As some of you might recall from this essay, I spent the latter half of 2025 working on a comic for the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Tania Sammons, a curator at the museum who had previously licensed my guide to sailors’ tattoos for a show, wrote to me with an irresistible pitch: four cartoonists would be hired, assigned a vessel from the museum's extensive collection of models, then given six months to produce a short comic for publication in an anthology alongside an accompanying museum display.
How could I say no?
My original brief was to research the Anne, the ship that brought the first colonists to Georgia, but in the aftermath of my dad's death the story took off in directions I couldn't have foreseen.
I'm releasing the whole comic online to coincide with the opening of Drawn to the Sea, the exhibition in Savannah. If you're in the area this week (or anytime over the next nine months!) you can stop in and see all the amazing work that came from myself and fellow artists Avery Hick, Rich King, and Sharon Norwood. Details about the museum show are here.
In the meantime, here's a very personal comic.
Content Warning: this piece deals with suicide and parental mortality. Readers with trypophobia may want to skip pages 14 and 15.
qi-ge, do you think we’re together in every universe?
of course we are!
[ID: In panel 1, peak lord shen jiu hugs a ghost yue qi, who glows gold, in the ling xi caves. Yue qi’s skeleton reaching for the entrance to the caves is in the background. In panel 2, shen jiu lays facing away, limbless and bleeding, in the water prison. A few shards of something lay close to him. In panel 3, peak lord yue qingyuan kneels facing a ghost shen jiu, who glows gold, in the ruins of the Qiu household. His skeleton can be seen close to the foreground. In panel 4, yue qingyuan kneels beside a sleeping shen qingqiu’s bed; light filters through the windows into the bedroom. END ID]
Danmei Gotcha for Gaza: Still in need of pinch hitters
Hello everyone. This is mod Stilton back once again in search of pinch hitters for the Danmei Gotcha (fill out the pinch hitter sign-up form here if you would like to join). But in this post, I'd also like to explain why we're having such a hard time getting leftover prompts filled.
When we started accepting prompts, we had a spreadsheet that allowed potential prompters to see how many creators were available for a certain novel/fanwork type. This meant that if a prompter wanted a S/FW piece of art made for Married Thrice to Salted Fish, for example, they could check how many artists were available and decide whether they wanted to order an MTSF fanwork or not.
If the spreadsheet showed that only a single artist was available, they could choose to pick something for a fandom with 5+ creators on the roster instead; and as more prompts were assigned, and creators decided they had reached their limits regarding the number of prompts they had accepted, the spreadsheet was changed to reflect this. Once all the creators for a particular fandom indicated that they wanted to stop accepting prompts, we stopped taking prompts for that fandom.
However, this put us in a bind when creators were forced to drop out later on due to unforeseen life circumstances or went no-contact with the moderator team. We were left with a number of prompts that we could not find creators for, since every contributor to the project signed up for a different set of fandoms.
We currently have 112 out of 434 prompts left to fill. 24 of these are unclaimed, meaning that we have been unable to assign a creator for them so far. All details for the S/FW prompts have been listed below, in the hope that a fan artist or writer in one of the relevant fandoms finds this post and might decide to claim them:
8: Fic, Guardian | Zhen Hun. Prompt: Zhao Yunlan showing Shen Wei all his favourite spots in Dragon City.
31: Fic, Guide on How to Fail at Onling Dating. Prompt: A fic where Jing Huan and Lu Wenhao really like to prank call and happen to prank call XIang Huaizhi at his job in the pizza place.
52: Art or fic, Kaleidoscope of Death. Prompt: Cheng Qianli and Cheng Yixie in a door world inspired by Little Red Riding Hood (or other fairytale of your choice). Light/funny, dark/angst, and everything in between is great.
144: Art, Drink, Drank, Drunk or City of Angels. Prompt: A B/W artwork/sketch of the artist's favorite scene out of either novel, that's all!
145: Art, Drink, Drank, Drunk or City of Angels. Prompt: A B/W artwork/sketch of the artist's favorite scene out of either novel, that's all!
