Back To Business.

For anyone who missed the good news earlier in the week. Yes, Babayka-Lives is indeed back online. So why not head over there now and read the long awaited Page-72, as we start to set up the cliffhanger for the end of Chapter three.

New reader and not ready for Page-72 yet? Why not head over to Babayka-Lives on Tapastic and read the first 20-pages of Brides Of Babayka. Watch (or rather read) the nightmare unfold from the very beginning. I should also say a friendly ‘Hello’ to any new readers of this blog I may have picked up from Tapastic over the last month. Hope you’re enjoying the web-series so far.

My blog’s ratings have dropped drastically over the last few days, which is a good thing, as it means readers are now migrating back to the main web-comic, after our unscheduled hiatus recently. It was a hell of a turbulent start to my second year of running a web-comic, but thankfully Babayka-Lives is still kicking.

Babayka-Lives (Again.)

Babayka-Lives.com

And… we’re back.

Yep, was kind of hoping to sleepwalk through January this year with no big dramas, but unexpectedly ended up having to rebuild my whole web-comic from the ground up again instead (the internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.) But on the plus side (because there is a couple of positives that have come out of this), I think my site looks a little sleeker and more redefined now. I had no plans to tart up my web-comic in 2015, but now that I have, I’m really glad I did. I think this is the best it’s ever looked. One of the things I regretted after launching the web-comic in late 2013, was not having the page number underneath, now there’s both page numbers and a decent archive option as well, making the comic more accessible to new readers and old readers who wanna catch up. I also finally got around to putting in a short-but-sweet ‘About Page’ too. Plus my recent being hacked woes made me realize I needed to be brave and set up a second online feed for Babayka-Lives, which I did on Tapastic. This gives readers somewhere else to find the web-series when the main site’s down for whatever reason, and is something I wished I had done sooner.

So what’s next, you may ask? Well… hopefully… business as usual. I’m gonna spend the rest of the week sorting out any bugs that pop up (it may take a few days for the search engines and so on to catch up with the changes), and then on this coming Saturday, all being well, I’ll finally get to post the allusive Page-72.

Please update all RSS feeds to avoid disappointment. You can also now Like, Subscribe and Follow the web-comic (all of which are greatly appreciated.) Other ways you can show some love for Babayka-Lives include: Rebloging, Reposting, Tweeting, Fan-Art, Fan-Fic, Slash-Fic, Skywriting, Cosplaying, Changing your first name to ‘Babayka’, your last name to ‘Lives’, and your middle name to ‘Hyphen’. Large, painful Babayka-Lives facial tattoos, or just leaving good old feedback at: babayka-lives@outlook.com

Thanks to everyone one that’s kept checking back and wanting to see more of this web-series. It was a huge bummer that the site got hacked just as the story was hotting up. I can tell from recent stats that there’s been a loyal readership that’s built up and grown slowly throughout 2014, so it was very disappointing to start the year off with a setback like that. I’m now just looking forward to trying to get things hopefully back on track over the next couple of weeks. Pick up where we left off earlier this month, as it were.

Don’t forget you can read a quick recap of what’s previously happen in Brides Of Babayka below, in the last post, for those who need a refresher.

A Quick Recap.

With Babayka-Lives coming back online hopefully in the next week or two, I thought before it does, it might be a good idea to have a quick recap of the story so far. Maybe the most fun way to do this is to head over to Babayka-Lives on Tapastic and relive those early pages again on there. But for those who want an even quicker and easier way, here’s a quick recap to bring you up to speed for when the story does return very shortly.

Previously on Brides Of Babayka…

Chapter One: A small group of six English men are met at a Russian airport by a mysterious and beautiful young girl named Yana. The men are four bachelors and two company chaperones visiting Russia for the weekend in search of potential Russian Brides. Yana herself claims to be working for a small Russian business called ‘Brides Of Babayka.’ Taken deep into the wilderness, they find themselves arriving at a large secluded house, tucked away at the bottom of a hillside quarry. The men are shown to their rooms and told they will be guests at a party later that night where they will be introduces to the girls, and that the hotel only has one other guest who resides in the room at the end of the hall. While preparing for that night, one bachelor (Kevin Moon) finds a human tooth on the floor of his bathroom after retrieving a dropped razor blade. The party starts, and one of the bachelors called Ben Plug introduces himself to a pretty blonde girl named Alina, who he has been corresponding with over the internet. While another one of the bachelors (a very young, good looking man called Julian Webb), appears to be a big hit with the ladies. Later that night during the party, the forth bachelor (an elderly man named Colin Mack) is suddenly taken ill after accepting a drink earlier from Yana. Senior company chaperone (Barry Conner) instructs the younger chaperone (Ronald Blake) to take the old man to bed, but Yana quickly offers to have two of her girls handle Mr Mack for them instead. Weak and dizzy, the old man is led upstairs by two of the girls (Vera and Zoya), but is not taken back to his room, but rather the room at the end of the hall where their mystery guest resides. Once locked inside, the old man is set upon by something sinister hiding in the shadows.

