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Adam and Jessica Debate the '80s on Maddox's Podcast

Best Debate in the Universe Maddox Satan Ninja Jessica Safron

It's a mega-honor to announce that Jessica and I flew out to LA to hang out with Maddox (whom we've both been long-time fans of) and to be featured as guests on the 28th episode of his awesome podcast, The Best Debate in the Universe. Check it out! I might be just a little biased, but I seriously think it's my favorite episode.

Also, you can check out this Twitch Stream Jessica and I did with Maddox last night (streaming some retro-style games, of course).

These past few days in LA have been superfun and it's a total bummer we now have to return to cold-ass Michigan, but we're excited to end the year by wrapping up Issue 3.

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Radicast 198X - Episode 6 - Evil Dead 2

Radicast 198X 1980s movie review podcast

We have a mega-special double-length episode of our podcast this week. Not only does it feature our first guest, the awesome Gregg Samsa, but it also features us discussing a movie that's incredibly important to me: Evil Dead 2.

Of course, we also talk a lot about the original Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. We also discuss how horror movies in general evolved over the course of the '80s, and at the end of the episode, we tell the tale of how Gregg and the "vampire killer of Paris" are largely responsible for Jessica and I meeting. I also share a few anecdotes from my days as the singer of the horror-themed rock band The EverDead, including my very intimate encounter with a gay zombie.

Some other movies we talk about in brief: The Last House on the Left [1972], I Spit On Your Grave [1978], Slither [2006], Kung Fury [2015]

Intro and outro songs by Michael Cook.

Click here to check out Gregg's music.

Due to hitting our limit on SoundCloud, we won't be hosting the podcasts there and instead we've moved Radicast over to PodBean. You can now expect Radicast 198X to be a weekly show, possibly released every Wednesday, but we'lll see. Radicast is also now on Google Play and iTunes, so it should be a lot easier for people to subscribe and listen to.

But don't worry, the comic is still our focus. Jessica had to finish up another commission before the holidays, but she's done with that now and is back to working on the next comic page.

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Happy Halloween! (2016 Edition)

Every month, Jessica and I make a black and white SN8X bonus strip for Jessica's Patreon (which, by the way, is over half-way toward reaching the first goal!). You could sort of think of these bonus comics as deleted scenes. They tend to show some amusing aside that adds some extra flavor to the SN8X-verse, but isn't essential to the story (like the two peeping ninjas arguing about whether or not Alex's bedroom belongs to a boy or a girl, or Patrick Hyser's battle with the sensei of the Snake Shi).

This month is our 8th such bonus comic, and it's a flashback to a Halloween when Eddie, at the age of 14, first got up the courage to ask Veronica on a date. Showing you the whole comic wouldn't be fair to Jessica's awesome Patrons, since its a reward for their support, but we hope you enjoy this sneak peak of Eddie and Joe in their Halloween costumes.

In other news, we've recently received an award! As part of our effort to get as many people as possible aware of our comic, we upload it to several webcomic hosting sites. One of those is The Duck (previously known as Drunk Duck), and they hand out annual awards that are determined by the votes of the readers. Someone nominated us for the category of Best Superhero comic, and we ended up winning. Here's the announcement, which was done in comic form.

It's interesting, because as I said in the past, I don't really think of SN8X as a superhero comic, but I can understand how it qualifies as one.

Anyway, hope all you dudes have a mega-radical Halloween!

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Issue 3 Page 29 + Update on Updates

Click the image to check out the rad new page. And below is a news update that's a little long, but important.

Since launching this site over two years ago, our goal has been to release a new page of the comic every week, on Saturdays. At first, we had a bit of a buffer (pages already done in advance), but that buffer gradually disappeared over the course of the first year or so. Since then, we've been putting out the pages as Jessica finishes them. Sometimes we hit the Saturday deadline, but other times it comes out on Sunday, or even into the following week.

Our fans have been great about it. No one has ever complained. At least not to us. But in spite of that, it's severely stressful for us every single time a deadline is missed. In fact, I doubt anyone is as disappointed by a late page as we are. We hate the thought of letting people down. Of letting ourselves down. Of taking even longer to share our radical '80s-themed story with the world.

