Well, its that time again. Joyce’s birthday is today (February 2nd) and that’s the time we start gearing up for another Bloomsday. To get people in the spirit I usual do a series of drawings, bookmarks really, released daily over twitter. 135days from now until Bloomsday itself this makes for a nice little birthday gift to the Old Fella.
This year, 2016, also marks the centennial of the Easter Rising in Dublin, an important moment in the struggle for Irish Freedom and a date close to the heart of many fans of Joyce’s work. To honor and commemorate that date I’ve changed the format of the bookmark drawings this time around.
I’ll be drawing portraits of one hundred “Heroes of Irish Freedom” from now until Bloomsday based upon a list developed by good friend Pat Callan. So far they’ve been great fun to do and have given me a chance to learn more Irish history each day. I hope people use them as I have, as a window into study. We’ll try to figure out a way to drop some links to good biographical information onto the tweets for people encountering them that way, and our hope is to collect the group of them somewhere once all is done.
“But that’s only 100drawings,” you may say. And “what about the other 35?” you may say.
Good question. Don’t worry. I’ve got something more Joyce in mind as we draw closer to Bloomsday.
So let’s get started, and we’ll see you on Bloomsday,
-Rob
There are quite a few people doing this for a living of course, and even more finding a way to make enough money to think of it as “supported hobby.” The secret is in realizing that while what you’re putting out there is free content the ownership and control of it as an intellectual property is entirely your own. 
So friend and fellow cartoonist Gabe Ostley brought up some good points about money and webcomix on 
Writing on the fly a bit today as my wife and I get ready for a trip to Paris tomorrow. We’ve never been and, no, neither of us speak a lick of French. So some of this past week has been spent struggling through Rosetta Stone software and iPhone apps intended to bolster up the idea that we’re at least trying to understand the language.
So tomorrow we bring back the comic (finally!) in regularly updated installments. There’s been a lot of work done on the mechanics of both the comic and its website since we premiered it on Bloomsday back in June. Probably the most time-consuming, and maybe the most important, change since then is our decision to switch to hand-lettering. Josh and I (though mostly Josh, thank god) will be drawing all the text on the original art rather than adding it using a computer font. Yes, it’s a crazy, old-school way of doing things that I’m absolutely certain is worth every bit of the trouble. 
So all of these earliest posts bring us back up to speed with how the project has changed since its inception and premier at Bloomsday ’08. Mostly what you, as new readers, should know that we’re doing are best here to set up for the long-haul of a project that could not exist if not for the interactive possibilities of the internet. We’re learning a lot of new stuff to do this and, like in ULYSSES, the learning curve for this stuff is pretty high. We hope that this new format of the site and new presentation of its content makes connect with fans (and experts) of the novel that much easier for us while allowing each of you add advice, criticism, hand-launched rotten vegetables or faint praise whenever necessary. The site, and the comic itself, cannot happen without that kind of input from readers.