Last week I decided to give the writing a break and redesign shelfabuse.com from scratch. The idea was to design the site around a pile of notebooks and sketchpads strewn across a tabletop; this new look would stand out from the crowd, and emphasise the more personal direction I planned to take the site in.

One week later and things haven’t turned out quite how I’d planned. Somewhere long the way, you see, I realised that I currently spend a good portion of my spare time fucking around with this site’s design. Which would be justifiable if it ever looked stunning, but it doesn’t.

So back to basics it is, then, and I’m now glad I opted for something simple. Not least because the whole sketchpad idea looked like something from the late 90s, but because a slicker aesthetic hopefully places emphasis on the words and images on this site, rather than the fancy CSS borders around them.

A simpler design also allows me to devote more time to my own comic book projects. Somewhere along the way I’d lost track of where I was heading, and spent my precious free time churning out countless reviews when I should have been manifesting my own fabrications. The reviews will continue, naturally, but hopefully a bit more of “me,” whoever that is, will make it to the digital page.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be integrating my own webcomic, The Scribe, into the site, as well as providing a weekly cartoon, and I’d finally just like to thank anyone who submitted their work to shelfabuse.com over the last few years. The indie comic scene has inspired me in ways that were unfathomable when I first started blogging.