You may have encountered “Service Unavailable” messages when trying to access the website today. There currently seems to be a denial of service attack going on, specifically against the old forum that’s still used for internal communication by me and Elli.

The server log file shows a lot of requests with the user agent ClaudeBot. I currently assume that a misconfigured bot is the culprit of the attack. I moved the forum to a different folder and hope that this will already solve the problem. So far, it looks promising.

I plan to publish the first page of my new comic The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer on 29 January. Just like Gaia, it will be a serious, long adventure story with some humorous scenes here and there. However, Scarlet will also differ from Gaia in several aspects. In order to align the expectations of the readers, here’s a short overview of the main differences between the two comics:

Despite the differences, all Gaia readers should also enjoy Scarlet. My general approach to storytelling hasn’t changed. Moreover, Scarlet Carolus will share several personality traits with Gaia’s most popular character Viviana. Like Viviana, Scarlet is brave, smart and practical. I hope you’ll like her, and Tibor, as much as I do.

The satellite video allegedly showing the abduction of flight MH370 by three spherical UFOs, which was the subject of strip [1340] MH370 until proven otherwise, has been proven fake! The original photographs of the clouds have been found. Jonas De Ro, a concept artist and illustrator, took them from a plane near Mt. Fuji in 2012, two years before the incident.

I’ve found an artist for my new comic The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer! Please welcome Elli Puukangas! It’s now probably only a matter of weeks until we’ll post the first pages of Scarlet.

Elli is originally from Finland. That means she’s used to long and cold winters like those on Lavarel. We all know how the unforgiving climate has shaped the character of the Finns. “An introverted Finn looks at his shoes when talking to you, an extroverted Finn looks at your shoes.” as VisitFinland.com summarizes it.

This demeanor is of course also reflected in Elli’s artwork. Her strict lines and sparse coloring are precisely what is needed to capture Lavarel’s somber character. You’ll see what I mean when looking at the following panel from one of her old comics:

…. Okay, scratch that. 😉

As you can see from just this one panel, Elli’s characters are full of life. You can look forward to dynamic character poses, expressive facial expressions, detailed backgrounds, and a lovely coloration. All in all, her unique semi-realistic style is a perfect fit for Scarlet!

Before I posted my job offer in various art forums, I had looked at several thousand accounts of comic/manga artists available for hire at ArtStation and other websites. And Elli was my top pick right from the moment when I saw her portfolio!

Here are some other comic pages and illustrations she has drawn:

I’ve been working hard on my new comic The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer. I have now written the dialog for almost 200 pages and will soon be ready to hire an artist to draw the comic. However, I will need the rest of October to understand better how many pages exactly the comic will have in the end. At the moment, I project around 500 pages, so a little over half of Gaia.

If you’re interested, you can find more info about the setting of Scarlet on the linked page. Of course everything there is still subject to change.

I used the fantastic new image generation tool Dall-E 3 to generate a lot of concept art for Scarlet. Some things I can’t show yet of course, but none of the following pieces of artwork can be considered spoilers so I want to show you some of the cool artwork I generated:

The main character Scarlet Carolus

Logos featuring Scarlet Carolus

The second main character Tibor Frey

The Machine of Eternal Summer

An illustration of the machine will be shown in the second page of the comic, so it’s not a spoiler to show it here.

A mysterious yellow megastructure

The Master Crystal

The Master Crystal is located in the center of the Twin Cities (Capella and Callisto), the political and cultural center of Lavarel.

Some landscape impressions