I know I'm dragging my feet a little and shuffling this around a lot, but getting this started up is trickier than keeping things going. I'll go off hiatus as soon as I can make this happen, and in the meantime, sorry. Thanks for your patience! It'll be off hiatus really soon.

I put Dracula on hiatus until I get back from my surprise trip to Colorado to visit my family for a week. After some (fixable) computer problems, I've decided it'll work out best for me to put Ekwara updates on hiatus until I get back, too, so tune in for more pages on the 20th! Thanks for reading!

This picture is a guest update I did for my friend Razz, for her comic Ye Gods! while she's on vacation. While the two comics aren't actually crossed over, here's a little riff on her Sekmet showing up in Ekwara, as the warrior aspect of the jaunx goddess. A would-be temple thief appeases her with beer.

I did this back in 1997. It's marker on copy paper. My favorite part is how I didn't even try to make the handle of the lizard guy's polearm straight. I probably drew this in math class. None of my teachers ever stopped me.

Wow, I've been working on this for a long time.

Anyway, I figured posting old, old art was enough of a consolation prize for posting a filler comic. It's been a tough week.

Today I'm uploading a picture from my summer-long challenge to draw an Ekwara sketch every day. It's a part of the livejournal community Artslam - http://www.livejournal.com/~artslam - where artists commit to a theme and a month, two months or three months of concept art! It's a lot of fun, and you can still jump in to complete a two month or three month challenge in July and August! Check it out!

I'm posting a lot of worldbuilding tidbits in there, so readers of this comic might enjoy reading my entries to the community. You can keep track of them with my 'djinni' tag on there - http://community.livejournal.com/artslam/tag/djinni.

For instance, you can see and read a little about various Ekwara animals as I doodle them. The fellow above is a small, songbird-sized creature descended from an Earth pterosaur.

Since the comic so far has been dealing with both kids and species that don't have much dimorphism (just wait until we get to the part of the story with grevicans in it - they have two distinct body types unrelated to gender!), here's the rundown:

Matiph's a boy, Jristin (Jree) is a boy, Tae (the human baby) is a girl, Quen is a girl, Ginger is a girl, Sparrow is a boy, West is a boy, Baxi is a girl, Rhiagh is a girl, Resk, Bren and Iebra are boys, Old Raven is a girl and Chandrian is a boy.

There you go! ;) It is no longer a mysterious mystery!

Generally, jaunx are and should be difficult to tell apart. Many other folks in the setting can't tell. The stereotype is that female jaunx are more serious and down-to-business, and male jaunx are more easygoing and friendly, except around other male jaunx. Ginger comes from the stoic culture of nomadic Auln jaunx, where she would be considered downright lighthearted.

Despite being an androgynous little kid with long hair, Jree acts much more like the endrich idea of what a little boy should act like. Matiph does not. Like Earth's chimpanzees, they look comparatively more human-like when they're young, developing heavier ape-like features as they age.

Despite the three named vedrig happening to be male, both male and female vedrig play equal roles in pack life, and the split among the hunting party is about fifty-fifty.

This part might get changed around in the final draft... I'm trying to show the happier memory getting interrupted by the fire, but I'm not sure if that's clearly presented. I might add speech to make it flow better, but also like the idea of having the flashback be silent. What do you think?

Sorry for the delay on Tuesday's page, which is up now. I've been tackling some computer problems this weekend, and need to get my buffer stocked up again. I think I have this fixed, now, so updates should be back on track.

Page 1 of Chapter 3 will go up for Monday night/Tuesday morning. Since I'm at a good breaking point - end of the chapter plus cover image done, plus weekend, I'm going to take a little extra time to go over the plot and get things ready for the next part of the story.

I've decided to make a pretty big change in how I'm drawing this comic, and after mulling over it and doing a little experimentation, I think this is the best way to move forward, right now. Here's what's up!

Tuesday through Saturday, the comic will update with penciled pages, like you can see for today's update. I've spent some time coming up with a small buffer, and will continue to build that up, so we can stay on schedule. Doing the pages like this allows me to both keep up a reasonable pace (at a page a week, this story'll be done when I'm in my 40's, and I'm very enthusiastic about getting the story out of my head and onto paper!) and really push the effort I put into refining the page designs before I commit to an inked and colored final version.

The added step of finished pencil art, after my rough layout sketches, is a huge help in then producing finished color pages, which I'll still be doing. Right now, I don't have a regular schedule for them, but as I build up the buffer of penciled updates, I'll get a better idea of how often I can make color pages and swap them in. Once I figure that out, those'll have a regular update schedule, as well, but bear with me while I work this out.

Because of this change, I'm no longer doing a tip incentive for extra pages - there'll be many more updates anyway!

Thank you for reading my comic and for putting up with me learning what works best for my artistic process!