Howdy folks, we’re BACK!!! Man oh man, California was amazing, one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. The highlights included wandering San Diego, conquering the comic convention, rockin’ out at Disney Land, exploring L.A and visiting DreamWorks Animation Studio… but the BEST part was meeting so many wonderful and inspiring people, and making some amazing friends on our journey. To everyone at ComicCon who stopped by the Flight booth to say hello, THANK YOU so much! Each and everyone of you was an absolute pleasure to meet, I have definitely got the sweetest (and best looking) readers around! To new readers who’ve just started here, welcome to “Shrub Monkeys!” If you’re curious about what’s going on here, there’s a FAQ and an about page way up top, I hope you enjoy the comic!

The next good chunk of strips is going to be related to our California happenings (I’m back at work storyboarding, and nothing really happens to me while I’m busy boarding) so California should be much more interesting for you to read and for me to draw. And now for some quick announcements:

I’ve decided to bid a fond farewell to girlamatic.com and move Shrub Monkeys to my own website as of September 1^st. I’ve had a great time being a part of this community of warm and talented creators, but feel it’s time to start building up my own place on the web. The strips will stay active on girlamatic.com, but I’ll be updating only on www.ktshy.com when the site launches Wednesday Sept 1st. I’ll keep you guys updated on that.

This is a bit far in advance, but for the majority of October I’ll be in Florida attending a Master Class in graphic storytelling with Paul Pope! Very exciting times. While I won’t be around to respond to comments or emails, I’m working on stock piling some comics so you guys shouldn’t notice my absence. I’m almost at the end of my storyboard contract, and don’t anticipate taking on any new animation work until after I return from Florida, so there’ll be time to catch up on comic making (TIME, precious, precious tiiiime…)

And last but not least, Flight: Volume 7 is available for purchase on amazon.com and should be available at your local bookstores and comic shops as well! Shagster and I have a short story in it called “Fairy Market,” alongside a whole whack of wonderful tales. So check that out if you get the chance

Anyhoo, I’d best get back to work, thanks for reading guys!

~Kt

The San Diego Comic Con was amaaaazing, I don’t even know where to begin! Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hello and grab some free swag! Huge thanks to the fabulous Flight crew for inviting us to be a part of their anthology and hang out at their booth! Mega huge thanks to Rachel and Mike for letting us crash at their place and explore beautiful San Diego and eat way too much Mexican food! My brother and I are off to Disney Land and then on to L.A and Hollywood. You can follow our wandering ramblings over on twitter (mine’s @ktshy Shagster’s is @shaggyshan)

…yup.

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And in other news! San Diego Comic Con is ticking closer and closer! My brother Shagster and I will be in attendance and while we don’t have our own table, we’ll most likely be at the “Flight Anthology” booth (#2235) for hopefully more than a couple hours each day (I’ll tweet about it once we’re there). I say “hopefully” because there are tons of amazing artists and writers in Flight 7, and we might not all be able to cram into the table at the same time all day. For those of you asking “why the ‘Flight’ booth?” it’s because we have a COMIC in this awesome anthology! YES WE DO! You can check out previews and all sorts of information by clicking on the cover image below!

Comic Con would have been a brilliant time to have some sort of “Shrub Monkeys” books available, but that’s still in the works (we’re looking into putting something together for next summer!). HOWEVER, I’ll have some free limited-edition art prints available at the table (as seen on deviantart and my sketch blog):

A small run of 4×6 art prints, and yes you did hear me correct when I said “free”  And while I do appreciate that some of you would love to collect them all, because it’s a small run I ask that you please only grab a couple, whichever prints you like best! If you swing by the table sunday afternoon and there are a bunch left, then for sure come grab some more!

I’m working on getting a Shrub Monkeys compilation 4×6 post card made as well, and Shagster and myself will each have a small batch of super top secret BUTTONS to give away, (you have to ask for em, we won’t have them out in the open!)

I think that’s all for now, AUGH so much to do before we leave!

I love my “new drivers” sign, it’s like the stripes on a skunk or the red dot on a black spider…a big ol’ “Keep away, I’m CRAYZAY!” I figure even 50 years from now I’ll still have that sign plus a couple hundred “baby on board” signs and maybe a gun-totin’ granny in a rocking chair on my roof, just to keep other drivers from getting TOO comfortable around me!

And also… NEWS!!!!!