And then once a deadline is missed, we're faced with another problem. Say Jessica gets the page done on the following Tuesday. Do we post it then, or do we hold off until the following Saturday? If we post the page on Tuesday, that'll pretty much guarantee that the next page won't be finished on time for a Saturday release and we'll find ourselves stressing over yet another Saturday passing by without a new page. And there's also the simple matter that some pages take longer than others. Some might take four days for Jessica to complete, while in rare cases it might take two weeks.

We've found that when stress is added to the mix, it seems to slow her down. It also seems that the longer a page takes her to create, the slower she progresses on it (it's a rather strange and sucky phenomenon, but one that's familiar to many artists and creators). Jessica frequently pulls all-nighters in an attempt to get the pages done ASAP. She's canceled plans with friends and family. She sometimes works day and night, only taking breaks to eat and sleep. And the stress has started to take a toll on her health.

She's been resistant to talking about this stuff publically. She doesn't want to come off as a whiner, or a downer, or like she's seeking pity. But I think we owe it to our fans to explain why we've been struggling to release new pages on a steady schedule. I'd hate for anyone to think we just don't care, because that couldn't be further from the truth. This comic is a total labor of love, and I think that shows in our creation. However, I worry that continuing on as we have, stressing to meet that Saturday deadline, will build resentment and the comic will suffer for it.

So for the time being, we've decided to revise our update schedule to "New page posted weekly. Usually."

Jessica will continue to strive to get a page done every week, and we'll post them once they're ready, regardless of what day it is. And as soon as a new page goes live, we'll send out email notifications to those who've signed up for our mailing list.

We hope that having a less stressful update schedule (allowing Jessica to get more steady sleep and spend less time in Bummerville) will eventually result in her being more productive than she was before. And of course you dudes can help out by supporting Jessica's Patreon. The more she makes through that site, the fewer commissions she'll have to take, so more of her drawing time can be spent on SN8X. We've revised the Patreon rewards, so if you haven't checked it out it in a while, you should totally give it another look.

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Radicast 198X Episode 1 - Death Wish 3

That's right, we've jumped on board the podcast bandwagon. Or, actually, we're riding our skateboards while holding on to the back of the bandwagon, Marty McFly style, because that's way cooler than sitting in some fucking crowded bandwagon.

For the past few years, Jessica and I have almost exclusively consumed media from the '80s (partially for our entertainment, and partially as research for the comic). After every movie or show that we watch, I read up about it and then Jessica and I tend to discuss it and give our ratings (out of five). So we figured we might as well turn those discussions into a short podcast (most episodes run about 30 minutes).

The very first trial episode we recorded was actually after we saw the terrible 1984 Supergirl movie. However, we recorded it really late so Jessica was mega tired and it showed in the recording. We consider that episode zero, and instead of releasing it publicly, Jessica made it available to her patrons as a little bonus.

For our first "official" episode, we discuss the awesomely terrible 1985 movie Death Wish 3.

Other movies we briefly talk about in this episode: Death Wish [1974], Death Wish II [1982], Rocky [1976], Rocky II [1979], Girls Just Wanna Have Fun [1985], Rambo: First Blood Part II [1985], Assault on Precinct 13 [1976]

We've already recorded three more episodes, and we'll put those out as I edit them.

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Issue 3 Page 26 + Our First Video Review + TV Tropes!

Click the above image to view the new page!

Also, majorly cool dude Mike Thompson made a badass video review of Satan Ninja 198X for his Action Ration YouTube channel:

Watching that video totally made our week. Thanks, Mike, you're officially rad as fuck!

Oh, and if you know your shit when it comes to TV Tropes, you should head over to the freshly spawned Satan Ninja 198X TV Tropes page and do your thing.

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Fun with Statistics!

Wait, don't flee! Statistics can totally be fun!

Seriously, Google Analytics is awesome. It’s pretty much the only way for us to have any kind of idea as to how “well” this website is doing (likes on our Facebook page are rad too, so you should totally like it if you haven’t yet—supporting us on Patreon is even better).

