The month of April marks the arrival of new Dimestore Novel character, Brie Zahn. You see, what had happened was, I was spending a lot of time drawing Hitomi Kanzaki from classic anime The Vision of Escaflowne. Now, I have never been much for fanart and fanworks, and the Hitomi I was drawing bore decreasing resemblance to the Hitomi in the show. Imagine the artistic equivalent of a dog chewing a chew toy. It dawned on me to take this feeling and release it from the burden of being attached to an existing character. With surprising speed it sprang into a new configuration. Like Hitomi, Brie is launched into another world against her will. Unlike Hitomi, Brie is kind of a bad person. Entitled, immature, unwilling and unable to deal with the demands of the real world. So lucky for her the world she finds herself in is not real.

Look forward to seeing how her story intersects with the rest of Dimestore Novel (spoilers, it's laid out on her EoP page).

Additionally, among the love heaped on Natasha and Brie this month you will also find Evangeline, Virginia, and Ashley. Remember them? I wonder if we will ever see and/or meet them in the near future. You never know!! Dig Ashley's cool arm though. Pretty neat, eh? I think you will see her robotic limb in increasingly modular forms going forward.

They say time marches on. So too, does March, so it seems. As a result, I have produced for you a small selection of March Arch. I mean art. Mart Art.

Whatever. You get the idea. At this month's art feast I have provided a dozen or so normal crumbs, as well as a few salacious crumbs. The latter are not cataloged here because I am a coward. If you wish to see them you need but ask and I shall share with you my horde of lewd. When I wrote that I wrote "horse" at first and that is an entirely different category of lewd which, while popular, is not one I partake of in any capacity.

Recently a good friend of mine approached me and asked, "When am I going to stop exploding?" It's a good question. He was supposed to stop exploding quite a while ago, and yet despite my least efforts he remains caught in the moment of destruction. A skilled cartoonist can elide a lot of events in the white space between two comic panels. Even a skilled cartoonist, which I do not consider myself to be, cannot depict events between a comic panel and nothing. Another panel needs to be drawn. Until such time, my good friend will continue to explode. Doesn't seem fair to him, but on the other hand he did know what he was getting into.

As expected, February was a better month from an art production perspective if not any other conceivable metric. I don't actually know if that was expected, or why it would be expected. Despite this being a substantial bounty of drawings this is not even all of them, there's a handful that are a bit too lewd to share on this public venue, even though my definition of lewdness is not even enough to upset an online payment processor. Maybe if enough people clamor for them in the comments below I will share them...somehow.

What a year, eh? Early on I saw someone posit that this would be the stupidest year yet, and so far it has not disappointed. Indiscriminate application of state violence, rampant corruption, the revelation that there really is a cabal of pedophiles but they're the wrong people so nobody cares. To make matters slightly better, I drew Natasha several times. You can attempt to enjoy her with me if you like. It does seem to help me a bit.

Well, that's another year in the books. A lot of folks like to celebrate the end of the year with a look back at what they accomplished. Not me! It's already here for you to see, all the way back to 2022 or maybe even earlier. Other folks look to the horizon to talk about what is to come in the year ahead. Not me! I refuse to consider what might happen in the future. I exist in a perpetual twilight, trapped in a moment of time forever drifting into the future at the typical rate.

November started strong with quite a bit of drawing, then petered out a bit toward the end of the month. I drew Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair for some reason. Quite proud of that one. I tried my hand at drawing a character with white hair looking up and to the left, which was the style at the time. I drew Natasha a bunch. I drew Merry and Jess from Merry Hell as Peridot and Lapis from the Steven Universe episode when Peridot was most egregiously tiny. Typical November stuff. My situation has grown somewhat more tenuous in the last couple weeks so looking forward I'm not sure if I will deliver much in December. This is fairly typical for me, though, since I do most of my drawing at work and they typically close down the last two weeks of the month for the holidays. I guess we'll see!