It’s time again for our yearly Gaia and Sandra and Woo artwork contest! It comes with a total prize money of $1100!

As you can see below, not only the best entry will receive a nice sum of money. If your drawing skills are just average, you will still have the chance to become one of the winners by drawing something funny, clever or innovative. Your drawing must clearly reference Gaia or Sandra and Woo in some way. You can also submit other types of art such as 3D models, action figures, fanfiction, or even (photos of) a cosplay costume.

• 1st place: $250
• 2nd place: $200
• 3rd place: $150
• 4th place: $125
• 5th place: $100
• 6th place: $75
• 7th place: $65
• 8th place: $55
• 9th place: $45
• 10th place: $35

Please send your entry in an e-mail with the subject “Artwork contest 2017” to novil@gmx.de. You can attach the file to the e-mail or put a link to it in the e-mail’s text body. You must submit your entry until (including) Monday, 21 August 2017. If you have a website that I should link, please put its URL into your e-mail as well.

Additional information about the contest:

• You can submit several drawings or other types of art, but you can win at most two prizes.
• Please do not publish your artwork on other websites before the end of the contest. After that, you can post it anywhere you want.
• You can sign your work. But a large, ugly watermark will reduce your chance of winning.
• Digital images should be sent in their original size in a lossless format, for example as a PNG file with full color depth. If you draw the image on paper, you should send me a large, clean scan of it in a lossless format, for example as a PNG file with full color depth. However, you can’t send me files larger than 25 MB by e-mail.

After my trip last year, I also visited the Comic Con Germany in Stuttgart last Saturday. Once again, I had a lot of fun. I met a couple of other German comic artists, a few Sandra and Woo fans, bought some cool artwork, and saw a lot of cosplayers with great costumes. In this post, you can have a look at all the photos I took and read my comments about them. You can click on each photo to see a larger version of it.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

Here’s some info about my visit of the Comic Con Stuttgart next Saturday for our German readers:

Ich werde diesen Samstag, 1. Juli 2017, der Comic Con in Stuttgart einen Besuch abstatten. Allerdings nur als Besucher, nicht als Aussteller. Sollte es Leute geben, die Lust haben, mich zu treffen, mögen diese hier bitte einen kurzen Kommentar hinterlassen. In dem Fall könnte man einen Treffpunkt ausmachen. Ich werde zum Beispiel meine Kollegin Sarah Burrini beim Stand des Comic-Verlags “Edition Kwimbi” besuchen.

Adventure Gamers has published a review of our PC adventure game Sandra and Woo in the Cursed Adventure. It got an overall score of 3.5/5 stars. I think the reviewer Peter Mattsson did a very good job, giving a nuanced overview of the games’ strengths and weaknesses. So check it out if you’re interested in the game. Here is a summary of his pros and cons from the article:

• (+) Lovely cartoon graphics
• (+) Faithful to the original comic
• (+) Quirky characters
• (+) Interesting story and setting
• (+) Challenging puzzles
• (+) Substantial length

• (-) Some puzzle solutions come out of left field
• (-) Setting feels underused
• (-) Minigames more frustrating than fun

From 2 July 2016 to 10 June 2017, the following eleven polls ran on the Gaia website. It’s time to present the results. Most of the polls also ran on Sandra and Woo. So also check out the results @ Sandra and Woo since I’ll usually just point out the differences to those results here.

Poll from 2 July 2016:

The correct answer Greendew only received 4%. As a reader, I probably would have guessed the tower in the sky as well.

Poll from 2 July 2016:

72% of our readers read at most seven other fantasy comics. That’s not a big surprise given the rather low number of straight fantasy webcomics. Gaia is one of just a handful of webcomics that tell a serious adventure story in a classical fantasy setting. That’s a bit surprising given the popularity of the genre.

Poll from 2 July 2016:

The number of Gaia readers who also read Sandra and Woo is very high and almost identical to the 82% when this question was asked in a poll from 1 October 2013.

Poll from 2 July 2016:

This result is almost identical to the one of the same poll that ran on Sandra and Woo.

Poll from 24 December 2016:

This result is almost identical to the one of the same poll that ran on Sandra and Woo.

Poll from 24 December 2016:

The vistors of the Sandra and Woo website show more interest in visual novels if the poll results are representative for the whole readership.

Poll from 24 December 2016:

This result is almost identical to the one of the same poll that ran on Sandra and Woo.

Poll from 24 December 2016:

The average age of the computer of Gaia readers is a little bit older than that of Sandra and Woo readers.

Poll from 24 December 2016:

This result is almost identical to the one of the same poll that ran on Sandra and Woo.

Poll from 20 February 2017:

“Breaking All Barriers #139” and “Breaking All Barriers Cover” are also my favorites from the 15 pages placed between 11 and 25 from the last two chapters “Breaking all Barriers” and “Monster”.

Poll from 27 February 2017:

I’m not at all surprised that “Breaking All Barriers #125” won the reader’s choice for the best page from my selection of the 10 best pages the last two chapters. I added “Breaking All Barriers #139”, the winner of the poll above, as an additional choice. I suspected that it would not come last, but that it managed to make it all the way up to place #2 is a bit of a surprise to me. The three pages from “Monster” all got a solid 11% of all votes. My personal favorite “Breaking All Barriers #106” only got 8% of all votes. The pages “Breaking All Barriers #36” and “Monster #79” may be examples for pages that you just appreciate more as an author than as a reader. However, I wouldn’t have voted for them as my absolute favorite as well, so the low amount of votes they got isn’t shocking.

There are four new polls that appear randomly in the voting widget in the right sidebar:

• Who is your favorite main character?
• Who is your favorite secondary character?
• Which is your favorite chapter?
• What’s your favorite hair color on Viviana?