2025! Not a round number, but it feels pretty momentous. It's already proving itself to be a year of changes and challenges, and my love and thoughts are with those who have already experienced hard challenges this year.

Let's call this year the 20th anniversary of Dimestore Novel. Not twenty years since it started, but twenty years since I started thinking about it. Twenty years ago I started taking the various silly ideas I had and piecing them together. I had wizards and magic books, depressed cartoon characters, murderous cops, centenarians in cyber suits, and then the final piece that really brought it all together: a girl that I felt should be holding a sword for some reason.

I thought about it for a while, then put it on the back burner for a while, and then around 2017 I really started thinking about it again. I started practicing with pen and ink, I met some encouraging friends, I posted on social media and started a Patreon. I had an idea in my head for what I wanted, but I couldn't find the path to get there. I experimented with 3D backgrounds. I tried a few different kinds of digital art tablet. I even tried hiring a couple fellow artists to see if they could fill in my gaps. Of all the things I tried, the only thing that felt right was pen on paper.

Late last year, I found something that filled a gap for me. I mentioned it in the last roundup, a tool to quickly lay out a set of panels on a regular sheet of paper. I was using it and for the first time drawing comic pages felt as good and right as all the other drawing I had been doing. Just me, the pen, and the paper, making my characters talk and making things happen for the first time. Right after the new year one of my many encouraging friends showed me an upcoming strip he was working on for his comic, and I showed him one as well. "I think this is the first page of my comic." I said. I was wrong, I had a better idea and scraped out a new page 1 at the last moment. But I posted it on time, January 3, 2025. I was done waiting. I was done rolling it around in my head year after year. It's 2025; I'm not getting any younger. It's finally time for people to see what I'm cooking.

So here it is. Dimestore Novel. Updating every Friday for as long as I can do it.

Soon, I hope to have something on the main page that shows and directs folks to the latest comic. At this point I care more about telling the story than getting lots of people to read the story. Deep down I can't shake the feeling that this is still just the prototype for a better story yet to come, but if this is all I ever do it will be enough. I'll have told my story, I'll have said my peace.

That's not all, of course. I've been hard at work drawing comic pages that you'll see in the future, but this is still an art roundup after all. So here's the non-comic work I've done this year.