Looks like I’ll be taking the “semiautobiographical” out of the description of this webcomic for a bit…

Since I’m flying out of town this Saturday (September 12) to shoot a movie in Michigan for three weeks (WAH-HOO!) I’m going to need some help with the site from the JEFbot community, and that means guest strips! Although I’m also going to be emailing a few of my webcomic peers, part of what convinced me to do this was some awesome comments and emails I received from a few of you readers out there, generously offering to supply a guest strip while I’m away. So YES, please send them in! I’m excited to see how the world of JEFbot and the characters within are interpreted outside my own brain. Check out the requirements below if you’d like to submit a strip:

• Keep it Rated T for Teens, which means no explicit language, nudity, illegal drug use, etc. Use common sense with this one.
• The artwork should be 900 pixels wide. The height can be whatever you’d like, just keep it within reason.
• Explore anything but the current (jefbot+cel+beach) storyline. Even though the guest strips won’t necessarily be canon, I have plans for what happens with cel and jefbot, and it might get confusing if there are alternate futures going on.
• Send the strip to me in RGB, jpeg format. Can be black & white, but still send to me in RGB.
• Deadline: I’d like to get at least one or two this week, before September 12, so I have some time to put up a strip before next Tuesday, especially if I find myself without wifi. However, I’ll be accepting them the entire month of September.
• Email the strip to me with “Guest Strip” in the Subject header by clicking here.
• If you have any questions, feel free to email me, although I might not be able to answer once I’m in Michigan.

That’s it! Now go to town with those pencils and pens, mice and styli, and let me see what you come up with! While I can’t guarantee that every strip submitted will run, as long as you adhere to the rules, I should be able to put yours up on the site. And thank you in advance to everybody who sends in a strip. You’re really helping me out here!

Since I only have about a week of shooting left on Grey Skies and have several more guest strips, I’ll be ramping up the posting frequency a bit as long as my Internet access holds up. So expect a new guest strip every day over the next week!

Also, thanks so much for all the comments you’ve been leaving on the guest strips that have already come out and for supporting the artists who have generously helped me out while I’m away by visiting their sites.

And since I haven’t explicitly said this yet, I consider these strips to be in the Alternate JEFbot Universe and not in JEFbot Universe Prime so you’ll see exciting stuff like: breaking of the fourth wall! Self-aware characters! Talking animals! Canon paradoxes! Etc! I love that these guest writer/artists are creating things that you wouldn’t normally see here – that’s what makes these guest strips so fun for me.

If you haven’t checked out the amazing guest strips from the past couple of weeks, please do so by clicking the following links:

• Guest Strip_01.Krishna Sadasivam, PC Weenies
• Guest Strip_02.Evan Diaz, Pajama Forest
• Guest Strip_03.D.Long, Edmund Finney’s Quest to Find the Meaning of Life
• Guest Strip_04.Audra Furuichi, nemu*nemu

New JEFbot Universe Prime strips should be Go next Friday!