Normally in mid-January, I’m flooding my social media outlets with excited sneak peeks and preview hype for the new issue of the Retro Game SuperHyper fanzine. If you’re one of those who looks forward to the ‘zine each year, you might be eagerly awaiting issue 5! But you also may have noticed this year that I’ve been abnormally quiet on the subject. Unfortunately, the reason for that is that I am nowhere near done with issue 5 and I’ll be missing my self-imposed mid-January deadline by a mile.

If you need a reason, it’s that all of my free time in the past year has been taken up by a massive project. I don’t need to talk much about it, but it was not an art project, not work-related, and not even anything particularly fun, but it’s been a huge undertaking that I had to accomplish, and quite honestly, left me wiped out and with little ambition to focus on anything else.

I’ve recently finished that project, but then was immediately blindsided with the necessity of spending extra time at work to cover for someone who was let go.

All that adds up to zero free weekends and no significant time or energy to spend on an ambitious project like the fanzine, no matter how much fun I have making it.

The good news is, issue 5 *IS* underway, and I have about 10 pages done, with some more work finished but not scanned or ready to be added yet. The plan is still to make issue 5 a “visual” issue, focusing on art and photography, and that’s still the direction I am headed in. As you can see from the header image, the cover art is drawn but not finished, but I wanted to give you at least a peek of what to expect. I can’t wait to get to a place where I can relax and focus on creating this new issue.

So fret not! It’s going to be later this year, but Retro Game SuperHyper issue 5 is definitely coming, and I’m going to try to make it the biggest and best yet. Thanks for your patience and understanding.