I’m happy to announce a new feature on Sandra and Woo: Commissioned artwork featuring our characters drawn by other talented artists. You can expect a wide range of different styles and subjects and one or two new images per month.

The first painting is titled “The Flower” and was drawn by the Bulgarian artist Denny (Exarrdian). She has a DeviantArt gallery and a fantasy webcomic called FanFyria. Exarrdian is already working on a second image and I hope she will become a regular contributor to the feature.

Supporters can download the image in its original size (3300 x 2500 pixel) and as a wallpaper (1600 x 1200 pixel) on the special page for donators.

I’m open for suggestions for topics that you’d like to see drawn in color.

We are grateful for every reader. But if you support Sandra and Woo by

• not blocking the advertising banners and maybe even checking them out once in a while,
• and/or by linking to Sandra and Woo on your Facebook page, blog or website,
• and/or by writing witty or funny comments,
• and/or by even making a donation,

or in another special way, I want to particularly thank you for your support. Without people like you, even less independent artists would be able to find an audience on the internet and to earn some money with their art.

I’m currently saving money to ensure future updates of Sandra and Woo and Gaia until at least the end of 2012.

The first pages of our new fantasy webcomic Gaia will be released in November 2011. We will then post two new full color pages per week starting in December 2011.

You can read some basic information about Gaia in this blog post from last December.

On the Gaia website you can already find the following articles:

• Cast
• Setting
• Glossary

Just like Sandra and Woo, Gaia will be written by Oliver Knörzer (Novil), drawn by Puri Andini (Powree) and edited Brenden Myers, Charles Wang, Chris, C. Wray and Sarah Dunphy.

The update schedule and content of Sandra and Woo will remain unchanged.

Here is the sample page (page 2) I posted in January (the dialog contains a typo, it should be “archmage”):

It’s once again time for our most popular blog feature, other good webcomics. This time I want to present two fantasy webcomics with particular nice artwork and solid storylines.

Unsounded by Ashley Cope is one of the comics with the prettiest color artwork I’ve ever seen, including print comics such as Blacksad. That it updates three times a week with pages that are as detailed as the covers of professional comic books is absolutely astonishing. The story is also well done, but it might not be everybody’s piece of cake. The female lead character, the foul-mouthed 12-ish rogue Sette, is one of the most obnoxious brats in the history of storytelling, surpassing even Dakota Fanning’s character in War of the Worlds. Together with the loyal lich Duane, whom she teases endlessly, Sette is on a mission to find the cousin on behalf of her father who is a thief lord in Sharteshane. Of course there are more than enough monsters and villains who get in their way.

The pacing and dialog is quite good and there are some nice ideas here and there, but it remains to be seen if the main story will offer something unique in the end. Unsounded is definitely not suitable for children, the PG-13 icon on the page should be replaced with an R rating. Not only do the characters cuss like sailors, there is also lots of graphic violence with bad things happening to little girls and whatnot. My biggest issue with Unsounded is the heavy accent of most characters and the large amount of uncommon words they use, making the comic very hard to understand for non-native speakers.

The Meek by Der-shing Helmer consists of three chapters so far which only seem to be loosely related to each other at the moment. The colored artwork is also top-notch, but I wish the pages were bigger to be able to really appreciate it. The first chapter centers on the (completely naked) young woman Angora who has been sent by her “grandpa” on a dangerous mission, the second chapter is showing a key day in the life of the emperor Luca DeSadar. The dialog in The Meek is significantly easier to understand with fewer strange words and place names as in Unsounded, and I also think that the main story looks slightly more promising. However, The Meek’s biggest problems is its erratic update schedule with only one new page per week in average. Just like Unsounded, The Meek is made for an adult audience with a naked main character; the violence is less drastic, though.

The Advice Animal meme started when the first image macros of the original Advice Puppy were posted on the Image-Board-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named some years ago. The images showed a puppy’s face against the background of a color wheel accompanied by unrelated, ridiculous instructions such as “Do the laundry / Rob a bank”.

Since then, an uncountable number of variations of the meme have been created, some of them with very amusing “characters”. One of them is for example the “Socially Awkward Penguin” who just has no clue how to behave in certain social situations. Another one is the “Insanity Wolf” who is just, well, insane.

Here are some examples, you can find many more and create your own on Quickmeme:

Business Cat	Courage Wolf	Advice God
Hipster Kitty	Insanity Wolf	Ordinary Muslim Man
Philosoraptor	Sheltering Suburban Mom	Socially Awkward Penguin

And here are three macros I created myself today for this blog post:

Lame Pun Coon

Pedobear

Good Guy Greg