April fools! My clever jape this year is to provide the artwork I produced last month in exactly the same manner as I have for the past few years (The evidence is here! Prove me wrong!)

Obviously, I have been in the throes of both attempting to carry on this long-awaited comic story while dealing with the incredibly depressing situation the world has presented to me. Thanks to my manic production in the month of January and the glacier pace I chose to release new comics we still have some buffer to work with. That said, if I don't light my butt on fire this month that buffer will melt to nothing in no time.

This month you get a couple of images of a person I would describe as "young Natasha" on account of that's who it is. Perhaps someday you will get to learn more about this Natasha and what makes that time in her life important. In addition to Natasha we also have some Natasha of a classic vintage and a mysterious young man who is DEFINTELY NOT Shaggy from Scooby Doo. Feel free to click through and inspect this files in the full detail afforded by my lightbox plugin.

Well, hello there. If you're anything like me (statistically speaking, you likely ARE me) then the last month has not been conducive to the production of creative works. This is a time of great upheaval, and even if you like what's going on in the world (statistically speaking, you do not) you would have to be incredibly naive to not be worried about what the consequences of these recent events will be.

But that is not why you come here. You are here to see the art I produced last month. It is not much. You have my apologies for that. The worst part is after a flurry of activity in January, I have not produced a new comic page since February 1st. At this moment I still have comics to post until mid April, so it's not yet a big concern. If I can get my nose back to the grindstone in March I ought to be able to complete the next scene of the story, which includes an introduction to the power of Artifice. Now, please click through and see my meager offerings to you, my gracious viewer.

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!

Another month has passed, and oh what a month it has been. I don't begrudge anyone for wanting to retreat to the realm of fantasy in the face of all this. After all, that's the only place where impossible things like "evil being punished" and "powerful people receiving justice for their crimes" and "me actually drawing a comic" can happen.

In more possible news, I did draw a good amount of art this month. Unsurprisingly, it is mostly Natasha. She does make some rather daring fashion choices, though, so that's fun. I also colored one of these, which you can see over on the gallery where finished art goes.

At the end of September 2024, beloved social media website Cohost shut down. Cohost was a site with a bold proposition: What if we start a social media site that treats its users well, one that doesn't exploit people and track people and show them intrusive ads? What if we make a social media site that has no clear monetization plan?

When they ran out of money and shut down, a lot of folks were left without a good place to post their weird nonsense, myself included. But unlike most people, myself had a backup plan. I call myself Mr. Encyclopedia because for a long time I had a website called The Encyclopedia of Pointless, where I enjoyed posting my silly nonsense for up to dozens of friends and acquaintances. Luckily, I had recently rescued my venerable old URL, eopoint.com, from the clutches of spammers and domain squatters. I had been planning to relaunch The Encyclopedia of Pointless for a long time, and now I had a motivating factor.

Running on the venerable wiki engine pmwiki The Encyclopedia of Pointless is reborn, and for the time in nearly 20 years the old "Choose your own Error Adventure" collaborative interactive fiction fever dream is back online to shock and offend a new generation of Internet.

Oh yeah also I made art.