One last old Neopian Times comic. I'm pretty proud of that background actually. (Although, yikes with the composition. Rule of thirds, anyone?)

 If only stat training worked this way. On the website, raising a Neopet's stats is an arduous, expensive, time-walled process, which makes me wonder how the people on the Battledome high score list ever got there. Sometimes, upon completion of training, a pet gets a random super bonus and gets extra points added to the stat they were training. But only sometimes. Much to Hyren's chagrin.

You might also notice that I hand-drew and lettered the speech bubbles in this comic, as opposed to previous comics where I used the text tool and Manga Studio's speech bubble generation tool. The latter, while handy, was also a bit limiting. These days, I prefer to hand-draw speech bubbles because it gives me much greater flexibility, and I feel that it's more aesthetically cohesive than canned ellipses* and dry computer-generated text.

*Man, "Canned Ellipses" would be such an awesome band name. I feel like that's what Johannes Kepler would have named a rock band.

This is the last "Hyren goes unhinged during the Altador Cup" comic, I promise.

 I don't know what more to say about this comic than that I just really enjoy Hyren taking himself very seriously when no one else does. And his face in the last panel just gets me every time.

Looking at this comic now, I realize I spelled "favourite" wrong! For shame! (As Neopets was founded by two Brits, the franchise uses British English and all Neopian Times submissions are required to do the same. Not sure how this one slipped past the radar. Whoops.)

(And yes, that is why all of my Neopets fanfiction uses British English, if you were confused about that.)

 So on the website, when you "read" a book to one of your Neopets (i.e. basically use a book item on them), they say something cute like "Wow, this is one of my favourites!" The lines are randomly pulled from a prewritten list, which was a fun programming trick back in the 90's, but it also results in Neopets sometimes saying things not really in line with their personalities*. 

*On-site, Neopets don't really have personalities; they're essentially just a graphic and some stats, and a large part of the appeal of the website for creative types such as myself is the fun of coming up with personalities and backstories and psychological issues for each of one's pets.

In this old Neopian Times comic, I feel like I kind of like the art more than the joke, but eh. So in the Yooyuball game you can play on the site, there's an ice debuff that temporarily freezes the opposing team, and I guess I just got to thinking about how that would work in-universe. Except this only works for teams with Bori players.

(For those not in the know about Neopets lore, the Bori anciently magically froze themselves as a defensive measure against the Bringer of Night, an ambiguously malevolent demigod.)

I'm not really sure why I ended up drawing so many Altador Cup-related comics. Either the event just sparked a lot of ideas for me, or maybe I just didn't have much else going on at the time.

 

Another old Neopian Times comic. This isn't really franchise-based humor as much as it is an example of my pets' odd family dynamic. Hyren's usually a pretty chill guy, but there are two things that can instantly make him go aggro: his family being in trouble, and someone badmouthing his favorite sports team. Including members of his family.

There is a bit of an inside joke here; Kreludor has historically not been the highest-ranking team in the Altador Cup (although they did win the Cup at least once, as far as I can tell), but Hyren consistently roots for them every year. He doesn't care whether they win or lose--he's just happy to support a space-based team that's not Virtupets-affiliated. And what Team Kreludor lacks in talent and payroll, they more than make up for in heart and not having cheaters or Elon Hughlis on the team.

 I just love Hyren's expressions in this one. Drawing unhinged Hyren brings joy to my soul. He's fun to write as pretty much the cantankerous middle-aged dad of the household.

(Granted, after the events of a fic that I never submitted to the Times but will post here eventually, Hyren would no longer have ethical qualms about Team Virtupets, but he would still object to them on the grounds that they just win too often and that's boring.)

Another old Neopian Times comic. I'm not sure this one scores many points in the humor department, but I just loved drawing manic Hyren in the first panel. There's always got to be one insane sports fanatic in every household. And yes, I am aware that the background Usul's eyes change between panels. I was trying to not make the background characters look static but actually it just turned out distracting. Ugh, I had so much to learn about illustration. I still do.

 Also, Hyren is a big fat liar. His rivalry with fellow Virtupets commanders Garoo and Gormos was practically legendary in the corps. I suspect that with his military days behind him, sports is the only outlet he can find for his competitive streak.

Another old Neopets comic. This one was written by another user and I drew the artwork. I rather like how this one turned out. Maybe don't put Dr. Frank Sloth in charge of anything ever.

