And welcome back to our mainline Beyond the Western Deep tale! I hope everyone was happy with the wonderful little mid-course appetizer that was The Scholar and the Seawal. It was a TON of fun to work on it with Jayelle, and I imagine we’ll be collaborating on another story sometime soon in the Western Deep universe. Isa and Nora seemed to resonate well, so hopefully we’ll see them in the future.

We’re picking things up right where we left off. Actually, if you want to catch up, you can select Chapter 3 in the chapter dropdown box and you should be able to read through all the pages sequentially without needing to go through Seawal’s pages too. ComicPress DOES have some handy chapter tagging, after all! I just needed to remember to mark all the pages appropriately X)

A bit of a personal plug: for those who may not know, I’m currently working as a narrative designer/writer on Guild Wars 2, an MMO developed by ArenaNet. We’re going to be releasing a new episode of our continuing story, the Living World, this upcoming Tuesday (the 26th), and my first major writing contribution will be in it! Aside from helping on various punch-up in the writers’ room for the main episode, I wrote the story in our new fractal dungeon, Deepstone. It gets a little nod in the trailer, and I can’t wait to see what players think!

For guest art this week, a little follow-up from the Aggretsuko images I showed earlier! Saraa provided us with a fantastic alternate take on Janik, presenting her similarly to the Washimi character! Check it out:

Perfectly calm, totally chill. She probably does yoga after work and then swings by the karaoke bar to belt out some insane heavy metal along with Quin, which is a side we saw of both Janik and Quin last week in Rachel and Jeri’s guest art!

Thanks so much for this awesome piece of art, Saraa!