Chapter Two: The morning after the big party finds Ben waking up next to Alina after spending the night together. The bachelors are meant to be going on a hike and picnic with the girls, but Ben quickly blows off the offer to spend the day with Alina. Blake tries to check on Mr Mack to see if he’s feeling better after falling ill the previous night, but is intercepted by Yana, who says she has just spoken with the old man, and he’d rather stay behind and sleep in and join them later. The girls and bachelors set out for their picnic, and much to the annoyance of Kevin Moon, the girls are again swooning and ganging around the young Julian Webb. The group treks through a broken landscape of deserted homes and abandoned farm land until they find a clearing to have their picnic. Back at the hotel, Ben and Alina decide to get up and get some breakfast. While heading downstairs, Ben informs Alina that he has already booked a room at his favourite Sci-Fi TV show themed convention, which they could use, if she accept his marriage proposal. Rather then answer him, though, Alina shouts out to a figure standing behind Ben in the dark. Zoya, clad in a plastic bodysuit, emerges and violently strikes and kills a shocked Ben Plug with a sledgehammer. Meanwhile back at the picnic, a rainstorm breaks out, forcing everyone to start fleeing back to the hotel, as Alina and Zoya take Ben’s body into the room at the end of the hall, and try and clean up the kill scene. The group returns to the hotel all wet, and Yana suggest they get dried off, and get ready for the Bachelors leaving party that night. On his way back to his room, Kevin Moon again finds a human tooth (this one having belonged to Ben Plug), but Moon is unaware he is being watched by Yana and Vera as he studies it.  

Chapter Three: The leaving party is in full swing, and again Julian is centre of attention amongst the ladies, and openingly mocking Kevin to the amusement of the young girls. Blake meanwhile tries to check on Colin, but finds his door locked and can get no answer from inside. While leaving the party briefly to use the urinal, Julian in the meantime is ambushed by Kevin Moon in the bathroom. Intent on beating Julian up for stealing the limelight and mocking him, Kevin is left furious when Julian quickly talks his way out of any walloping with the threat of legal action, and Moon storms out the toilet in a foul mood, his bloodlust unabated. Leaving the party, Kevin finds Alina creeping about upstairs and decides to take his anger out on her, after it transpires that Alina had ignored Kevin’s attempts to engage with her over the internet before this visit. Kevin’s attack is short lived though, as he is knocked out from behind by Yana with a glass bottle. Yana instructs that Moon be taken to her room, and that they also “fetch the bladder.” Back at the bar, Blake approaches Conner and insists he helps him try and get an answer out of Colin. Begrudgingly Conner agrees, leaving Blake to supervise a now Bachelorless party. Up in Yana’s room, Moon starts to wake. While he was passed out, the girls have tied him to a chair sitting in the middle of a large sheet of plastic wrap. Yana berates Moon over his un-gentlemanly conduct, before using a knitting-needle to force a leather bladder up inside Moon’s head through his right nostril. Any pleading from Moon is ignored, as a foot pump is used to inflate the bladder, crushing Moon’s brain against the inside of his skull and killing him. Yana instructs that the girls wait a couple of hours, before cutting up and moving the body to the room at the end of the hall.

And that’s where we got to, as I move closer-and-closer to getting Babayka-Lives back online. What will become of Blake, Conner and Webb? Will they escape The Brides Of Babayka? And the most important question of all… are you ready to take a trip into the room at the end of the hall and meet the monstrous Babayka?

Prints For Sale.

In a bid to help fund Babayka-Lives in 2015, I’ve decided to start selling some prints on my deviantart page. I’ve already got a few Babayka-Lives related artworks up for sale now. If you feel like helping out the web-comic, whilst treating yourself to an awesome art print, please do. All the money raised goes towards maintaining\running Babayka-Lives.com during 2015 and really does help big time.

Also, please feel free to Email me at: babayka-lives@outlook.com if there’s any piece of artwork you’d like to see made available as a print. Right now it’s just Babayka-Lives prints, but I’m open to adding non-Babayka-Lives artwork down the line. So please do get in touch if you’d like to nominate an pin-up, and if that pin-up gets enough votes, I’ll add it to the roster.  

A big thanks to all Babayka-Lives readers that did check out my account over on Tapastic last week. It’s been getting hits, so clearly some of you have. I found Tapastic so user friendly I’m almost tempted just to make it the sole Babayka-Lives output… but I won’t… but I do recommend it to first time web-comic creators looking for somewhere quick and easy to start their web-comic series. So far it’s a thumbs up from me.  

