You know, set aside the whole “Pagan” thing, and she’d fit perfectly on TBN…

As you all know by now, this is the last chapter that Greg Holkan’s going to do as the regular artist here at Gossamer Commons. (And one look at today’s strip shows how much that scares me — that is some glorious artwork.)

Well, moving forward, I’m pleased to announce some changes, both in how we do things and — naturally enough — in personnel.

First off, while Greg is stepping down from the three-day-a-week grind, he’s going to continue to be a part of the creative team here at Gossamer Commons. He and I have been telling this story together since the beginning, and I’m not about to give that synergy up now. We’re going to continue brainstorming and discussing, and Greg is going to contribute certain art pieces and character designs. And most importantly, Greg is going to help Wednesday and I with the editorial process as strip art is turned in. It’s important to all of us that Gossamer Commons have certain artistic commonalities. We’re building a visual language, here. And Greg’s the linguistic expert on it.

At the same time, there is a tremendous advantage to having new artists come on board. We don’t want someone who’ll simply do their best Greg Holkan imitation, after all. We want artists who’ll take the language that Greg’s begun building and make their own statements, unique to their own artistic vision, for everyone here to see. Further, one of the issues up until now has been the question of time. It takes a lot of time to do between eighteen and twenty five panels of beautiful line art a week like clockwork, and most artists want to do their own projects as well as this one. To that end, we have a change of artistic policy we’re announcing as of the next chapter.

From this point forward, we are going to have not one but two regular artists on Gossamer Commons. Each artist is going to work on a specific Chapter of the story. At the end of that Chapter, the next artist takes up the next one. This should give the artists several weeks or even months to build up a healthy backlog of art while still having the time to produce their own projects. And, of course, it means that we get a lot of opportunities to broaden and improve Gossamer Commons.

I am extremely pleased to announce that the two regular artists on Gossamer Commons, starting at the beginning of January, are going to be Peter Venables and Ben Brooks.

Peter is a veteran Webcomics artist best known for 13 Seconds, which is utterly worth your time, so feel free to head over there. Peter brings a tremendous command of tight pen and inkwork alongside a gloriously diverse capacity for character design. The more we see the fey, the more I’m going to be glad Peter’s alongside us. Peter will be the artist for Chapter Three.

I’ll let you all in on a little secret about Ben Brooks. When Greg was selected as the regular artist back at the start, Ben was very, very close to getting the nod instead. When Greg told me he’d have to step down, Ben was my first e-mail back. As you can see in his current project Nekonomicon, Ben has a sense of artistic freedom and energy that’s infectious and fun. He’s also produced some tremendous pencil and pen work, has a solid CG art background, and is an excellent photographer. With Ben on board, we not only get his tremendous energy and pen-work, we get to broaden the palette we use. Ben will pick up with Chapter Four in the Spring.

Finally, the month of December should have something special between Chapters Two and Three. Something Wednesday and I are putting our heads together on.

Change is frightening, but it’s also exciting. And I think the best is yet to come!