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Page Delays

Jessica just started a new job working security at a museum (queue the Night at the Museum jokes), so between that, a couple other art obligations, and preparing to be in a friend’s wedding, the next Satan Ninja page has been delayed. But hey, she's looking mighty snazzy in her new uniform! (By the way, she still has blue hair, but she has to wear a wig to work, since the museum isn't cool with having a blue-headed security guard--but they're totally fine with displaying naked corpses.)

Jessica Safron Musuem Security Guard

Work on the comic will continue, though progress might be slow for a while until Jessica settles into a new routine. She's hopeful that giving her life a little structure by working this job will end up benefiting her productivity on the comic. But in the meantime, instead of adhering to any kind of set release schedule, we'll post pages as soon as they're ready.

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for our mailing list and we’ll shoot you an email as soon as a new page goes live.

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Dionysian Dialectics Podcast

Jessica and I were guests on the latest episode of the Dionysian Dialectics podcast, which must be the most high-brow sounding show to ever dedicate an entire episode to discussing ninjas, Satan, boobs, and the 1980s. Awesome.

We had a great time talking to the host, Alexander Quaresma, who's an all-around rad dude. Check it out, and you can hear us reveal a lot of the '80s influences that inspired characters in the comic, and you can also learn why Satan Ninja Eddie up there in the header has short hair.

 

 

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Satan Ninja 198X Wiki, TV Tropes, & Patreon Updates

Now that we’re back from hiatus, I bet some of you dudes are re-reading the comic to refresh your memory. Which makes this a great time to mention that one of our totally awesome fans has started a wiki for Satan Ninja 198X.

There’s not a whole lot there currently, but it looks rad and the structure is in place, it just needs more meat tossed on its bones. I’m actually tempted to add to it myself, but I feel it goes against the spirit of such things for a creator to get involved. Besides, it’s way more fun and rewarding for Jessica and I to see how others describe our comic.

We also have a TV Tropes page that another awesome fan started, but again, there’s plenty of room for that to grow.

Seeing our fans make and contribute to these sorts of things is so goddamn radical, it’s like receiving a jumping high-five to our creative morale. Not only that, but they also help spread the word about our comic. For instance, the more TV Tropes pages that mention Satan Ninja 198X, the more curious clicks we’ll get.

By the way, if you end up contributing a bunch of stuff to the TV Tropes page or the SN8X wiki, you should totally contact us and let us know so we can thank you. Perhaps we’ll even conjure up a little something to send your way.

What’s that? You say you don’t have time to dick around with TV Tropes or a wiki, but you’d still like to help out the comic? Well, first off, you rule for wanting to help. Second, you can help out by spreading the word about the comic. Especially to people who are into retro-’80s stuff or just like totally rad things.

Plus you can always contribute to the comic by supporting Jessica on Patreon. She’s revised her rewards, and now creates a monthly SN8X pin-up based on concepts submitted by and voted on by her patrons. Even contributing a dollar a month is enough to check out her Patreon pinups. She’s also already posted the next few pages of the comic there. She lost some patrons while we were on hiatus due to her health issues, so it’d totally make her day to gain some new ones.

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Comic Updates Resume this Month!

Rad news! Jessica’s feeling a lot better now, so we’re going to resume regular updates to this comic starting on Saturday, July 28th. Mega thanks to our fans that have been so patient and supportive through this, especially those of you that have continued to support Jessica’s Patreon (where, by the way, she’s recently posted the next three pages of Issue 4).

Also, here’s an enthusiastic cyber high-five to everyone who stopped by our table at the Anime Midwest convention this past weekend. To those of you that grabbed business cards and then followed through and actually came to this site: you rule! And to those of you who purchased stuff from us: you mega rule! Thanks!

(Click the "Comments" button if you'd like to see some pictures and video of us at the convention)

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State of the Comic - Feb. 2018

Jessica’s been having health issues that’ve gotten worse over the past year. Nothing life threatening or anything, but she ended up having a bad reaction to some medication that was supposed to help her, so she’s been in total Bummerville these past few months.

That’s why things have been so quiet around here. She’s trying a different medication now, and we’re hopeful that she’ll soon be able to ninja flip her way back to Healthyland. Then she’ll resume kicking ass on the comic.

But for now, she’s going to focus on feeling better.

Now to end on some rad news: Comicon.com selected Satan Ninja 198X as one of the eight best webcomics of 2017! We’ve also booked a table at the Anime Midwest convention in Chicago, so if you’re in the area the weekend of July 6th, you should totally visit us.

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SN8X Hiatus Ends Oct. 13th! Also, New Radicast Up Now!

