I will be exhibiting with Topatoco (Booth #202) and we'll have genuine contentment and well-being for sale in the form of books that I can sketch in for you and t-shirts and whatnot.

I will likely also have a preview copy of Goats: Showcase Showdown, to be viewed by human eyes for the very first time. It will be hidden away for security purposes. If you want to see it, whisper code word "HAM HOCKS" deep into the nearest Topatocoan's ear and they will fetch it for you.

So much more to tell you but Friday's comic ain't gonna ink itself, as the old proverb says.

Thought it might be helpful to have a few reference points for the current storyline since a lot of this stuff goes back a few years.

• One Death shares the recipe for making demons.
• Toothgnip resurrects Bob with the aid of some corn flakes and murphy's oil soap
• Bob is fairly bloodthirsty in his new incarnation. And in his old one, I suppose.
• Oliver and Diablo proved that if you work together, you can nuke even the sturdiest of spaceships.
• The negotiation of the non-aggression pact occurred off camera, since pact negotiation is about as thrilling as CSPAN. It is all broken to hell now anyhow.
• Apparently you can make just about anything with cornflakes.

Hope those help you get your bearings. Tweet me if you have any questions regarding the current storyline that need clearin' up, I'll add the more useful links and info here.

You could argue I've been a negligent parent, with infrequent updates, but I could counter that life is weird and requires periods of intense concentration on things like how many brobee dolls is an appropriate number for a child to own, and plus I like your sister better than you, she gets all A's and will eventually grow up to be Internet President.

What can I say.

I may replace this news column with the twitter feed, I prefer the conversational style to the larger blog posts. I don't want to waste anyone's time, most of all my own. I'd rather just get the 140 characters out there and get back to drawing comics.

Just thinkin' out loud here, of course.

Let me know what you think? Not via the comments, obviously. Heh.

USPS INTERNATIONAL PRIORITY = December 8

USPS DOMESTIC EXPRESS = December 21

Please make your orders accordingly, once those dates have passed there's not a lot we can do. Physics prevents most of our more creative solutions to this dilemma unfortunately.

Also I want to apologize to all of you for today's missed strip. My daughter has been sick since Monday, and while I've been trying to keep up with my workload by working nights, I've fallen behind considerably. Rather than post a rushed strip late today I'm just going to pick things up on Monday and hope for a better week.

Once work on Book 3 is completed (still working on the last few copyedits) I'm going to try and rebuild my long-vanished buffer to try and prevent these things from happening again. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

First up is the new book! The Corndog Imperative is book two of The Infinite Pendergast Cycle, serving up full-color Goats chaos and mayhem from 2006 and 2007. Published by Del Rey, this is my second mass-market release. It'll be available at your local comic shops and bookstores and online in various places but if you'd be kind enough to preorder it directly from us you'll be helping to support the strip. You'll also have the opportunity to order the book signed and sketched by Yours Truly for a few extra shekels and we'll also toss in an Overclocked Lemon or Psychic Potato stressball (also available separately) if you so desire. And every preorder ships with a free full-color plastic bookmark, for place-savin' while you're reading.

If you never picked up the first book, or you're buying Christmas presents for someone new to the strip, we've knocked the price of book one, Infinite Typewriters, down to only twelve dollars. That's a two dollar savings off the cover price! And you can get both books together for only $25, for a combined savings of like, seventy dollars probably.

I'd like to stress that it's extremely important for me to sell as many of these books as possible if I would like to please my corporate masters and have them continue to print more Goats books in the future. Please help if you can and consider giving them to your friends and family this holiday.

Next, we've got two new t-shirts available for wearing! Check out the new Turtles All The Way Down and I'm Feeling Randy. Both instant classics. Both available in your size. Both guaranteed to make you more attractive and/or fiscally savvy.

We're also offering prints in a variety of flavors, including Showcase Showdown, featuring art from the cover of the upcoming Book 3, Team Force Alpha prints Danger Jungle: Swamp Action and Graveyard of Death, and the full Jonathan Livingston Seagull comic. There might be some others. I can't be bothered to check.

That's about it for store hoohah. Friday's strip finishes up the Status Quo storyline (and the content for the mostly-theoretical Book Four), and I'm going on mandatory vacation (i.e., working on copyedits to book 3 while everyone else travels repeatedly to one of several nearby identical Target stores to buy diaper paste) to Florida, Land of Jewish Grandparents next week, so this seems as good a time for a break from the strip as any. Brock will be contributing Teh Nerdzors strips for the next two weeks. Please be gentle with him. I'll be back on December 7th with a new storyline to kick off Book 5.