Well unsurprisingly the calendar end of summer came and passed and there’s still a good deal of work left on it. Progress is still slowly but steadily coming along, probably won’t bother to estimate any more timeframes and will just leave as it’ll be done when it’s done lol

All pages are FINALLY inked and there are even a couple of finished* pages!! The (digital) inking process has by far taken the longest out of all the stages of chapter creation so the finishing process of laying down fills and shadows in grayscale should be much quicker from here on. It’s been a long journey of learning and experimenting with a bunch of new things along the way, redoing certain panels here and there, going back through a bunch of pages after super late realizations of mistakes, getting sick way too many times throughout, etc. It wasn’t til like over 80% of the inking process that I actually thought to revisit vector layers in CSP and realizing that they work very well with the G-Pen I use; years ago when I first tried out vector layers I was doing lines with a soft brush and saw that the strokes were coming out jagged and weird and proceeded to then ignore the feature for years on end 💀 Pretty funny in retrospect when considering that I did end up switching to G-Pen for lines not very long after and didn’t think to try it with vector layers until this year lol

I think there’s still a shot of the chapter being finished within the calendar summer season, but only time will tell (cue future me looking at this post way into autumn and shaking my head at myself lmao). Thanks to everyone sticking with me thus far and giving my original comic a chance!!

*(of course, everything is subject to possible change until the moment the page is uploaded)

Some more signs of life…Inking is now much closer to done than not, but then there’s all the rest of the filling and whatnot which will also take a good deal of time. Considering a “shorter” chapter like this is taking this freakin long, I have definitely been thinking a lot more about how I can dramatically shorten chapters going forward to reduce hiatus duration lol

Some more previews to somewhat tide you over during the long wait…

As I’d mentioned two weeks ago with the end of Chapter 2 I’m posting some previews of the upcoming chapter! YEARS after starting this comic I’m finally drawing Lina in her hero attire (technically I already did so in Chapter 0 but this was a much earlier design that ended up changing a lot from then). There’s still quite a lot of work left on this chapter so I hope you’ll bear with me through the long wait! Will I be consistent about posting previews like this every other week?! We shall see…….

With the last few pages of this chapter now uploaded, it’s time for that hiatus I was mentioning… As stated in the past, the way I upload now is to only begin to upload a chapter once the entire thing is done, and this is what I’m doing with the current upcoming chapter I’ve been working on all throughout when Chapter 2 was being uploaded. In the past I used to start uploads before a chapter was finished, which did not end up going very well for me mentally. Ultimately, since the comic is still something I can only work on a little bit each week during certain stretches of free time, hiatuses are just unavoidable unless I just make the update schedule extremely slow (and it’s not like one page a week is very fast!).

My current rough estimate is I think I could possibly resume updates some time this summer, but I definitely can’t make anything resembling a guarantee on timelines. In the mean time, I think what I’ll do is sporadically post sneak peeks/progress crops during the long wait. These will probably be inserted into site posts like this one so as to not interrupt the overall sequence of pages across chapters. At the moment I think I’ll post the first of these in probably two weeks’ time, but beyond that I’m not sure if I’m ready to commit to a consistent intermission update schedule.

The chapter I’m working on is almost as long as Chapter 1, so while it’s fairly shorter than 0 and 2 it still is a considerable length (also I highly recommend checking out the initial Chapter 0 for anyone who started with 1!). In the future after this chapter I’m gonna keep trying to see how I can organize the story to have shorter chapters which should hopefully improve turnaround (I tried to do this with the in-progress Chapter 3 but didn’t entirely succeed). The small funny upside to how slowly I make progress is that it gives me plenty of time to brainstorm/develop further out parts of the story 😂

As always, thanks so much to everyone who decided to check out this random webcomic and stick around! Assuming the viewcounts are at all accurate I’m super grateful to be getting even this much readership, and I hope you’ll continue to bear with me as I slowly plod along making more of this original comic!

The double update today will be the last update in general of 2024 and the next updates will be spaced out a bit as well. Basically I’m at a part in the chapter where it’s making more sense to post multiple pages at a time for a couple updates’ worth instead of breaking up the flow with the usual update schedule (but I also don’t want to burn through my buffer too much quicker lol). The chapter is starting to get close to its end, so this is also a heads up that a hiatus is coming in early 2025, which I certainly hope will be nowhere near as long as the one before 😂 I do anticipate that I should at least be ready to resume updates within the same year!

Next week’s update will be postponed a week, and this update will be the last one before that dumb DST time change; readers from countries without DST will be seeing updates an hour later during this period.

This year America’s good ol’ stupid-ass tradition of setting the clocks back an hour will start the first Sunday of November which is on the 3rd, so this means that readers from countries not impacted by this time change will be seeing updates an hour later each week for the duration of American DST. (A couple years ago we got so close to finally repealing this moronic time change but the professional idiots in Congress fumbled at the final stage and let it implode…)

Last week I’d mistakenly made a scheduled page go public immediately so the next update is on 2 July!