 For some odd reason, I find Dr. Sloth really fun to draw/write. I think in large part it's because of the fun of putting my own unique spin on his personality. Canonically, despite being portrayed as the biggest and baddest of all Neopian villains, he's never really been given much in the way of background or character development--pretty much all we know about him is that he's a genius who specializes in genetic engineering and wants to take over Neopia for unspecified reasons.

As he was a major player in Worth Fighting For, however, I took the opportunity to really delve deep into his personality. My vision for Sloth is that of a hyperintelligent being who's always at least ten steps ahead of everyone else mentally, and has no qualms about using that to his advantage. He's calculating and ruthless, but usually not so much malicious as just really dedicated to expanding his galactic empire and ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently. If you do get on his bad side, though, he's quite adept at psychological manipulation (as Hyren finds out the hard way in Worth Fighting For). Still, being a Virtupets citizen isn't all that bad as long as you know your place in the system.

I actually wrote a long-form Neopets fic that I never bothered to submit to the Neopian Times that's all about Hyren, his family, a rogue Virtupets officer, and Sophix II traversing the galaxy in an attempt to free Sloth from the Space Faerie Token so he can resume leadership of Virtupets, because after he was trapped inside the token, Commander Garoo took over and became an unbearable despot, and at the end of the day, nobody can run Virtupets better than Sloth.

In this fic, we learn that Sloth created Virtupets and conquered most of the galaxy out of a twisted drive to ensure his own survival, after he was left the last living member of his species when they were eradicated by a freak illness (which he had been working to develop the cure for). He's especially interested in conquering Neopia because it's implied that Neopia is the only world in the galaxy that has magic, a novel energy source that Sloth is keenly interested in.

As for how it all turns out, well, you'll have to wait until I get to posting that fic here.

Okay yes Sloth experiences a change of heart and becomes a good guy. I know that will irritate a lot of Virtupets fans. But I really wanted Sloth and Hyren to get some closure after the events of Worth Fighting For, and I personally prefer the idea of Sloth using all that brainpower for good.

Another old Neopian Times comic. Looking at these now, I feel like at times the composition could have been better; in this comic, there's a lot of empty space and relatively tiny characters (and those hands in the second panel could have been positioned way better). To be fair, though, it can be difficult to find composition that works when you've got a main cast consisting of a 170cm-tall human and roughly meter-tall creatures. (It's also slightly implied in my Neopian Times writing that unmutated!Hyren is on the short side even for a Grundo. Wait, I'm not sure if I ever actually implied that anywhere in writing, or if it's just my headcanon.)

(Actually, another reason why the composition was on the strugglebus was because for these comics, I used art software called Manga Studio that had a lot of handy features, but I often never bothered to customize the panel size. So these panels were much wider than they could have been.)

 Oh, right, about the actual comic. On the site there's a game called Pick Your Own where you go into a Meridellian berry field, click random bushes, and hope you get something good. (Most of the time you don't.) Half-Eaten Berries, despite their appearance, are perfectly acceptable food items that your pets can eat without any ill effects. However, Hyren (due to a quirk in the site's programming) won't eat them. He also won't eat Spiced Apple Pie, but that's another story. :)

Another old Neopian Times comic exploring the oddities of random item generation methods on the site.

Mostly I like this one because the spacescapes were fun to draw. The last panel could have been clearer; the idea is that Mira has been going around tossing space food onto (into?) objects in the Neopian planetary system apparently just for fun.

I could go into a whole lot of unnecessary speculation about how many small planetary system bodies are loose agglomerations of smaller components; therefore it is conceivable that an artificial object, upon impact, could easily become buried in the substrate. #overthinkingeverything

 

 I've previously posted some comics that I never got around to submitting to the Neopian Times, but I realized I'd never posted the comics that did get into the Times, so I thought it would be fun to do that for the next little while. Especially considering the NT archive is huge nowadays, and you've got to be pretty bored to go through past issues and eventually stumble upon these.

First off, here's the logo for it. Squid are kind of a running joke with me. (I also really wanted to have a title that did not at all incorporate some variety of "crazy" or "insanity" because those sorts of comic titles had been way, way overdone in the NT.)

On the site, keeping a Neopet's HP full could be kind of a hassle, especially when said Neopet had a lot of HP, and the more potent Healing Potions were really expensive. Training a Neopet's stats was also extremely tedious and resource-consuming. I feel like the Battledome and training Neopets could have been implemented a lot better (although they did eventually make some good improvements to the system); even though battling wasn't really the biggest aspect of the site most of the time, it played an important role in a lot of events and there were also some much-sought-after awards for it, so they could have made the system a lot less painstaking.

