Last month Clickwheel, the iPod comic site, relaunched with a new front page and features. Among those new features were an iPhone emulator we're calling the Push-Comic player that allows users to read Clickwheel comics right on their computer.  Today we're launching the next step for our reader featuring more content and a user controlled upload feature.  You can find it at: clickwheel.net/push_comics.

We've completely redesigned the interface and added a bunch of new features, like the push-comics' Lab, a new tool for viewing and testing your comic directly in the emulator to see how it will play on the iPhone and next gen iPods. It's simple and intuitive to use and represents, we believe, the first in a new generation of online comic readers.

Currently, you can only upload your comic to the player and try it out.  But there's more to come.  We're working on a feature that will allow you to push the finished comic directly to your Clickwheel account together with the title, date and description, all without moving off the  push-comics page  and all without needing an iPhone/iPod touch.

But it's not all for the creators.  If you want simply to browse, we have the Editor's Picks, a selection of some of the more recent and/or outstanding work on Clickwheel which, again, you can read directly on the player, including a new exclusive episode of Random Encounters.

We are very excited about the player and have plans to take it much further.  As always, we place a lot of value on you for ideas and suggestions. So if you have any thoughts, please let us know via our forum or by emailing tim'at'clickwheel.net.

So there has been a word I've been avoiding over the last weeks as I've started unveiling just what Bustout Odds is, and with good cause. It's a polarizing term and often inspires immediate outrage.

That word is retcon.

I've been avoiding this word because it does get people all bent of shape, but it's been a few weeks and we're all friends here, so let's not mince words: Bustout Odds is a retcon of Reckless Life.

ON NOES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Relax.

Despite the nasty connotation of the word there are retcons that make sense. Mine, hopefully is one of them, and if you disagree, allow me to try and convince you otherwise:

A retcon as we commonly know it in comics is the act of prior stories being cleaned up, changed around, or otherwise erased via an in-story plot contrivance, um, I mean, narrative. This is typically done to refresh a character that is bogged down in volumes of prior material daunting to new readers, or simply to excuse a story or status change that in retrospect was just plain bad. The motivation here is typically editorially driven and intended to widen the appeal of the character, sometimes at the expense of angering the existing audience.

I won't lie to you, my retcon of Reckless Life to Bustout Odds is not completely bereft of some of these points, and as we discussed last week, some of the motivations for this shift in my work are very practically driven.

Others are not.

The difference between Comic Company X deciding to get a fresh start and when I decide to do the same is at the end of the day my decision is not editorially or financially driven it's creatively driven. Given that my comic is not a media empire there was no pressure on me to do this from anyone. (Quite the opposite, actually.) This was a decision I came to myself, and after A LOT of introspection so you can trust that this was not something I did just to get a few new readers with a new title in name only, I really feel like it's the right call creatively.

So I'm doing all of this over the lead character's name giving me trouble? No, not hardly.

My plan post Murphy's Law was for Reckless Life to continue both the Locke and Tyler storylines, with some stories taking place in Locke's present in Las Vegas and some in his past in New York. I had been planning this since day one of RL in fact. There's one problem though, I didn't like doing Murphy's Law and while I really dig that so many of you liked it, I felt it was my weakest arc to date and many of my most trusted critics agreed. The problem is that RL found it's own voice over the last few years and moved away from the more standard soap opera-ish comic I created in college and when I got to this more subdued story it felt off tone and took away some of Locke's swagger. I lambasted Lucas for wrecking Bobba Fett in Attack of the Clones by showing him as a little kid and Marvel for telling me Wolverine's real name and then I went and did the same thing. I don't regret this, I guess I had to do it to know it wasn't the right way to go, but I can see now that it was not.

So that in hand I knew I had the options of dealing with the effects of the story, flat-out ignoring it going forward, or taking the opportunity to recognize that the comic I was doing had evolved into something I didn't precisely intend but liked way better and push that notion further.

