Happy New year, everyone! I hope you had a good New Year's Eve. As for me, I ate, drank and made merry; now I'm in recovery finding some easy things to do while my head clears. So I just realized that I had a bunch of fan art sitting on my hard drive that I've never posted.


First, here's The Gay Fairy Squad as seen on Page 69: Responses from the Target Audience. The funny thing is I never actually said those faeries, colorful as they are, were gay. They might be - all we know about them is that they are reluctant to give up their lives and relocate to another village on Aléas, Scallop and Asper's say-so. But they got the fabulous colours and the Gay Faerie designation stuck. Art by The Cosmic Beholder.


Second, here's Maximum Nudity Force, named after a deviantArt group I started early last year and closed some time after as I was unable to give it the time it needed to be a healthy group. Abúi is shown along with Wakatonka from Spun Off. The other characters are Kaza and Gwenna from Kaza's Mate, Gwenna, Captain Evening from Tales to Behold, Mixtli as created by Tulio on DeviantArt and the open-source character Jenny Everywhere. The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition: This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, that others might use this property as they wish. All rights reversed. Art by The Cosmic Beholder.


Finally, here's The Pixies Meet the Faeries by Emeraldwing of Prexor, the other comic with naked winged creatures on ComicFury. It hasn't updated for a while, but then neither has Spun Off.

There are five pages of Spun Off in production right now. They will be worked on some more this week during my vacation. I may become more active on the ComicFury forums as well, calling for guest art or maybe doing an art exchange if I have time.

Cosmic Beholder has been spoiling me with fan art for both Spun Off and Abúi's Travels. Here's his latest, featuring Emea and Wakatonka:



Cosmic Beholder wrote:

As it's been a while that Spun-Off is on hiatus and I missed the characters, I have created some fan-art. Since it includes Wakatonka in all his glory I couldn't post it on DeciantArt this time, so I'm sending it to you directly. I hope you'll enjoy it and if you'd like to post it on Spun-Off I'd be honored.

Since I'm already writing this email, I might as well tell you how much I've been enjoying your work online, especially Abui and Spun-Off. It's been inspiring to see your stuff around and I hope that i'll be inspired to continue for many years.

Well... about that.
Right now, Abúi's Travels is updating once every few weeks. This is really about all I can muster at this time: I have a demanding day job which in the past few months has given me leadership responsibilities on two major translation projects for tech companies that you know and whose products you probably use, possibly daily. My hours get very long and are also spent sitting down in front of a computer typing at a keyboard, except when they're spent traveling to the client for face to face contact. I have also put on an alarming amount of weight since I started working for the company 7 years ago, and so I need to set aside time to work some of that off too. Add to that family life, walking the dog, traffic and so on, and there's only enough art time left for me to do that one page every few weeks.

For the past two years, Spun Off has been the summer comic that I work on at the caravan on weekends and during vacations. That is still the plan, but caravan time has been very limited this year and so I don't expect new updates any time soon. Plus, I'm having too much fun working on Abúi's Travels and developing new concepts for it. If you haven't been over there, Neive has recently made an appearance and Aléas will be showing up in a few pages. The two characters in the image above will not, because while it is the same universe, it's a different place in the timeline and some of the nuances for one comic don't work with the other.

You can find Cosmic Beholder's comics on The Cosmic Beholder - I recommend his work very highly!

Spun Off may be on hiatus, but that hasn't stopped The Cosmic Beholder from creating two lovely fan arts. As his characters travel between worlds, both also contain characters from other comics:


Webcomics United: This one also features Abúi from Abúi's Travels. This is potentially dangerous for Abúi as meeting faeries from her own world but a generation before puts her at risk of crossing her own time line and causing a time paradox. Luckily, her mother Aléas isn't in this picture. A larger image can be found on the Cosmic Beholder's DeviantArt page.



Crossovers: Spun Off Meets Tales To Behold: features Wakatonka, Neive, Finbar and Gavin with characters from The Cosmic Beholder's Tales To Behold. A larger image can be found on the Cosmic Beholder's DeviantArt page.

Thanks again, Cosmic Beholder! I enjoyed seeing these images a lot.

Another fan art by my lovely wife, Aggie Janicot AKA Skycladstrega AKA Rona! She drew this hairy goblin a few months ago while we were out at our caravan by the lake.


Aggie has a new comic out at Square One Comics. The full version of this hairy goblin girl is at her DeviantArt site (login required for NSFW images).