Radicast 198X Episode 10 Labyrinth and Legend thumbnail

First the big news: on October, Friday the 13th, the most spooky day possible, we will finally resume updating the Satan Ninja 198X webcomic on a weekly basis. Fuck yeah!

Of course, OF COURSE this hiatus lasted waaay longer than we anticipated. Sorry about that. It kills us to not be pumping more life-blood into our radical ‘80s child. The hiatus was drawn out due to a bunch of factors, not the least of which was us getting married over the summer.

Adam Dravian & Jessica Safron's wedding

So, again, I apologize for any inconvenience caused by our love.

In the meantime, we have a couple episodes of our ‘80s media review podcast, Radicast 198X, which we recorded several weeks ago, but never got around to editing and uploading … until now!

This week’s episode marks Radicast’s exciting journey into the double digits with episode 10 (technically, it’s our eleventh episode if you count the one we did on Supergirl, which is exclusive to Jessica’s Patreon).

This time we discuss two very iconic mid-'80s fantasy films that have a lot in common. They both bombed at the box office only to go on to become cult classics. They both star gorgeous "cold" brunettes. And they both are titled a single word that starts with the letter "L".

I'm speaking, of course, of the 1986 Jim Henson directed Labyrinth and the 1985 Ridley Scott directed Legend.

Other media we discuss in brief: The Dark Crystal [1982], Phenomena [1985], Seven Minutes in Heaven [1985]

Intro and outro songs by Michael Cook.

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Updated Comic Pages & Radicast 198X Ep. 9 - Class of Nuke 'Em High, Crocodile Dundee

Radicast 198X

The comic hiatus continues for just a bit longer, but to help you endure the wait, we've resumed our weekly podcast: Radicast 198X.

We kick off our glorious podcast return with this episode where we discuss and review two very different films from 1986: the bizarre high school gross-out comedy Class of Nuke 'Em High (Troma's second best movie), and the chick flick disguised as an action-adventure comedy, Crocodile Dundee.

Other movies we discuss in brief: The Toxic Avenger [1984], Airplane! [1980], Robocop 2 [1990], Romancing the Stone [1984]

We dedicate this episode to Matty (Australian Dude).

In other Satan Ninja news, Jessica went through and made a whole bunch of minor updates and corrections to Satan Ninja pages. Mostly mega minor stuff that you wouldn't notice without directly comparing the updated pages with the old ones, but one of biggest changes is that the van the satan ninjas use in issue 1 is now '80s accurate. When Jessica first drew it, she must've accidentally used a more modern van as a reference, resulting in an anachronism. Whoops! Neither of us are knowledgeable about vehicles, so the mistake slipped past us until a reader recently pointed it out.

If you're really curious to see exactly how the old pages were updated, Jessica posted some before and after examples on her Patreon, which, by the way, is starting to creep close to reaching the first milestone, at which point Jessica will release the flash animated original trailer for Satan Ninja 198X, from way back in 2008 when it was called Shinobi Fist: Legend of the Badass Ninja. Thanks a lot to all you dudes and dudettes who help support this comic—you totally rule!

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A Way Long Overdue Status Update

Holy shit, sorry for the extended period of silence. Jessica has been posting updates to her Patreon, but I totally should've been posting occasional updates here as well, because people have begun asking us if the comic is dead.

So for the record: Satan Ninja 198X is totally not dead.

We’ve been actively working on the comic as much as life allows. In fact, this hiatus (which has taken way longer than we anticipated—of course) is finally drawing to a close. Soon. Hard to say for sure when, but probably around the start of Summer. In the meantime, as evidence of the comic's status as "still alive," we've decided to post the Issue 4 cover (if you haven’t already, go on and click the thumbnail image above to give your eyeballs a much-deserved blast of radness).

So what have we been up to these past several months?

Well, for one thing, Jessica and I got engaged, and we’re getting married this August. We’ve been boning for over ten years, so I figured we might as well make our union all government official. I proposed to her through Fallout 2, a game that I worked on a Restoration Mod for (I served as the lead writer and a voice actor). Normally, after you beat Fallout 2 with the Restoration Project, you’re treated to a special encounter in which you can talk to the various people who worked on the mod (all represented by Star Wars characters for some reason). In Jessica’s version of the game, we changed my character’s dialogue so that’d I’d propose to her. Here’s a screenshot:

Fallout 2 Restoration Project Wedding Proposal

During this haitus, Jessica also went back and did a bunch of art touch-ups on older pages to prepare them for the next run of print issues (the pages on this site haven't been updated yet, but they will be sometime this week). And we’ve been preparing to film a couple more live-action Satan Ninja Promo videos, because why the fuck not? Some awesome props are currently being made for those—it’s going to be rad.