I had no interest in the first option, and I felt the second was a bigger rip-off to readers than the dreaded retcon, so here we are.

You may agree with me, you may not, but I've long since decided that I'm confident in my ability to get you' all to agree when you find that Bustout Odds will be doing what Reckless life did best without some hold-over plot elements that were written when I really hadn't the requisite experience to know just how to make a great comic. I can see now that I only knew how to regurgitate and alter what plenty of other comics already do just fine. You can make a good comic that way, Invincible for example takes what we know and delivers it in a completely fresh way, Ultimate Spider-Man even moreso, but despite the fact that I love both of those comics, it's not what I want to be doing with this series.

So yes, it's a retcon, and that word may make you squirm, but it is a retcon with good intentions. I watch the numbers and the comments and I know just what is you guys dig about my comics and as it so happens it's the same stuff I dig. With that knowledge in hand this little Vegas-based crime comic is going to move away from being a clever interpretation of a lot of comic tentpoles we're used to seeing to something that I hope you will find truly unique to what you might find at the comic shop.

Also, unlike most comic retcons, you can yell directly at the creator. Comment away!

(And be back next week to get a look at a certain ivory-clad hitman that you may recognize!)

So, who is Chance Gray..'s start first with "WHY is Chance Gray?"

As I've mentioned in prior posts, I knew that changes in the way I work were going to effect how and when I was creating comics and I decided to take that opportunity for change all the way and that meant looking at what I was doing, getting under the hood, and seeing where I could improve things both in my craft and in my stories.

In doing this, the very first that came under fire was Locke.  Not so much the character Locke mind you.  Locke drove Reckless Life in a lot of ways, but over the years the name Locke had become problematic. 

There's a lot of crossover between video game and comic fans, especially webcomic fans and I'm sure many of you have played Final Fantasy VI (III in the US.)  Either way, said game contains a thief character named Locke, and this has been a continuous thorn in my side over the years.  Of course I never intended to rip-off Final Fantasy, in fact the Locke we knew grew into that character in the same way he is now becoming Chance Gray, but the fact of the matter is many people think I did just borrow from FFIII, and that is not only bad for the comics' credibility but it grates on me as a creator for people to think that.  The immense popularity of LOST and the character Locke therein has also not helped me make Locke a name that is readily associated with my comic.

So right out of the gate I knew if change was afoot, then that name was going to be the first to go and it was the real key as to how things went down.  I could find a plot contrivance to force the lead character to change his name, or I could just up and do it.  The latter is jarring to the reader and ends Locke's story, though it allows for further streamlining and improvements without any excuses.  The former creates an in-story transition but starts adding in continuity layers I hate and moreover, makes me put stories I want to tell on hold for one I'd "need" to tell.  Essentially it was a full reboot vs a "Superboy punches time" retcon.  I hate those so I choose the former and as a result, here is Chance Gray.

Chance, being a man who embraces his namesake, is a gambler often found at back room poker games and is a small time, albeit rather talented, crook.  While he may be small time in the eyes of some of the more polished criminals he associates with, he's actually far more skilled than any of them would ever give him credit for, and he's constantly reaching for that respect, something his naive and affable nature does little to help.

Like the majority of Las Vegas criminals, Chance gets most of his work via the Crossroader bar in Bustout Town. Bustout Town is the abandoned and quarantined ruins of the former Vegas strip, which also is the location of Chance's safe house, a necessity for him because aside from living outside the law, Chance has run afoul of most of the crime syndicates running the new Vegas that replaced Bustout Town by refusing to conform to the special brand of law that governs that new strip.

Chance fancies himself a bad guy, and is not only unremorseful of anything he does but genuinely enjoys it.  Ironically, in the context of his world, he's not such a terrible person at all and has a dangerous capacity for trust and desire for companionship that often land him in trouble.

Of course, there's far more to Chance, but that will come out in the pages of Bustout Odds where it will be much more fun to see unfold.