I don’t travel that much and when I do I guess I never go to Taco Bell. Lots of readers are writing in to tell me that they have never even heard of mexi-fries. At first I thought that the Taco Bell people must have gotten to them. Not content to simply remove them from their restaurants I figured they had set out to remove them from the very minds of their patrons.

I went to Taco Bell last night and I was shocked at what I discovered. I understand that it is their policy to mess up my order. I expect now that what I ask for is never what will actually end up in my bag. It turns out that simply forgetting your burrito or shorting you a taco is no longer good enough for these sons of bitches though. Now they have decided that they needed to replace their awesome mexi-fries with new shitty fiesta fries. No more delicious and authentic seasoned tater treats. No sir, now you get disgusting little potato wedges fried in salt and sweat. I noticed something was wrong a few months ago when their combo meals no longer included mexi-fries. They tried to pawn off some shitty taco in their place but I would have none of that. “Fuck your taco bitch, I want my fries!” is what I was often heard to say. Now it’s obvious that their removal from the combo meals was simply a precursor to a much larger mexi-fri conspiracy. They are now missing entirely from the menu and every bit of evidence that proved they ever existed has been meticulously removed and probably destroyed. Did those filthy Taco Bell bastards really think I would simply forget how much I liked mexi-fries? Its bullshit like this that makes me worry about bringing a child into the world. These are dark times indeed.

And they are sons of bitches.

Here's the third - or maybe the second, chronologically speaking - installment of The Wandering Age: Last Rites. Of course, we need to thank Elbo for the translations in panels one and two - and we need to thank you, as the readers of a comic ostensibly concerned with gaming, for enduring our erratically sourced samurai epics.

One of the lessons I learned this year at San Diego was that I need to start carrying a sketchbook. I always knew that it was something I should do but I just never did it. I’ve decided to fix that and I’ve begun working really hard to keep a sketchbook and I love it. I figured I could solve another problem with the sketchbook as well, mainly my lack of updates to the gabeart section of the site. So I went ahead and redesigned gabeart to be a sketch dump site. I’ll still post finished illustrations in there when I do them, but I’m going to try and post a new sketch dump each week. I put the first batch up today if your interested in checking them out. A lot of it is just junk that most of you probably won’t care about. But I know as an artist I love looking at other artist’s sketchbooks and seeing how they work. I figure there might be a few of you out there who will find this stuff interesting. Doing the weekly sketch dumps should also keep me motivated to work in my sketchbook.

When Gabe says that Stephen Silver "...is probably my biggest influence as an artist and having him do a sketch of one of my characters was a real treat" I need you to know that this is the most gigantic understatement that has ever been magnetically inscribed on a hard disk array. Let me tell you a story about Gabe and Mr. Silver.

I had a really great time in San Diego this year. I'd like to thank everyone who came out to our booth. We really appreciate it.

I'm glad we decided to reserve this Last Rites thing for when we got back - Gabe pretty much took a day to do it, something that wouldn't have been possible for any one of a hundred reasons while we were at the convention. So, Friday wraps it up, unless our climactic battle rages on longer than originally intended, which is usually the way of such things.

There are other things to do at this convention, like finding out what the next Star Wars movie is called or seeing a preview of the Firefly movie, but we wouldn't know - we're in the dealer room pretty much the whole time. Con attendees know perfectly well what dangers exist in there, such as the dangers of buying expensive bullshit with your food money, and that's why they leave it from time to time. Imagine some depraved Vegas invention which could, in a single iteration of its evil purpose, obliterate your savings and replace the real artifacts of your life with convincing replicas of the sword from Lord of the Rings. This is not some dark fantasy. This is something that can actually happen, if you lack the cunning to contend with the treacherous dealer room and its huckster denizens.

The somewhat elaborate Cardboard Tube Samurai adventure that we wrote is, if not impossible, certainly improbable from the laptop - unfortunately, this took hours to figure out. It's something that we'll do properly on Wednesday and Friday - for the time being, here are our two offerings as a conciliatory gesture. It turns out that my hotel does have Internet, and it's free, even - but that support is extremely porous. Indeed, it only appears to function properly in a five by five area, easily discernable by the dog pile of geeks all trying to get five bars of wireless signal.

This is the current plan, don't hold me to it - we've got a CTS: Wandering Age comic up today, called Last Rites. You'll know what happened when you read it. Now, it has become tradition that we upload a sketch of some sort on days where we are gallavanting far from home. Hopefully you enjoy that sort of thing, but let's be clear - they are fun for us to do, but I'm not above admitting there is a certain pragmatism to the format.

We are leaving tomorrow for San Diego. I hope you come by and see us at Comic-Con.

With Doom 3's precise ship date in hand, now is the time to lavish affection on our machines - or the machines of others, when your console gaming friends suddenly remember that they own a computer. They'll slum down here with us for the major releases, sure - but they secretly wish they were jumping on mushrooms, or one of the other surreal fantasies they indulge in.

Bungie decided to make their most recent Halo 2 update in our forum. They are all really nice guys and had they told me of their intentions I would have begged them to reconsider. They post these updates in forums all the time but I don’t think they really understood just how bad ours is. The only reason it still exists is because at some point someone in there will blow up a nursing home full of senior citizens and the FBI will want a history of their online activities. It’s really just a big pile of evidence that we’ll hand over to the authorities the second they stop posting pictures of their asses and start killing people.

As you can see from the image above, our booth at San Diego is going to be shit hot. As usual I’ll be drawing sketches for anyone who wants one. We’re also going to give away a special edition Halo Xbox that I’ve doodled all over. Anyone who comes by the booth can drop their name in the bucket. On the last day of the con we’ll draw a winner.