The month of April marks the arrival of new Dimestore Novel character, Brie Zahn. You see, what had happened was, I was spending a lot of time drawing Hitomi Kanzaki from classic anime The Vision of Escaflowne. Now, I have never been much for fanart and fanworks, and the Hitomi I was drawing bore decreasing resemblance to the Hitomi in the show. Imagine the artistic equivalent of a dog chewing a chew toy. It dawned on me to take this feeling and release it from the burden of being attached to an existing character. With surprising speed it sprang into a new configuration. Like Hitomi, Brie is launched into another world against her will. Unlike Hitomi, Brie is kind of a bad person. Entitled, immature, unwilling and unable to deal with the demands of the real world. So lucky for her the world she finds herself in is not real.

Look forward to seeing how her story intersects with the rest of Dimestore Novel (spoilers, it's laid out on her EoP page).

Additionally, among the love heaped on Natasha and Brie this month you will also find Evangeline, Virginia, and Ashley. Remember them? I wonder if we will ever see and/or meet them in the near future. You never know!! Dig Ashley's cool arm though. Pretty neat, eh? I think you will see her robotic limb in increasingly modular forms going forward.

As expected, February was a better month from an art production perspective if not any other conceivable metric. I don't actually know if that was expected, or why it would be expected. Despite this being a substantial bounty of drawings this is not even all of them, there's a handful that are a bit too lewd to share on this public venue, even though my definition of lewdness is not even enough to upset an online payment processor. Maybe if enough people clamor for them in the comments below I will share them...somehow.

November started strong with quite a bit of drawing, then petered out a bit toward the end of the month. I drew Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair for some reason. Quite proud of that one. I tried my hand at drawing a character with white hair looking up and to the left, which was the style at the time. I drew Natasha a bunch. I drew Merry and Jess from Merry Hell as Peridot and Lapis from the Steven Universe episode when Peridot was most egregiously tiny. Typical November stuff. My situation has grown somewhat more tenuous in the last couple weeks so looking forward I'm not sure if I will deliver much in December. This is fairly typical for me, though, since I do most of my drawing at work and they typically close down the last two weeks of the month for the holidays. I guess we'll see!

Did you remember? Did you remember the 21st night of September? Did you remember to wake up when September ended? September is a month for remembering many things.

One year ago, Cohost shut down. In the wake of this highly unsurprising development I was compelled to bring back The Encyclopedia of Pointless. This year, I was yeeted off Tumblr merely for posting hundreds of lewd anime images. Well, joke's on them, now I have my own website for posting lewd anime images. I shan't share it here, but ask and you shall receive.

Speaking of asking and receiving, I asked myself if I was up to drawing anything in the month of September and I received the following images from myself. It's not much, but any art is better than no art in these dark days.

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.

Well, that's another year in the books. This is the time of year when artists whip up little retrospectives showing what they accomplished over the last year. I've done a bit of that myself. Want to see it? You're in luck because you're already staring at it! That's right, this website is actually an elaborate retrospective work where all my favorite art of the year is collected for your enjoyment. Feel free to look around and see what I thought was worth archiving for future generations!