You know what book I’d love to review someday soon? How To Make Webcomics, the all-in-one, do-it-yourself tome put together by the fellas on the Halfpixel Brodeo and Jamboree. You know what I can’t review?

Yep, you’re good guessers. It seems that someone very powerful and very angry has decided to put a stop on anything and everything Scott Kurtz attempts to accomplish. Sure, a few PvP strips have made it out unscathed since a week long plague hit ol’ Kurtzie, an event he cataloged with a few guest strips and a post:

Just a quick notice on outstanding orders in the PvP store.

I’ve been home sick for almost two weeks and because of that, the orders have piled up at the office. We’ve sent out a bunch of stuff yesterday but we have a long way to go. Especially orders for How to Make Webcomics. So please bear with me as we get out from under the pile of orders. We’re going to kick them out as fast as we can and make up for lost time.

Know that orders are going to be going out all week, just as fast as we can sketch, sign, stuff and stamp.

Management greatly appreciates your patience in this matter.

After I send off an e-mail regarding this very matter, it was comforting to know I wasn’t the only one left in the dark. And if there’s a good reason to miss a shipment or two, it’s life-threatening illness. But as if that weren’t enough, a real-life natural disaster has struck the Halfpixel studios, home to both Kurtz and Kris Straub, which may cause even more delays:

I can’t win. It’s like nature itself is conspiring against me now to keep me from catching up on my work.

Came into the office this morning to discover the window in front of our shipping nook completely blown out and pools of water and broken glass strewn about the area. It turns out there was some severe “tornadic” activity in the area last night and it blew chunks of the roof off of our building and then flung said chunks in a circle of death back into my window. The frightening thing is that despite losing a very large window, there was very little glass inside the office. That’s what leads me to believe we had some twisting winds. The window broke but was sucked out away from the building.

We lost our shipping computer, the mac mini my fans bought me years ago. It’s a fountain now. I tipped it over and water poured out of it. We lost the 21 inch Sony CRT monitor. That thing was a workhorse from ages ago. That Trinitron never broke down but it could not withstand water being poured into its port vents. The rain beat in through this broken window right onto the shipping table and just pooled there. Everything on the table marinated in it.

We got very lucky not to lose any product save for a stack of How to Make Webcomic books I had sketched in and prepared to ship out. I’m more pissed about the lost time and art than I am the cost of the books. But hey, we could have gotten off with much worse.

So we’ve spent the day cleaning up glass and spreading stuff out to dry. If, in the next week or two you get a package with a wrinkled invoice, know that it survived the mini-tornado of aught 8.

Having been born and bred by fellow Tornado Alley member, Kansas (or as we Kansans like to call it, “The Land of Ahs”), I can relate to dodging twisters and truck rides with Helen Hunt and identify with the problem Kurtz has been slammed with. Let’s just hope that bad things don’t always come in threes.