The past two months saw the creation of two original characters: the witch with long, black hair with stars in her hair on one side of her head, and the skeleton who lost his arms, permanently as it would seem. They both have alternated in the posts over on the national mars day instagram and there have even been new characters introduced. The whole story pretty much introduces the two characters, and then charts the events of a full moon one crisp October, November night. And it's been a great journey. The prompt lists, made by @vetvy, @soniastegemann, @jakeparker, @nlitvvin, @ludmilacerafoce, and @asayris were all great fun to look at and be additionally inspired by to create an interesting tale of Halloween, and more than that, stories of the autumnal season. Thank you to each of you for making and advertising your prompts. The way the story developed, there was a vampire chasing his ghost lover, witches drinking in an open field, and a dog basking in the heat of a fireplace, plus

Now with fanart July gone and past, August comes in with teasers and celebrations of Dance of Wolf and Snake issue #1, available for physical purchase online at www.nationalmarsday.com. What all has gone into making a comic book is a story longer than it seems. There have been a lot of articles mentioning tips and tricks that are hard to pin down yet offer great trade advice, such as adding weight to a drawing by darkening the lower lines, or having one side be more smooth than the other; advice that takes more than just mentioning to make sense. There is also knowledge that comes from observing, or taking note of other people's observations when it comes to publishing, drawing, and putting out comics. And there is the experience from putting together several different stories and having the images all weave together. Altogether, there's been a lot of books read, articles taken in, and drawings made, and there are still many of each of those to go. In addition to all that, this is not

A good amount of time ago a friend gave me the answer to a question, "Who are your favorite cartoon characters?", and one of the characters was Stevonie, of "Steven Universe". Awesome answer, and I looked up what they looked like so as to get inspiration to re-interpret them and/or begin making a model sheet of the character to draw them as exact as possible. What I found on image search were beautiful renditions of the character. Several amplified Stevonie's femininity, and regardless of how that might get a reaction, they were gorgeous drawings of how a character could look within the given the nuances of the character. Some even captured the duality of the character. Or neutrality? Stevonie is worth many words, perhaps for another time. The point of this is, I began to think that there might have been enough fanart of this character. All my friend would have to do is type the character's name into a search engine and have their fill of amazing fanart. That is not enough, however.