll consider supporting my comics!

Support Messenger and Follower on Patreon!

After every imaginable setback, Follower #1 is now available both in print and as an ebook! To celebrate, I'm also taking today to launch the brand-new Messenger &amp; Follower shop!

You can grab a copy of the new book, one of the Messenger books, or pretty much anything else you'd need to survive the wasteland!

Visit shop.messenger-comic.com to see what's new!

I have a Weasyl account now which I'm slowly adding to. Let us be friends. :3

https://www.weasyl.com/~bugbyte

The nominations for the 2013 Ursa Major Awards are now open, and this year I'm hoping to see Messenger and Follower nominated in either of the Best Graphic Story or Best Other Literary Work categories! While I don't think I stand much of a chance competing against some really big webcomics as have been nominated (and won) in the past, even being nominated would be a huge honor, and help both Messenger and Follower become more known.

How can you help? Visit the Ursa Major Awards site and click "nominations page," and then either enroll to register or login if you've registered before. Then, add Messenger and Follower under Best Graphic Story and/or Best Other Literary Work. For clarity, you may want to submit the comics both by name with their URL, so there is no confusion - for example, "Follower - http://follower.messenger-comic.com". Submit the form, and you're done! It's easy. You can (and should!) nominate other comics and media you enjoy for the other categories, as well. You can even nominate multiple things for the same category, if you like.

What's next? The nomination period is open through February 28th. After that, if the comics were successfully nominated, you can then start voting for real on them!

If we can make it into the nominations category, I'll come up with some kind of small reward comic. If we can get even further than that, I'll have to think of something bigger!

As always, I appreciate your ongoing support. Thanks for reading my comics!

Sorry for the doublepost if you've seen this elsewhere --

First off, happy 2014, everyone! This is the year that Messenger turns 10 and that's pretty weird to me.

I wanted to make a post as a follow-up to my last news bit about taking a short break from comics for a few weeks. There's been a lot going on in my life recently, like a death in the family, a new job, ten million winter holidays, and then getting sick. I've not been feeling well on and off since November, and finally went to a doctor last week and found out I have pneumonia. Oops. I've been dealing with that and am starting to feel much better, but just incredibly drained all the time. I had been planning to start posting both Messenger and Follower again this week, but the most I've been able to accomplish is sleeping and looking at my DS occasionally and doing other exciting sick activities. It's really, really frustrating to want to get all these things done and just not have the energy to do them.

So all of that aside, if there is anyone who would like to contribute any kind of guest art/fiction/etc to the site, I would certainly love to share it up on the front page as filler for another week or two while I kick this bug out of my lungs. I will provide credit and links to your own comic/DA/whatever, of course, and will also put your art up on the Fan Stuff page for everyone to see for the rest of forever after. You can e-mail anything you'd like to share to me at bug [at] messenger-comic.com, submit it to DA and note me a link, or post it on the forums.

If not, hey, at least here's an update about what's going on with the comic! Here's to a (hopefully) much better and healthier 2014. Thank you for all these years of continued support; just knowing there are readers out there enjoying what I do makes it worthwhile.

It's been a while since I've written a legit post about what I've been up to, so here goes!

First note: I'm participating in Comic Creators for Freedom again this year! I'll be submitting artwork of Eldora as an "Awkward School Photo" for the charity donation wallpaper assembled by the group. Proceeds will benefit Love 146, and the wallpaper will be available in December. I hope you'll consider supporting this great cause!

Secondly: Apologies for the slow Messenger updates. I have been ridiculously busy with a few things (including some projects you will see the results of fairly soon) and Messenger keeps unintentionally suffering. Follower has been updating weekly and will continue to do so!

Finally: If you use Tapastic, I'd like to point out that Messenger will be doing "reruns" of its 9-year archive three times a week on this service! Please help support Messenger by giving it a star rating and adding it to your reading list. This is a little bit of an experiment on my part to help bring in new readers to the comic. We'll see how it works!

That's all I've got for now, but you can check out a slightly more wordy post on all of the above on the Messenger news blog.

So tomorrow my webcomic, Messenger, turns 9 years old. I still remember sketching and planning out the first chapter, and it definitely doesn't seem that long ago. But, yay!

I'm not doing anything special this year (but more than likely will next year) buuut if you felt so kind as to make fanart, it would certainly get the front page treatment this week. :3

New page(s?) coming later in the week. I would have been ready sooner but this snuck up on me. D:

Painting and whatever for a short bit!

http://www.livestream.com/bugbyte

In order to help ease the pain of my webhosting bill this month, I am opening up for a few commissions!

The short story is, $25 digital full-body, full-color art of a single character. There are a few bells and whistles I'm willing to add to dress it up, but that's the basics. Hoping to keep these quick, simple, and awesome.

If you are interested, please check out this page for more information!

If you would like to help support Messenger but don't want a commission, you can always contribute via the "Donate!" button on Messenger-Comic.com. You will receive a wallpaper download for helping out.

Thank you for looking! Please tell your friends!

So the comic I am doing with Delade is now actually a thing~ The first page is up (along with the prologue we did last fall) at follower.messenger-comic.com, and will update on Wednesdays. We are planning to have a print version of the first issue available by this fall; I had intended to release it alongside the online version, but I've been pretty swamped/sidetracked with other things all summer so far. So, fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, Messenger and Ask a Chio are making a return as well, so please keep an eye on my Tumblr or Twitter for updates!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the comic!

Since we kept Messenger above spot 100 on TWC for May, here's the archive for the month!

Remember, if we can stay above 100 for June, I'll post more pages in July! Thank you for your support!

Page 6
Page 7
Page 8

So we made it to 100 on TWC! Awesome! I mentioned on Twitter that if we could get to (or above) spot 100, I would upload previous pages of the minicomic incentive I've been posting week by week, so here they are!

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5

If we can stick at or above 100 for May, I'll upload the new pages I post for the month in June.

Vote for Messenger on TWC now!

Thanks again for all your support!

So it's been a small goal of mine to start gaining more readers for my comic. Knowing that people enjoy or at least read what I'm working on is motivating, and definitely helps me stay on track.

One thing I want to do to help promote the comic is to get back into the top 100 on TWC. Right now, I'm hovering at around #170. I need about 30-something more individual votes to get into the top 100. Being within the first 100 comics would be awesome, because it increases the chances that someone will see Messenger, click on it, and read it.

Will you help me out with a vote? I would totally appreciate it! <3

Vote for Messenger on TWC: Click to vote!

So I'm changing my update schedule for Messenger for a while - it's temporarily going to update only on Saturdays for a month or two while I finish up drawing the first issue of Follower.

You can read more on what's going on with both comics on the front page of Messenger.

Thanks for your patience!