Looking over 2016 so far, here are some of the more interesting stats:

  • Since January, we’ve had over 22,000 people check out the site.
  • On average, our website gets between 100-200 sessions a day.
  • About 94% of our visitors are dudes. No idea why we don’t have more female readers.
  • Most of our readers hail from the US, no surprise there. Followed by Canada, the UK, Australia, and then a bunch of European countries. Africa seems to be the continent that we’re least popular with (but we've still had a few hundred visitors from there).
  • Our most viewed page is Issue 3, Page 20: “Dude Shinobi in Ninja Exploder II” which brought us a whole bunch of traffic from reddit. Unfortunately, only a very tiny percentage of reddit traffic stayed around to check out the site beyond that one page.
  • Our most popular blog post was “Jessica Safron Punk Girl Photoshoot.” Hmm... I'm going to guess it was the underboobs.

Using Google Analytics, we can also get a rough gauge of character popularity by seeing how many unique page views the various character profiles in the About The Characters page have gotten since the first of the year. Here they are listed from most popular to least:

  1. Alex
  2. Heather
  3. Veronica
  4. Ket
  5. Tina
  6. Eddie
  7. Carmen
  8. Ryan
  9. Psycho Sam
  10. Trance
  11. Dean
  12. Darwick
  13. Viper
  14. Joe
  15. Trent
  16. Corey

Looks like there’s a heavy preference toward the SN8X babes, with the Hyser sisters winning the popularity contest. Veronica would be so upset. Also, poor Corey.

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New Page Coming Super Soon

The next page got delayed by Jessica taking on some art commissions (psst, that's your cue to support her Patreon [if you don't already] so she spends less time on commissions and more time doing the comic). She's now very close to finishing the next page, but we didn't want to let a whole two weeks go by without some kind of update.

So here, you can enjoy some of the art I received in honor of my recent 35th birthday. The badass image at the top of this post was drawn by our friend Matt G., whom you might know as Eddie in our live-action promo videos.

Here's an awesome birthday card Jessica's mom made me:

Pizza Wizard Birthday Card Front

Pizza Wizard Birthday Card Inside

And here's a sketch Jessica did of me riding a chocobo for some reason:

Adam Dravian Chocobo Rider

 

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Satan Ninja Comic Strips

Click the image to view the latest strip!

Ever since we launched this site, we’ve noticed that the Internet in general tends to be a lot more receptive to gag strip comics as opposed to long-form comics. For those who don’t know the difference, long-form comics are story-driven (think Batman or Dragonball), while gag strips are joke-driven and each strip tends to stand alone (think Garfield or xkcd).

The popularity of gag strips on the Internet makes sense. Long-form comics require that a reader start at the beginning (or at least at the beginning of the latest narrative arc) in order to fully appreciate it. They require a time investment, which is a total bummer. Gag strip comics, on the other hand, are instantly accessible. You can see a single page, chuckle at it, and then carry on with browsing the ‘net. Or better yet, share the page to social media so you can make your friends and family laugh and feel unjustifiably funnier for having shared it.

Recently, we decided to start doing a monthly bonus Satan Ninja gag strip for Jessica’s $10+ patrons. It was while working on the gag strip for March that we thought: “Hey! Why don’t we totally re-vamp Satan Ninja to be a gag strip comic all the time!” We then smacked our foreheads and exclaimed “Duh!”

Now, some of you might not be too happy with this change, and we totally understand that. But listen, since Jessica quit her “day” job to focus on the comic, it simply makes sense for us to take the path that has the greatest chance of success: the path of the gag strip.

Besides, the comic will still feature Jessica’s awesome art, and all your favorite characters will still be there, and so will the ‘80s references. And now that we’re a gag strip, we have a lot more creative freedom. We can do things like break the fourth wall, and “kill” characters for the sake of a gag, only to have them back without explanation in the next strip. And it’ll be a lot easier to write the comic without having to worry about things like plot or continuity. From now on it’s nothing but good ol’ wacky fun and gags!

And, oh yeah, happy April Fools Day.

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Another Text Interview & Our First Podcast

Two new interviews have gone live this week. First, here's a written one that Action A Go Go did with Jessica that mostly focuses on art. She dishes out some great wisdom for any of you would-be artists out there.

And second, you can listen to my and Jessica's first podcast interview, on 80's Reboot Overdrive, where we spend a little over an hour talking about the comic and '80s movies. We were told we had to keep things family friendly for the podcast, so you can hear me constantly struggle not to swear, and as a special bonus, you can hear my really shitty Corey Feldman impression.

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