 I doodled this back in the day when Neopets was still good, because there were a few editions of the Neopian Times editorial where the editor decided to have some fun and let site characters King Jazan and Hanso answer player-submitted questions... much to their consternation. It was hilarious.

I've actually written multiple Neopian Times short stories about the misadventures of the long-suffering Jazan and the Ixi thieves who keep him on his toes (i.e. both Hanso and his wife Queen Nabile). I haven't been putting them on this site because I wanted to keep focused on my main Neopian Times cast, but maybe I'll add them to the collection someday.

I also wrote an NT short story that's a series of correspondences between a desperately penitent Jazan and a very vindictive Princess Amira, in which she makes his life miserable as politely as possible and he tries very hard to be diplomatic about it. It's got a Jane Austen-esque vibe to it and I had a lot of fun writing it, so I'll have to post it here eventually.

(To be clear, I like Jazan; I thought he had a really interesting character arc in the Lost Desert plot and I loved further developments of his character in subsequent plotlines. His high-strung personality and complicated relationships with other characters just make him really amusing to write situational comedy about.)

The other day I was feeling bored enough to do some vanity Googling, and to my surprise, Google's AI actually came up with an overview for my Neopian Times work. I'm a little shocked because nobody actually seems to care that much about it, but perhaps it has more to do with the fact that I was fairly prolific back in the day, and my username showed up frequently across many issues of the NT in a certain time frame.

(Although, this is the first I've heard of being "well-known" within the community. One of the reasons why I stopped writing for the Times was because my work was getting ignored, and I honestly haven't interacted with the player community in ages. Apparently AI thinks that prolificity = renown, so it needs a reality check.)

 As much as I eternally loathe generative AI, I concede that sometimes it is good for a laugh. I have no idea why the AI picked those four particular pieces to detail, instead of, say, one of my epically long series. The bottom two are super old and janky contributions from when I was in high school, and every time I see them I just sort of wince. 

Okay, actually that "Fifty Reasons" article is pretty decently funny by high-school-me standards. It was basically me poking fun at how, for two consecutive plots, players could choose to fight on the side of the good guys (Isca, Hannah, et al) or the bad guys (gangs of pirates and thieves, respectively), and so many people inexplicably went the "evil is cool" route instead of seeing the logic in trying to keep Neopia safe. This article was trying to point out, in a tongue-in-cheek passive-aggressive manner, that both thieves and pirates are pretty gross when you stop to think about it.

"The Ensorcellator" is a tepid little short story from when I was going through a writerly phase where I had just plain run out of ideas, and decided my inspiration process would basically be "pick random stuff and make stuff up about it". Yeah. I'm glad I grew out of that phase and moved on to "let's wait until I actually get an idea for a story".

The AI summaries are also a little off. "On Developing Your Neopet's Character" is actually an op-ed that discusses various ways one might go about giving one's Neopet a personality and biography, with examples of how I formulated my own Neopets' characters. And that's a pretty generic description of "Ylana Skyfire: Protector of Spring", which is actually more about Ylana and a clingy fanfic-writing geek (who is totally me making fun of myself) searching for a missing Illusen. (I actually do recommend this one, as it's more recent and I had great fun writing it. Maybe I'll put it on this blog at some point.)

As an opinionated aside, I'm still not a fan of the directions Neopets is heading under its current management and I have no desire to start playing the website again. I much preferred the Adam-and-Donna and Viacom days, when Neopets was more "we're marketing this franchise to kids but we know plenty of adults play too" and not "Hey Gen-Z's! Let's make your childhood on-trend!". Way to alienate everybody else, guys. Thanks.

 Recently I remembered that I actually have a bunch of old traditional (i.e. non-digital) artwork lying around (i.e. neatly tucked away in a portfolio), and I thought it would be fun to post it here.

Here's a little standee of Blynn that I crafted for a Neopets contest some years ago. It didn't win (apparently most people don't share my cauliflower obsession), but I had fun regardless.

 I drew this illustration to commemorate a new and updated edition of my unnecessarily long Neopets fanfic Worth Searching For! I had already uploaded the previous version here, but parts of it still weren't sitting quite right with me, and I finally decided to just give it a total overhaul.