Again, a massive thank you to those who have shown support and stuck with the web-comic during this last crummy fortnight. Hopefully I’ll have some more positive news for you over this forthcoming fortnight. And lastly a disappointed headshake and two-finger salute to all creativity killer hackers types, schadenfreuden gawkers, and people in general who use the internet to be shitty to other people. I sometimes wish Krampus was real, and late on Christmas eve at night every year, he would just go around sitting naked on the faces of all internet trolls, hackers and haters as they lie sleeping in their beds as their much deserved Xmas present for that year. I can’t be the only one, right?

A quick update on the main site. Work is well underway on bringing Babayka-Lives.com back from the dead. It was a massive kick in the nuts kind of way to start 2015, but I am determined to resurrect this web-series, have no fear. No official date on when it’ll be back online, but my birthday’s in very early Febuary, and I’d like to be back online by then, if I can. So sooner, rather than later, folks, so please do keep checking back. I’ll have a better idea of if that’s possible next week, so I’ll make some kind of announcement then. Hopefully this shoddy work-in-progress photo below will keep readers going until then.   

Extra nerdy points to those who notices I choose to take a crappy photo on my phone, when you can clearly see a Windows Snip icon in the lower left-hand corner which would have done the job so much better… I wanted the photo to be dramatic and mysterious, ok?

Important Site News.

As you all probably know by now Babayka-Lives was hacked early last week. I don’t think it was a lone vindictive hacker attack (even though I’d just finished posting a pretty close to knuckle scene), I think it was probably more likely a random opportunist hacker who just did a botch job of trying to put malware on my site, and just ended up mangling the site instead (Jeez, just my luck to get the Mr Bean of hackers targeting my site.) After this hack attack, and some pretty piss-poor tech support from my web-host, sadly it become very clear that Babayka-Lives.com will indeed now be needed to be rebuilt from scratch. It’s a massive blow, and a crummy way to start 2015, but there’s no getting around it. This will be my third time rebuilding Babayka-Lives.com from square one.

One thing that’s become clear and I’m gonna take away from this whole sorry affair, is that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have Babayka-Lives going out on a secondary feed online. Somewhere else online people can find this series, for the next time my site gets hacked or goes down for whatever reason. With that in mind, I’ve just started posting work on Tapastic. If you head over there now, you’ll find I’ve already posted the first four pages of Brides Of Babayka. I’ll be uploading pages four-at-a-time randomly in the coming weeks until I get us back up to page 71 (the page we were on when the site got hacked.) I’ll most likely upload another four pages at some point this week, and be sure to let readers know via this blog when it has been updated. At least on Tapastic you can relive the first 71-pages while I try and get Babayka-Lives.com active again in the coming weeks.

If you wanna make a note of the url it’s:

http://tapastic.com/series/babayka-lives

So the battle-plan for moving forward looks like this. Over the coming next few weeks, I’ll be trying to get a new look (and maybe even better) Babayka-Lives off the ground. I will be sure to keep updating this blog and my deviantart journal to keep you all up to date on the progress. While I do that, why not reread the first two-thirds of Brides Of Babayka over on Tapastic.

A big thank you to those who have reach out or shown concern over the site in the last week. I’m hoping by early springtime at the latest, we’ll all be back on track and moving on, and hope readers ain’t too disappointed over these recent events.

Site Update.

Wow… technology really been kicking my arse this week. Firstly the memory stick I keep all my Babayka-Lives work on got corrupted meaning my laptop, that I post pages onto the internet from, no longer excepts\recognizes it (luckily, I did make a back-up copy, so that’s one drawback I should be able to overcome, even if I’m now down the cost of one perfectly good memory stick.) And then as you all probably know by now, my web-comic mysteriously went down on the same day at the start of the week. I’ve been talking to my web-host (very, very slowly… they like to leave 24-hour gaps between very brief messages), and as far as I can tell, it’s because of a botched hack job that my site is down. I’ve tried deleting the supposedly infected files, but still no luck, sadly. Just like the rest of this week, I’m currently now just waiting to hear back from my web-host… again.

I’m very happy I made the decision to keep my blog off-site for events just like this. If I had one of those under the web-comic blogs, I’d be screwed right now and you wouldn‘t be reading this. I might start thinking about doing an Email newsletter in the future, too, at some point, maybe.

