Star Cross’d Destiny Creator Blair (@junobean) and I agreed to swap blog posts about our respective comics, which I was rather excited about since I remember reading it “back in the day,” not too long after I started Messenger. She’s taken a long break from working on her comic to do some other awesome things like, oh, I dunno, be part of a band, go on tour, and release a couple of albums. But now that she’s back, SCD is more epic than ever, with new art, a new look, and lots to look forward to.

SCD is a sci-fi/action comic started in 2003 as a black and white, manga-styled webcomic. The story follows Juno and a band of her misfit companions, each of whom has a hidden power based on a particular element – Air, Water, Fire, and so on – in a dark future New Orleans. The comics were later colorized and updated with fresh art, which really brought a new dimension to the story. Blair often works in bits of photography as part of the background, which lends a really slick, authentic look and feel to the comic, especially since many of them are from real locations in and around New Orleans. The comic’s art has a really neat grungy-yet-stylized aesthetic, and many of the elemental visual effects are simply gorgeous to look at on their own. One of my favorite parts of reading any webcomic is watching the evolution of an artist as it happens, and SCD is no exception. Blair’s art has really matured over the years, and I personally am looking forward to watching the rest of the story as it unfolds.

I can really only recommend checking it out for yourself, as you certainly won’t be disappointed. Read the whole comic at starcrossd.net, or check out Blair on Twitter and DeviantArt. I wish her tons of luck in getting her comic started up again!  (And thanks again for the opportunity to swap posts! If there are any other comics out there interested in doing a news swap, drop me a line at bug@messenger-comic.com!)

In other news, I’m still working toward my goal of making it into the top 100 comics on TopWebComics! If you vote for Messenger, you’ll be able to view the latest page of a short minicomic I’ve been posting as an incentive for voters – it’s a short story about a Chio named Teir from the same village Eldora and Finn came from. Teir is a very curious Chio, and is about to discover something not seen by her village before. If we can get into the top 100, I’ll post an archive of all the previous pages (4 so far!) of the minicomic for everyone to see. Let’s do this!

Other than that, Chapter 12 of Messenger begins today. Stuff is gonna happen. I’m excited.

Thanks for reading!