YAFU - I used to know a little Spanish, twenty years ago. Are you from Spain or a South American country (or somewhere else?).

K1TesseraEna - Thank Griatch for his rake brushes. I do almost all the details with them.

Jeremy_Ray, from Argentina. So Latin American Spanish.

Nine was difficult to write. I had something else I wanted to say, but when I got done I decided it was too soon, and the Guru should say it instead. Painting the page wasn't too bad. I'm about as fast drawing as painting now. Painting will probably be faster in the future. It goes to show how bad the computer interface is for line art. I've got a Cintiq and it's still hard to get the lines right.

YAFU - You're way down there, huh? I want to visit the southern hemisphere. I spent the last few years learning the northern constellations. I'd like to see the southern ones. Where in Argentina are you at?

Ten was pretty easy, but the painting took a long time.

I'm going to take a break and rework the earlier pages a bit.

I think I'm going to start knocking down the panel count for painted pages. The last two pages had a couple good panels, but no big "look-at" panels. It's good to have the page filled with story, but ten and eleven gave up too much on the art side.

The artwork is nothing less than awesome.

I reworked it a bit - now it's nothing less than double-plus awesome

THANKS for the comment. I haven't gotten anything in a month anywhere, wondering where I screwed up at? Is Ulupi stupid? What happened?

I'm going to take another little break and write/layout/letter the remaining pages of issue 1 (probably 9-10 pages). Page 13 was a big leap forward and I'm not as worried about the art anymore. I'll continue to grow as a painter but I believe there are bigger deficits to be made up in writing and marketing.

When I started SM I was hoping to crowdfund each issue, and start the first round of funding when I reached page 12. There has not been anywhere near the response to SM that there was to The Dragon's Dreamworld however. I suspect that if I started a funding project now I'd get $10 from one fantastic person. If you are a totally stoked lurker who wants to see SM continue, speak now or there may well be more anime cat girls in my future and less realistic American style comic art. I will finish the remaining pages of the first issue of SM. That will give you the gist of the story, and I'm sure it will continue to improve my painting. Without a positive reader response though, I'd be pretty stupid to put more time into SM.