The Spirit of the Waters is probably my favorite thing I drew for this comic, which is why she’s going to be a full color feature of the Table of Contents and probably, at some point in the future after this comic is put to bed and after my literary journal release party and hopefully after getting out of jury duty, I hope to make it a sticker. There’s a few images in this comic that would make good stickers.
I’m not confident about a lot but I am confident that this is the best drawing of a knight in shining armor doing battle with an octopus that you are going to see today. I worked really hard on it.
This is the story that’s probably going to do the least for a reader who hasn’t actually read the book, and required the most careful note taking on my part, so I could really get a sense of each of the six “knights” and what they specifically had to be sorry about.
Also, tiny mermaid boobs, tee hee. Always gotta have at least one naked body part in each of these comic books to ensure that I can’t show them to my elementary students.
It was such a big, white space! This one gave me a lot of trouble too, mostly because I needed to fill it up. I drew a bunch of different flowers that I hated and never finished before I got inspired to do these giant stylized dandelion puffs, which are excellent and magical.
Sweet Lorena is probably the most blameless character in the book, even though she certainly has to suffer through the nonsense everyone else creates. The story puts some distance between her and the reader, while marveling at what a standup person she is.
As mentioned previously, I wrote most of these stories in a kind of fugue state, which led to me writing Lorena’s story twice because I forgot I had already written it. I ended up discarding the second one, in which she is characterized as “the strong girl” but has to go through basically this same nonsense. (Rose is a siren in that one.)
After I drew this image, I felt like it wasn’t quite done and then I realized it needed a squirrel laughing at the prince in the tree, so I added that.
I’m very pleased with Princess’s bloody arm in the last panel. I’m afraid that I just couldn’t get a background that I was happy with for either image and gave up. Imagine that these picture are drawn in the royal seer’s dark workshop.
I made the lindworm intentionally simple after drawing the 52 thousand scales on the dragon. She’s a little derpy but I love her.
This story took the longest to write, and is 1 of only 2 that I actually remember writing. All the others were generated in an intense flow state, basically a trance of pulling archetypes from the collective unconscious. But I had to think more deliberately to write the poems.
If there’s one thing literature teaches us about lindworms, it’s that you shouldn’t just yeet them in to a confined body of water and not expect them to turn up again in 15 or 20 years bit enough to eat a man.
Of all the amusing little details I managed to get right in this comic, this page probably contains 2 of my favorites. On the first pass, I drew the ghost in a classical ghost shroud style, which looked…really dumb. Making him a glowing, translucent guy worked out much more elegantly.
But probably my favorite image in this entire comic book is the top one, of the devil being so incredibly offended and the guy with his hobo outfit and “hey, what did I do?” expression. But devil practically clutching his pearls like, “Dude? Your own stepdaughter? Really? No. Gross,” will be cracking me up for the rest of my life.
For whatever reason, this was the easiest page to draw. It was the second one I completed, but the the first one that I was completely satisfied with. Their clothes are perfect, their expressions are perfect, the image in my mind completely matched the image on the page. You really believe these guys could be in love.
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