Happy New Year to all! (If you'd like to see the pretty pictures for this journal, read it here on DeviantArt!)

As I mentioned previously, the Avania webcomic has almost reached the end of the first issue. I’m amazed at how quickly the 6-ish months have gone by since I launched the comic, but I’m very excited to continue into Issue No.2 and beyond! Right now I’d like to take a moment to discuss my plans for the comic as they currently stand, so that readers will be informed for the future.

Avania is a passion project for me, and I am more than happy to throw as much of my free time into it as I can… For the moment however, that time is limited by the need to work a day job. While this arrangement has its benefits, it does mean drawing the comic is slow going (as I prefer to go for quality over speed.) Back when I started this whole thing I vowed that I would finish three full issues (70 pages) before I published anything. This gave me a pretty big buffer to say the least, but as this is by design a book-formatted comic with many panels of detailed art, plus dedicated cover and interior art, I could still foresee a time when I’d run out of buffer…

Now don’t worry–We’re only at page 29, and as of right now I have 78 completed pages! That also is not counting the covers, which I intended to post between issues as weekly updates (along with chapter recaps) to provide a bit of a breather and help extend my buffer a little. With that in mind, I am pretty confident I will finish drawing Issue No.5 by the time my buffer is exhausted around August of 2020. This will coincide nicely with the first quarter of “season 1″ and the end of the first story arc.

After that I will have a few options for how to continue, assuming I’m still working full-time; I could switch to posting as pages are completed, but the option I’m leaning towards is to draw one full chapter (usually ~10 pages) at a time and after completing the last page, start posting once a week until that chapter is all up. The advantage of this would be I can continue to refine pages as I have been doing during the production cycle, which results in a higher quality comic at the cost of having an “on” and “off” season, but I think this would be worth it.

Again, I still have at least 1.5 years of weekly posting left, and I don’t plan to reduce how much I work on the comic, but I want to be open about how much time it takes to create the pages and what you can expect in the future. Should I become able to shift my time from my day job to my comic, I would love nothing more than to draw Avania at a sustainable weekly pace!

In other news, there are a few stand-alone versions some recent panels that I will be posting, along with a bunch of new sketches that I will be queuing up soon, so look forward to those too!

I also still fully intend to make full issues of Avania available on Comixology at their original resolution, as well as offer printed issues for sale. Do let me know if you’re interested in either–especially the print issues, as I’d like to gauge the size of the audience before I commit to a print run!

A big thank you to Avania readers, and to everyone who enjoys my work! Your support is very much appreciated, and I am always happy to hear your comments and suggestions! If you have questions about the future of the comic feel free to comment here, or if you have questions regarding the comic’s setting or characters, just send an ask to AvaniaMail!