This First Shoot poll was won by Gwen Stacy, specifically the one from the Spiderverse movies. Those films sit in a weird place for me, as there’s several characters I was interested in drawing from them, but a number of factors kept me from doing anything with them. I don’t think I’m comfortable talking about those factors here, but Gwen’s a popular character who’s getting to make her NHS debut now. I figured the most logical reaction from her to arriving in the Studio would be to fall back on her experience with hopping between dimensions, so that’s the angle I took.
Here’s the seventh page of our Straight Ongoing comic, “Clean Break”. There were two scripts submitted for this page, but they went in pretty different directions and I didn’t feel like I could reconcile them. Instead, I just went with the one that felt like a better direction for the comic, although I did make a small change. I’d misread one part of the script, but liked my misread a bit better so I went with it, hopefully no one will mind. I think Armin tapping out and then Mikasa and Eren getting a romantic one-on-one moment makes sense as we near the end of this comic. I expect at most 1-2 pages more based on where we are, but we’ll see how things play out.
Here is the One-Shot comic for August 2024. Like always, the script for this comic was written by one of my Subscribers. This one’s pretty straightforward, I think, with a threesome between Tsunade, Sakura and Ino. While I’m not crazy about a Naruto script winning, I’m not completely against this comic. Ino was my favorite girl in Naruto back when I read it, and she’s also the only one of these three I’d never worked with before. So it’s kinda nice to bring her into the Studio here, and I tried to give some good shots to these ladies since none of them have appeared in ages.
Here’s the ninth Studio Life magazine cover. At the time that I invited nominations from Subscribers for this cover, I hadn’t done a male-focused one in a while (the commission with Gon hadn’t happened yet). So the theme this time was just male characters, and there was a variety of nominations. In the end I went with Denji, who’s a character with a pretty unique situation in the Studio who’s also made a lot of appearances, so I thought he’d make a good cover star.
While I haven’t played many of the newer Pokémon games, I did play Pokémon Y and had fire starter for that game. Braixen seems to have become the most popular stage of that evolution line, even though I remember really liking Delphox. Braixen got the big push by being a main character in the anime, plus (if I remember correctly) a playable fighter in Pokken Tournament (which I only played a bit of). Anyway, I thought she’d make for a good Pokédex F entry here.
Tapion and Minotia’s story in Wrath of the Dragon was always really sad. Both have been in the Studio for a good while now, but I never really did anything with them together. By now they’ve had plenty of time to acclimate to Studio culture, though, and I thought a little Ask featuring them might be fun.
Also, for anyone who’s interested, here is the Q&A video I did for Subscribers last month:
I talked about it a little bit when I did the AMV, but I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed Gushing Over Magical Girls. It’s far from perfect, but for what it was trying to do I thought it hit the mark more often than not. I love villainess/heroine-in-peril stuff, but don’t draw it too often, but I’d like to indulge that interest a bit with this series. I have a lot of sketches covering most of the characters who appeared in the first season, and hopefully I’ll get more of them done than not. I started with this one, focusing on Magia Sulfur, ’cause it was one of the simpler ones and I wanted to get the ball rolling while the series was still somewhat fresh in my mind. The next Gushing pic I do will probably focus on my favorite of the magical girls, Azure, but I did end up liking Sulfur a lot more than I thought I would.
Now, I don’t know if this Subscriber had anywhere specific in mind, but this Ask was shouting foot worship at me and I feel like it’s been a minute since I’ve done anything with that straightforward of a foot focus. I also had a pretty good idea how each girl would respond in the Ask, and I think the final result is cute.