It is the end of December 2018 and I have finally finished the covers for both sides of this story, so I am back-dating them to make them show up in the right place. Best wishes for 2019, everyone!

Ssssooo here is the first page of the other side of the story. This has been taking a while to get started, because there’s a ton of design work to do.

Who are these creatures, and what are they doing in this huge space station? Give us a couple more pages and we’ll let you know. Got to start to create a mood first.

Around about now you are probably asking yourself “who are these spooky things moving through this spooky bio-mechanical forest”. This question will be answered on the next page.

Say hello to our heroes. We hope you like these gay fungus boys as much as we do.

Like any couple, Kirt and Noa have issues they keep on bickering about.

Drawing this comic has really weird rhythms. I took this page from script to finished in three days, but there’s a page before it that took something like an entire week.

I try to make a habit of turning as much as possible into reusable elements. All those little fairy bells, for instance, are drawn with a handful of graphic styles – one for the stem, another for the leaves, and another for the actual flower. I can just pick that out of the style palette, make a quick dash with my stylus, and there it is. It’s coming up with all these things in the first place that takes ages, sometimes.

This page took seventeen forevers and I think it was worth it.

The musical notes coming out of the plants came in at the very end and really tied it all together with Noa’s whistling in the first panel. This whole fairy garden hums and chimes; I imagine the overall effect as being something like the bridge of the Enterprise, with all its reassuring little bloops and bleeps and wibbles. You don’t notice it after a little while – but you sure notice when it stops, or when a dissonant note intrudes.

I do not think it is a spoiler to say there will be dissonant notes intruding on this before the chapter is done.

When’s the last time you sat in a tranquil garden and listened to its gentle sounds? I recommend doing it as often as possible.

My, there sure is a pattern set up in this page that the last panel breaks, isn’t there? I can’t be foreshadowing anything. I’m sure absolutely nothing is going to happen, and that Noa will not be watching his boyfriend die for the sixth time in this trip. They’re just going to sit here and do their gardening and maybe find the meaning of life on this ancient space station.

Kirt and Noa continue to tend their charges: Kirt’s got gardening to do, and Noa’s got a bird to try and keep from wandering off into craziness.

We will be seeing this map again.

The next Mixolyne page is going to be yet another complicated, scene-setting drawing. I’m slowly poking at it while mostly concentrating on the VX10 side of the story.

Time to switch back to Noa and Kirt for a while. I’ve been working on this page and the next one for quite some time – I think I started it in early October of last year and it’s early May now. Admittedly I did spend most of March and April moving from Seattle to New Orleans but that’s still a long time for a spread to take!

Right now I’ve got five more Mixolyne pages with full roughs lined up. They’re mostly character art, without much new background design to do, so that should help them come out a lot faster.

I had a lot of fun making this page and the next one right at the edge of “too bright to see anything”.

This is the last of the Mixolyne pages I’m putting in the buffer right now. I’m probably gonna work on more Mixolyne pages while these are coming out; for now, we’ll be switching over to the VX10 side for most of the next month.

Hello! We are back! Sort of. There’s seventeen more pages planned for this chapter; the next eight after this are done, and maybe I’m starting to work on drawing this again? We will see.

In which we continue to end where we began, with one less character.

In which all the color drains out of Noa’s world.

In which Noa does something they’ve become far better at doing than they’d prefer.

In which a friend is reassuring.

in which there is faint hope

but not much hope

In which there are tentacles.

In which there is Home.

And in which there will be a dearth of new pages for a while again: this side of chapter 1 is complete, but there are about a dozen pages left to finish on the Vek10 side. If you’d like to see them in their current state, along with the ten or so finished pages sprinkled among them, then you can support me on Patreon. Or you can wait for a few months and see them start appearing; I seem to be working on this again after a long span of time where everything around me felt too broken for big projects. 2020 was a hell of a year, y’know?