151: Art or fic, Lord Seventh | Qi Ye. Prompt: The sable has stolen something important. What is it? (Can be as serious or as silly as you'd like!)
161: Art or fic, Peerless. Prompt: Cui Buqu and Feng Xiao but Cui Buqu is the powerful cultivator and Feng Xiao is a peerless, sickly beauty. Feng Xiao falling for (in his own way) his pit digging not quite suitor who continues to show up in his life even though Cui Buqu says it has nothing to do with Feng Xiao (it does).
193: Fic, Faraway Wanderers | Tian Ya Ke. Prompt: Ye Baiyi angst (introspection on canon mourning? the horrors of immortality? go wild)
195: Art, Golden Stage. Prompt: "I just wanted to kiss you. Stop crying." Fu Shen kissing Yan Xiaohan's hand from Ch 78.
199: Fic, Global Examination. Prompt: Gamer AU - maybe Qin Jiu as game dev who used to own the Top 2 scoreboard with You Huo who abandoned his high-profile account to live a farming life with his burner account?
Alternate prompt: Modern AU with Qin Jiu & You Huo playing video games together with excessive PDA.
212: Art, The Submissive Emperor. Prompt: Lou Jing with his arms wrapped around his husband's waist from behind and nuzzling his hair.
230: Fic, Stars of Chaos | Sha Po Lang. Prompt: Pick a moment in the novel to explore a canon divergence (fix-it, make it worse, or just make it different, whatever fits the story you want to tell!)
288: Fic, Faraway Wanderers | Tian Ya Ke. Prompt: Bodyswap chaos!
(Preferably canon-verse, what point in time is up to you). Due to reasons, ZZS and JBY swap bodies/consciousness (ZZS wakes up in JBY’s body and vice versa). Why this happens and how it gets resolved is up to you! I’d just like to see WKX suffering having to be with JBY, and Wuxi being Worried.
328: Fic, Guardian | Zhen Hun. Prompt: The novel-verse SID + Shen Wei gets roped into helping out at a haunted house (or similar event).
Yue Qingyuan is a fun character because depending on what angle you look at him from, he is either surprisingly well-adjusted or surprisingly unhinged.
If you're looking at Yue Qingyuan, the composed, reasonable, ever-polite sect leader, you will probably be taken aback by how much of that is just smoke and mirrors. And not just like one layer, either, it's not simple like "beneath that smiling facade he's actually an ambitious asshole" or something, no, beneath the first layer of smoke and mirrors there is another one, and then another one, all piled up and twisted together over a core that is a terrified and starving child. He's like one of those old English pubs where the wood rot is so thorough that it's actually what's keeping the roof from collapsing.
But if you're looking at the former slave child who had to be the biggest, most responsible of a gang of neglected and traumatized urchins, who ran away to become a cultivator only to make a wrong choice that got his entire body and spirit taken apart and put back together again, only to lose the one relationship that mattered to him, then the fact that he's anything other than a weeping mess on the floor is genuinely impressive.
The third card in the series <3 Yue Qingyuan this time!
[ID: Scum Villain fanart stylized as a king of spades playing card featuring Yue Qingyuan holding Xuan Su. The upright Yue Qingyuan has a distant expression and is holding Xuan Su by the blade, making his hand bleed. The reversed Yue Qingyuan has his eyes closed peacefully, and the upright Yue Qingyuan's blade is slashing his neck. End ID]
Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! You are no longer a slave, no longer worth less than dirt. Congratulations! But you will never forget the way they looked at you, will you.
And; “A’Luo, A’Luo!” She calls, the girl with the ponytail and the sweet smile. In certain light, you can never quite recognize her. In certain light, you can never quite recognize yourself either. Or the little slave in the woodshed. The little monster in the woodshed.
_____
Is the girl Ning YingYing, is the girl Qiu Haitang ? Who knows, not me that’s for sure.
Is the hand Luo Bingue’s, is the hand Qiu Jianluo’s ? Who knows. But it is A’Luo’s hand for sure.
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