So aside from wedding planning (a huge fucking headache), promo video pre-production, and assorted life stuff, our hiatus has also been prolonged due to some issues with Jessica’s PC, which I’m now going rant about for the next few paragraphs, so feel free to skip ahead if you totally don’t give a shit.

[Computer problems rant begins.]

Just as we had purchased an external hard drive to finally backup all our important files (like, for instance,  all of the Satan Ninja art assets), our current hard drive began to die. We managed to backup the data using the built-in Windows 10 backup feature, but the dying hard drive transferred data at a ridiculously slow rate, causing the whole the process to take days.

Then, once the backup was finally done, I noticed that Windows had failed to back up several files, seemingly at random. Fuck. Eventually, I realized that since the Windows file history backup adds a date to the end of the file name, it simply didn’t bother to back up files that were too long to add a date to (strangely, I couldn’t find anyone else complaining about this glaring issue online, so maybe not many people actually use the Windows 10 backup feature, or we’re weirdos who have more abnormally long file names than most people).

Since our backed up data was missing random files here and there, I had to manually go through every folder on the dying drive and compare it to the backup drive, so I could verify what had and hadn’t been backed up, and then manually copy over files that Window’s auto backup had neglected. And since the hard drive was dying it’d often take about thirty seconds to do something simple like open a folder. The whole process was tedious as fuck and excruciating, but I finally finished, and I’m currently almost done transferring all the files back to a new hard drive.

[Computer problems rant ends.]

So anyway, the comic’s not dead. We’re not dead. And we’ll be unleashing more of our mega rad comic upon the world soon. At this point, we’re just trying to get a few pages ahead so that once we begin releasing weekly pages, we’ll have a bit of a buffer, making it easier for us to stay on a steady page a week schedule. In the meantime, Jessica will be posting previews of the Issue 4 pages to her Patreon. Also, we’ve finally recorded another episode of our podcast, Radicast 198X, so we’ll be posting that later this week.

Oh yeah, and happy Memorial Day to those of you in the US.

EDIT: Whoa, so I just noticed that during this entire hiatus, the "Last Updated" text on the top-left of the homepage has said that the comic was last updated on January of 2016 (it should've said 2017). Oh man, it's kind of painful to think of how many people visiting this page over the past several months might've seen that and assumed the comic was long-dead. Shit.

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Issue 3 Page 38 - The End of Issue 3!

Ket and Darwick

Plots are converging! Things are falling into place. And that’s where we end Issue 3.

Jessica tried really hard to make sure this page wouldn’t take as long as the last few (and it didn’t), but still took longer than we’d like. We’re determined to get back on a steady page a week schedule. But first, we’ll have to take a (hopefully) brief hiatus.

So here’s our game plan during this hiatus. First, Jessica’s going to take a week off of drawing for the first time in years, which will help her from burning out. Then there’s a bunch of minor things in Issue 3 that she’s going to go back and spruce up. Then she’s going to bust out a rad cover for Issue 4, and try to get as big of a head start as we can manage before coming off the hiatus.

In the meantime, we intend to resume our weekly podcast, and Jessica will continue to stream on Twitch and of course fulfill her Patreon rewards.

By the way, the title for Issue 4 is “Rad As Hell” and it’ll totally live up to its namesake.

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Merry Christmas 2016

Merry Christmas from Satan Ninja 198X

We hope you're all having a super rad holiday time! (And if you don't get what's being referenced in the holiday image Jessica whipped up, you totally need to watch this video.)

Looking back at 2016, it was a bit of a mixed bag for us. On the plus side, we had our first interviews about SN8X, our first YouTube review, we went out to Hollywood to be guests on one of our favorite podcasts, we started a podcast of our own, I finally released my horror novel, Jessica's Patreon has passed the half-way mark toward her first goal, and of course we released a bunch of badass pages of SN8X.

On the downside, we haven't released nearly enough badass pages of SN8X this year. Especially these last few months as Jessica has been struggling with juggling various projects at once. We also didn't do a single convention appearance this year, and blog posts have been relatively infrequent due to me focusing on writing.

But 2017 is looking to be the year of the Satan Ninja. We'll be starting the fourth issue of the comic, which is where is everything in the story really falls into place. Just as Issue 1 was largely setup for Issue 2, Issue 3 has been largely setup for the events of Issue 4. Oh, man, I'm so goddam pumped for Issue 4! 2017 should also see us release new promo videos, and we'll finally debut a pseudo-secret SN8X side-project spinoff.

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