From 1 October 2013 to 1 May 2014, the following six polls ran on Gaia. All of them got over two thousand votes and it’s time to present the results.

Poll from 1 October 2013:

Now that Lilith will get more screen time again, I’m sure that she’ll catch up to Viviana fast and both will rake around 35% each in future polls. I think it’s interesting how Viviana evolved from a minor character that just accompanied the group for a quest in the first draft of Gaia’s plot (written in 2004) to the second main character. However, the group will work more closely together in the next chapter(s), and the other characters should be able to gain a few percent here and there.

Poll from 1 October 2013:

I think 82% is a pretty high number if you take into account that one is a serious fantasy comic and the other is a comedy comic.

Poll from 3 October 2013:

48% of our readers prefer the Lord of the Rings book(s), while only 22% prefer the movies. The gap is not *that* large, though.

Poll from 3 October 2013:

With regard to The Lord of the Rings above, the Harry Potter books are even more popular than the movies. 72% of our readers prefer the books, only 4% prefer the movies!

Poll from 3 October 2013:

The most surprising result of this poll is that Unsounded received only 6% of the votes and Cucumber Quest only 2%. Both have received a good number of positive reviews and have also acquired a relatively large readership. I thought that Unsounded would receive at least 15% of the votes and Cucumber Quest at least 10%.

Poll from 3 October 2013:

Most of our readers do not read many fantasy comics. That’s not a surprise to me because there don’t seem to be many consistently updating fantasy webcomics of high quality if you aren’t using a very broad definition of “fantasy”.

To shorten the waiting time for the next page, which will be published on Friday, here are two early sketches of the main characters. I already posted a sketch of Viviana earlier.

I made a few minor changes to the dialog of the following five pages. I felt that it’s possible to make things clearer without harming the flow of the story.

• Shadowdancers 51: Added a word bubble with “Delvor!” in it to the second last word bubble to make it clear that Viviana is angry about the newspaper’s first headline that is shown in the next panel.

• The Tower in the Sky 2: Added “[…], sis.” to the boy’s word bubble in the last panel to make it clear that he’s Lilith’s brother.

• The Tower in the Sky 15: Changed Lilith’s word bubbles in the first two panels to “Hmm, I can see the sky…” and “… But with loophole spells, you can never be sure.” to make it clear that Lilith cast a hole into the prison wall and that she’s not sure if it’s safe to use it.

• The Tower in the Sky 23: Added “… or to dig around it.” to Viviana’s word bubble in the second last panel to make it clear that she’s showing Ilias their digging attempt in the last panel.

• The Tower in the Sky 43: Added “The hole lasted for a whole minute, not bad.” to Lilith’s last word bubble to give some context to her next sentence.

Here is a diagram that shows how often the main and supporting characters of Gaia appeared each year. Note that there were only 28 pages in 2011. You can click on the image for a larger version.

Some of our most observant readers have pointed out some minor issues in the last five published pages, for example the way Letho is holding the arrow in page 5 and 6. I have also found a few panels where the course of action could be made clearer with a few small alterations. Therefore we will publish an updated version of these pages over the course of the next days. Since our buffer of finished pages is large enough, this won’t have a negative impact on our update schedule on this website.

I find action scenes to be very hard to do right in comics. I just flipped through the very good Bone comic book by Jeff Smith and didn’t have to look long until I found one panel with a fighting move which is physically impossible (page 1156, panel 1) and one panel with a fighting move which is at least questionable (page 1169, panel 2).