The release date for Flight volume seven (the second-last in an amazing 8 volume comic anthology run) is drawing very close! And to get y’all pumped, the Flight blog has posted a preview page where you can check out samples from everyone’s comics (“Fairy Market” is from my brother Shagster and me!)  And check out the store locator to see where these lovely books will be sold. The official launch will be at the San Diego Comic Con this July, where you can get your excited, wiggley fingers on some hot, tasty, fresh-off-the-press books! Shagster and I will be in attendance as well, though mostly as wandering vagrants, but if you happen to catch us by the Flight booth, or anywhere else (except the bathroom plz) feel free to say hello and we’ll happily hang out and doodle in your very own Flight copy! 

We’re also going to be wandering the west coast for SUMMER VACATION so if you’ve got any travel tips, favourite spots, or yummy food-joints you’d like to recommend in San Diego, Anaheim, LA and Hollywood, drop us a line in the comments below!

YEE! I’m super excited to share this with you guys: the fabulously talented and super lovely Becky & Frank of Tiny Kitten Teeth fame have made us this gorgeous and adorable guest comic! A guest comic about Chubby Chub Chubs no less! Thank you guys so much! I got the privilege of meeting this dynamic duo back at TCAF, where I picked up their beautifully illustrated and whimsically narrated Tigerbuttah book… awesome, awesome stuff.

This gueststrip has perfect timing as it’s Shagster’s 25th b-day, hurray! So if you folks haven’t checked out his youtube videos yet, mayhaps that’ll be your b-day gift to him, hmm??

I clearly don’t understand cats. Oh wells. And HEY! A happy hello to all you new readers who found this comic through Stumbleupon, thanks so much for stopping by and leaving your comments!

Also, a quick shout out to people going to Anime North: My brother’s doing his annual “Amateur Voice Acting Workshop” which is always a hoot and guaranteed fun!

Who: My energetic comic co-star/brother Shagster (or Shaggy as we call him).
What: Voice acting games, sing-a-long challenges, and prizes!
Where: The Sheraton Hotel (Muskoka 1 room)
When:  Friday 7pm-9pm

Why: Why not!

He got me with a last minute “draw me characters for the panel!” trap as usual, so I’ll be pretty quiet on this end for the rest of the week, but yup I’ll be there too, so if you recognize my feathered-hat (I’ve got a short summer hair-cut right now so you won’t see any nub-buns…) feel free to come say “Hello!” and I’ll try my darndest not to be awkward!

This was the first and ONLY time that has ever happened. But yes, life drawing is awesome!!! I need to get into some more classes…

I’d had about three dreams like this so far, my brains a JERK!

In other news: Yikes-chee-wawa, I’ve been so awful with regular updates. Right after the last comic I got trounced by another work deadline (a fun storyboard, but with like a ba-billion monkeys in it… yes, real monkeys). I’m never able to tell ahead of time how tricky or easy a storyboard assignment is going to be, so I think it’ll be fairer to you guys if I make my update status “bi-weekly” for the next several months instead of scrambling and failing to put a comic out every week, and if I manage to squeeze in an extra weekly comic all the better!  This is something I should have done long ago, and while I don’t have much control over my animation workload, I should have been more communicative with you guys about how often I’m realistically able to update, and for that I apologize.  If you’re set up with either facebook, livejournal, deviantart or twitter, you may find it easier to follow me there as instead of checking this page at random, I’ll come to you!

Thanks so much for stopping by, I hope you have a lovely weekend!

~Katie

Hi everyone! Hope you’ve all been well (and that those celebrating it enjoyed the long weekend) Cheers!

Oh and coincidentally, Hes turned 15 years old on this here 115th update. Crazy!

Edit: whoops, some issue with the file for a couple minutes there. All fixed!!!

BadumCHING!  (Bad puns are the highest form of humor.) Hey folks! This here’s a quicky comic written by my brother based on his adventures in New York, (good times)!  Unfortunately due to some crazy website hack I wasn’t able to log in to Girlamatic for a couple weeks, so if you’ve already seen this comic on my twitter, DA, LJ, or facebook, very sorry for the old news!

I’m afraid I’ve had to let updates slow down to a drunken side-walk hugging crawl this month while I get up to speed in my day job. I’m doing storyboards on a really fun show for the Kratt Bros right now (just finished my first half hour!) and my animation day jobs take monster-stomping-fire-breathing levels of  precedence over these here lil’ webcomics. So nope I haven’t stopped doing them, yup they’ll be back, but there most likely won’t be any updates until this month is over (as I’m also working on a short submission for a kick ass comic anthology, more on that later).  Many thanks as always for stopping by and dropping me a message! Love n’ peace, y’all!