#quite possibly bc i sorta ripped this style from some old OCs of mine which were typically drawn traditional?? ooh extra lore

[accirax]

DRDTtober Day...... uhhhhhh......

Given that we are (*checks calendar*) now half a year out from when DRDTtober 2024 was meant to begin, I think it's finally time to admit... yeah, I don't think I'm ever going to go back and make art for those prompts 😔✌️

I did, however, draw this back in September, in accordance with my original plans for the event! For those curious, below the cut is a (hopefully) brief explanation of what these designs were intended to be for, and why the comics ultimately never came to fruition.

As you may or may not recall, librariansrose kindly shared 2024's DRDTtober prompts to Tumblr well in advance of October's beginning, on August 22nd. Because I had so much fun making all of the comics for 2023, I definitely wanted to participate again. However, making the comics for 2023 took a lot of time, so I resolved that, if I was going to commit to these comics as a fairly big time investment, I might as well go all-in and make something nice that I could ideally use as a portfolio piece in the future. One polished, paneled page per day, in a 31-day overarching story. That idea also aligned with my personal desire to do something different than I had done last year, just for spice.

"This will be so easy!" I thought. "I have the end of August and the entirety of September to make my designs, write out my script, and get well ahead of drawing the comic itself so that I'll have plenty of buffer for the beginning of October!"

A few days after the prompts were shared, it was announced that DRDT Chapter 2 would resume on September 6th.

Suddenly, all of the time that I had mentally blocked to work on my DRDTtober comics was absorbed into watching the series itself and writing up my episode-by-episode dissections, as well as reading and responding to other various theories. It was awesome, obviously, but by the end of September I had done basically nothing other than make some very loose notes and draw up these first passes at character designs. At the beginning of October, I played with the idea of doing 7-page bursts at the end of each week, but when the first week ended, that turned into starting it mid-month and finishing in November, to starting in November, until it devolved into where we are now.

The biggest reason why I never wound up making this comic is because, to this day, I still don't have a clear idea of what its ending would be. With the comics being one connected story instead of 31 largely separate jokes, I needed to know what the ending would look like in order to properly set up the beginning. And, as I quickly found out, trying to make up a satisfying story that has to feature 30 random prompts in a specific order and feature 17 different characters when you only came in with the desire to make a comic instead of to share a story, is really, really hard 😅

What I can say about the story is that it would have had David as the protagonist, with Xander and Teruko starring as fellow main characters. They would go on a quest throughout the kingdom and into the wilderness, encountering the rest of the cast (themed to various prompts) at various points along the way. For instance, you might be able to recognize Hu, Eden, and Min as representing the "magical girls" prompt, while Whit and Charles exemplified the "coffee shop" prompt. There was also a lot of lore, the details of which were also never fully fleshed out. If people are interested in hearing more about the story, maybe I can share the beginning of the script that I wrote out, and the layout sketches I made of what the first few pages would look like.

But yeah, unless I wind up reviving this story in some other form in the future, I don't think I'll ever wind up circling back to 2024's prompts. I'd be much more likely to either just wait until 2025's prompts come out, or continue making my own events, like the Secret Santa and Valentine's Day series I've done. I guess I could maybe try to combine 2024's prompts with 2025's prompts to do two prompts per day? That sounds kinda interesting. But also really hard. No promises!

I have no idea if anyone was still anticipating these from me at all, but in my mind I did promise that I'd do the prompts eventually, and leaving that dangling thread was bothering me. Plus, I did like these designs, and hopefully you do, too! Probably so, if you're still reading this. Thank you for reading this! It's not a month's worth of comics or illustrations, but hopefully it was interesting regardless :)