Toyland, Toyland

At last, Page 4-23 has landed and with it comes a new character, Agent Newton! You can learn a little about him on the Characters Page. He certainly has a very interesting idea what constitutes a “toy.”

Fun fact, Newton is actually an older character of mine I thought would slot well into a role at the Astral Conservatory. Unlike Lado, he wasn’t originally designed for Electric Fencer, but another project in which he was actually much younger, so I aged him up for the current story. He’s a bighorn ram with distinguished Xbox uncle energy.

As previously stated, this page will stay up for at least a couple weeks to allow it a chance for proper visibility and to afford me time to complete 4-24.

The longest drought in a while

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As you can see, I never got around to updating last week and once again it is Wednesday, my dudes.

I’m really sorry about the lack of story updates this past month. Work has gotten longer and it seems building the tracks as the train is coming down them has absolutely not been a viable strategy. I’ll discuss what this means for Issue 5 once Issue 4 is done (no, the comic isn’t getting cancelled so there are no worries there). For what it’s worth, 4-23 is about 75% of the way done, so I’m aiming to have it up before the weekend. In order to allow time for 4-24 to cook and for 4-23 to have its time in the spotlight, it’ll be up for a couple of weeks.

Once again, I’m really sorry about the slow rollout of recent updates, but for everyone still here reading and waiting patiently—maybe excitedly even—you have my eternal gratitude 🙏❤️

Ready? Say “Fuzzy Pickles!”

4-22 is up, and we have a visitor! Can’t hold the cameraman up too long. He has psychic adventurers to document.

ETA on 4-23 is in the air at the moment as I have some things to take care of, but I’ll keep you all posted.

I should probably also take this time to announce that unlike previous issues, this one is going to run a little bit longer than before. If you recall, the plan was originally that Issue 3 would be 24 pages long. Then rewriting the issue for pacing led to making Issue 3 run for about 36 pages. Then that went bust and I split the chapter into Issues 3 and 4. We accomplished everything we wanted to do in Issue 3 in 24 pages, but didn’t hit that mark for Issue 4. In fact, we overshot it. Issue 4 will actually be 32 pages long! Don’t worry, this time I won’t chicken out and split the issue again. To be honest, that’s not really a feasible solution this time around, especially since I want Issue 5 to cover completely new content.

Work obligations have made getting the comic done a bit rougher than in the past, but we’re gonna make it through this 😤

The World Map, Revisited

Elliott, Lee, and Ronan have a very brisk meeting with destiny today on Page 4-20! The siblings seem none too thrilled about it.

Today’s page was also a chance to bring up the world map! So far, five countries are highlighted: The Salemian Union, Amaerys (both of which were already covered in the previous Extras article I wrote), Marahoya (which has been vaguely mentioned a few times in the story already), Nukuria, and Pharaon. We’ll be learning about those countries as we go along. The other how many or so…maybe passing mentions in the narrative? Asappon, Lafrans, Dragomasca, Ladurana, and Svetalán have been brought up at some point.

I still need to do the rest of that article on the world map. One step at a time, maybe.

Get you someone who looks at you like

4-19 is up and we have a new character, Lado! You can learn more about him on the Characters Page. He’s actually a character I developed for a much older iteration of the comic and at one point dropped wholesale due to the sheer number of characters in the traveling party at the time. I figured we needed some more members of the Astral Conservatory to work with, so why not give an old friend his job back? Whaddup, Agent L-Deezy?! Glad to have you aboard once again.

4-20 (yes blaze it ha ha very funny moving on) is in the pipeline and will be out next week, barring any unforeseen outages. I had Techokami look under the hood and we’re hoping the problem is at the very least contained for now.