30 pages??? I honestly wasn't sure I'd ever get this far with the comic, considering I rapidly burn out when doing pretty much anything else. But now I've been drawing near daily ever since February. Win! I've learned tons during this time, both art-wise and how to better pace scenes and events for better dramatic effect. Still, I'm resisting the urge to go back and redraw the prologue, mainly because I believe in visible progress. One of the charms for me when following webcomics as a reader, especially those that span several years in real time, is seeing this progress. While I understand being embarrassed about old art I can get kind of sad when people replace original chapters with redraws. So I won't do it. Maybe I'll make a redraw at some point and post it as a separate bonus chapter, but the old stuff stays where it is.

And Tolkien-Orc-tober is on! One piece of art per day for the whole month, following a list of prompts I found on Bluesky. This is basically just Tolkientober with me being the way I am and shoehorning Orcs into everything. I've tried to participate in the past but... yeah... burn out. The longest I've lasted is four days. With the flow I'm in now, I decided to make a serious effort this year and lo and behold, we're on day 8 and still going strong! Yay!

I got a major inspiration boost after Weta Workshop posted a bunch of BTS photos of the love of my life, the "What about them? They're FRESH" Orc from The Two Towers. Including one I only had a tiny crappy screenshot of and two I'd never seen before! When the love of your life has less than 30 seconds of screen time (extended edition parts included) before dying horribly right before your eyes, you take whatever crumbs you can get.