The most crucial edits here were to erase all vestiges of Isengrim's narcissistic sociopath personality from the first version, and really help Terra come into her own as a strong heroine whose kindness, wisdom, and courage inspire others to change for the better. In addition, I added a somewhat significant conversation between Isengrim and Suhel to tie Suhel's character development together a bit better than in previous versions; when I originally wrote this fic, I didn't go into much detail with her because I simply wasn't planning on doing anything else with her, but since then she's actually become a main part of the cast, so I figured she needed her due in her introductory story. I also took the opportunity to tighten up the prose, since it had been a few years since I'd last visited this story and I've somehow improved a bit as a writer since then.

If you've never read the fic, there's no better time to do so (but for Sloth's sake don't read the version that got into the Neopian Times, thankfully it's very old and you'd have a difficult time finding it, so just spare me the embarrassment and don't go looking for it).

 More old art!

Neopets had several paint brush colours in the early days (before even I started playing) that were rather swiftly retired and converted into a completely different aesthetic (such as Glass becoming Tyrannian) as the art style of the site became more polished. Unicorn (down at the bottom of the page) was a colour with some cool potential, but in reality it was just... a white Neopet with a doofy horn sticking out of its head.

So, I thought it would be fun to play around with ideas for a "revamped" Unicorn style that actually altered a pet's appearance more and... looked better. Man, I'd love a qilin Moehog!

Also featuring my redesign for Grarrl physiology, because as a paleoartist, the canon designs for Grarrls and Chombies are a huge pet peeve of mine (or were when I still played the website, I guess). I hate that they have all the paleontological accuracy of a 1960's Saturday morning cartoon, and I'm a huge advocate for taking the time and effort to make sure current representations of dinosaurs in the media are scientifically-informed. 

Dinosaurs are not fantasy creatures that exist only in popular imagination--they are as real as living animals, just a few million years removed from us. I'm not saying everyone's got to stay on the cutting edge of the latest scientific literature, but would it kill filmmakers and toy designers to, say, put feathers on theropods, make sure their sauropods aren't dragging their tails, and just stop pronating those hands pleaseandthanks?

I'm barely letting the Jurassic Park/World franchise slide with this, simply because the original novel, and several parts in the films, state that the creatures in the movies aren't "real" dinosaurs, but genetic chimeras created for entertainment purposes, and the scientists are aware that their clones sometimes take some serious creative license. But everybody else needs a better excuse than "well, this is what dinosaurs looked like when I was a kid".

It's probably something silly to expect from a cartoony virtual pet website, but considering how gorgeous the rest of the Neopets artwork is, and the incredible amount of depth and lore the site contains that really make Neopia come alive, it's just too weird to me to have blobby kid-drawing-style dinosaurs waddling around an otherwise really sophisticated and well-designed world.

I mean no offense to Donna Williams and all the work she put in as the original (and at first only) Neopets artist, but as the franchise's aesthetic evolved and became more polished, Grarrls and Chombies should have gotten a glow-up as well. Many (actually most) Neopets species underwent redesigns before the advent of pet customisation, and to me it just feels like those two Tyrannian species are painfully still stuck in the site's Stone Age (pun intended).

/nerdy rant

 I wrote two articles for the Neopian Times where Blynn reviewed Neopian books under the alias of the Scrivener, a mysterious rogue who skulked about in the shadows leaving book reviews in the name of literary enlightenment. They were fun, but ultimately I was more interested in writing short stories and series. I still love the idea of Blynn as the Scrivener though. She gets up to all sorts of shenanigans when she's bored.

Once I got on a kick where I drew a bunch of human versions of Neopets canon characters. The War for the Obelisk plot introduced so many great characters and some awesome lore. I miss when Neopets still had good writing.

Couple more old Neopets doodles.

Concept sketches for Hyren in both his blue and mutant forms. I just love the idea of Grundo antennae expressing emotion, such as lowering when a Grundo is annoyed or twitching if they're taken aback.

 I drew this for the Art Gallery, it didn't get in, and I'm not surprised because it doesn't make much sense out of the context of knowing who my Neopets are. But I still think it's funny. The Sway mess with society, but who messes with the Sway? Blynn, of course. :)

 More old art. Someone on Neopets asked me to draw a robot Ixi, and I wasn't very good at saying "no" back then. Turned out pretty nice, though.

More old art, this time of a Neopets character so obscure he's not even canon anymore. Sir Bold Heart was one of several very old Collectible Cards with dated artwork which were replaced by newer cards; if I remember correctly, it was around the time of Champions of Meridell and they were replaced by Meridell-themed cards.

Honestly I think Sir Bold Heart could have stayed with updated artwork; he clearly fits the Meridell vibe.