So a big sorry to people who tune in today expecting a new page. If I get really lucky, and the site comes back online within the weekend, I’ll stick up the new Brides Of Babayka page ASAP. However, considering how this week has played out so far, I think it would be more realistic to say that the next new page will probably more likely go up next weekend now. It’s a bit of a bummer, I know. But at least it didn’t happen on the one year anniversary, or before I got to kill off Kevin Moon, so that’s a plus. (Wait… could be an angry Moon fan? So filled with rage that I killed off his favourite character, he hacked the site as an act of revenge? Even as I type these words, he’s out there online right now somewhere trying to rise an army of fellow Moon loving readers to attack me and the web-comic because of what I did to his favourite character? No… That’s stupid… It was probably just North Korea or something who did it.)

Back To Drac.

While we wait for my web-comic to come back online (my web-host says someone should be looking into it in the next 12-to-24-hours), here’s a Dracula related blog post to keep everyone going… Enjoy.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a bit of a fan of Dracula, and was lucky enough to get two Dracula themed presents this year. To be fair, I did buy one myself, but let’s not split hairs on this. A friend of mine was very kind enough to get me a copy of Dario Argento’s Dracula out of the blue, finally giving me a chance to see the film after waiting so long for it to come out here in the UK. And as mentioned, I bought myself a copy of Guido Crepax’s comic-book adaptation of Dracula (there’s no Wiki Crepax\Dracula entry, but I did find this cool French youtube video someone had made with shots from the book cut to scenes of the 92 Coppola movie, which is well worth a watch.) Sadly there’s no English langue’s version of the book, as far as I know, so I had to get a French copy. But on the upside, it is beautifully printed, and a stunning book.  

I’ll start with a few quick thoughts on Argento’s Dracula. While there’s maybe not much love out there for this film (it’s currently got a 3.6 out of 10 rating on imdb), I have to say as someone who’s seen a fair few Dracula films, I’ve seen a lot worse. I like my Dracula films sleazy and European, and on this at least the film doesn’t disappoint. I feel in recent times, the character of Dracula has maybe been watered down a fair amount in pop culture, so I’d give this film credit for at least showing a darker Dracula. I guess apart from a giant CGI mantis, there’s nothing really new this film has to offer, and I accept that. But for the most part, I did enjoy this film. For me it treads old ground, but after recent years of wimpy vampire movies, it was old ground I was happy to see retread. Plus I like that we got to see Argento’s take on Dracula. I like to see modern horror masters tackle the character of Dracula. I enjoyed this film as much as I usually enjoy most Dracula adaptations. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s no car-wreck either. A couple of dodgy CGI scenes aside, I mostly enjoyed watching this film. It’s like a sleazy European Dracula movie made in the 70’s, that someone’s just unearthed in modern times. I think if you’ve been feeling that must modern Dracula films feel a bit lightweight and fluffy, you might get something out of watching this film, at least.

As for the Crepax Dracula adaptation. I rate this along side the Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series, as my favourite Dracula related books out there. Being both a massive Guido Crepax and Dracula fan, seeing Crepax take on possibly the greatest horror story of all time is a huge buzz. The book does not disappoint (apart from the fact I can’t get an English edition.) The artwork is stunning, especially when you compare it to the pretty ropey Frankenstein adaptation that follows it in this book. Even the Victorian backgrounds and settings are well drawn. I would go so far as to say the Crepax comic is my favourite visual adaptation of the Dracula story to date. Ironically, like Argento’s Dracula, I really like the European sleaze feel to this graphic-novel, too. I wonder if this is maybe the most graphic telling of the Dracula story out there? I think you can probably tell I highly recommend this book.

Know Your Brides.

I’ve posted the original Brides character sheet over on my deviantart page today, just to make it a bit easier for readers to learn and identify which Bride is which. To be honest, it’s something I wish I’d done last year when I launched the comic.

Also, I’m very aware the web-comic’s been down today. At first I thought it may be a server problem and sort itself out after a couple of hours, but sadly that hasn’t been the case, so I’ve contacted my web-host about it and now I’m just waiting for a reply. I think it may be a wordpress related problem, and hope to have it cleared up ASAP.

Happy New Year 2015.

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and hope you have a great 2015.

For anyone interested in something I hinted at a couple of posts ago, December did indeed turn out to be my web-comics most visited month this year. Maybe it’s something to do with the dark and cold, but people seem to really get into their horror around this time of year. You’d think it would have been Halloween (I know I sure did), but nope, seems people want a good scare around Xmas time more, I guess. So a massive thank you to anyone who has been dropping by Babayka-Lives this past month. 2014 will always be to me the year I really got to start getting some work out there into the public.  

Speaking of Babayka-Lives and getting work out there, page 71 goes up this Saturday. As we edge closer to the end of Chapter 3, tune in this weekend, for the first update of 2015, and to see the final fate of Kevin Moon. Also I hope people are ready for Chapter 4 in 2015. If you thought Chapter 3 was scary, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Chapter 4’s where the true nightmare unfolds.

P.S. Remind me to introduce you to someone called Babayka in 2015.