Today we’re going to try and solve one of life’s great mysteries… how do you fix a broken heart?

Obviously there are two types, and we’re not talking about the one that requires a surgeon. That said, if any of you happen to be heart surgeons, do say, I’d be very interested in hearing what you have to say.

No, we’re talking about the other kind, the kind that most people experience at some point in their lives.

Is super-glue enough?

Transplants have been on my mind a little recently… It’s all tied up with how I ended up moving the site’s host earlier this month.

Most of you will be aware that I belong to a collective called Transplant Comics – and a fine collective it is too. In fact, it was Transplant that really encouraged me to turn The Flowfield Unity into a webcomic. It had existed online after I made a webcomic at Smackjeeves to promote it as a book but I decided to see what they thought of it.

I submitted my request to join and waited for them to mercilessly tear my comic apart, but they didn’t. Instead they gave me some really good advice and feedback and eventually, they accepted The Flowfield Unity.

This was great for several reasons, but perhaps the most important to me was the fact that they offered to host my comic… I couldn’t really afford to host it myself, and besides, my technical knowledge of how to run a webcomic was patchy at best. Most of all though, they enabled me to run my comic as I saw fit.

And that’s what made me a webcomic creator.

Holding my hand through all of this was Steve Voudrie, the technical master and evil genius behind Transplant. He helped me figure out databases, css, and all manner of weird web-related acronyms – the things that run a webcomic.

Steve had his own webcomic too, Professor Paradox.

You’ll notice, if you followed that last link, that the Prof. hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s because… well, we don’t don’t why. All we know is that he also stopped appearing at Transplant about the same time too. No explanation, no indication… and we haven’t heard from him since.

That has made us all worried – what happened to Steve? Is he alive? Is he well? Is he ‘detained’? We have no clues, and all attempts to locate or contact him have failed. I do hope he’s OK.

The problem left facing our community is not just that of losing a founder member, no. As I said, Steve was our tech-guy and as such was in charge of the site’s hosting account. Truth be told, he was the only one with the password and username to the site’s host.

This leaves us with a quandary. When the current hosting period is up (we’re not even exactly sure when that is), we won’t be able to stay where we are, we’ll be evicted. The same is true of the domain name, Transplantcomics.com, technically our collective identity.

So, that’s why I had to move host, because sooner or later I would have to do it anyway. There are other reasons why the move was probably a good idea anyway. The old host is quite slow, and I was starting to chew up some serious bandwidth via people visiting my site via StumbleUpon, but I didn’t feel I was ready just yet… yet here we are.

So what is to become of Transplant? Well, we’ve all been chatting, and I can say that if there’s one thing that will induce true community spirit and some great ideas, it’s a crisis on the Internet. We’re going to have to move, and we’ll probably be changing our name, but we’ll be doing it together and we’ll be doing it with style.

Obviously, there will be more information on that, nearer the time and whilst it’s there, the Transplant site will still provide our hub and a great place to find comics.

And Steve?

I really hope I get a chance to say ‘Thanks’.