The final winner in the character design competition was Elvira from Åsele who drew Iris’s love interest:

My interpretation of Elvira’s drawing:

And that was that with the characters. What remained for me was to draw the story featuring these five characters. Pencilling, inking and coloring meant two months of INTENSIVE work. I delivered two days or so past deadline in the middle of October, and then I slept for like a week. The comic book will be posted to the members of TL with the book package of January. Exciting times! Can’t wait to hear your reactions, dear TL-girls. I really hope you’ll like YOUR comic book!

A quick note about the cover. I was promised to make a wrap around cover, i.e. a continuous image that stretches from back to front. And so I did. Everybody happy. Thus the cover was supposed to look like the image above.

The same day the comic book was going to go to print (!) I was notified that they had changed their idea and squeezed in the whole wrap around into one single cover. I thought it was a bad joke at first, but it wasn’t. The layout was thus completely ruined and they had tried to make up for it by smudging things out with the smudge tool…

Unfortunately it is this corrupted cover-version that is featured in the ad for TanimaL in TL-magasinet. Totally beyond my control I’m afraid. The corrupted cover is the result of seriously BAD communication. It’s what happens when you run over people. I have to say this, because my name is being promoted with the release of TanimaL, and I would never hand in a cover such as the one above.

Luckily enough, I was given a few hours to try to save it. What will go to print eventually is this:

It is in no way ideal, as far as lay out goes, and I’m still a bit cross about this, but at least it is better than the ad i TL-magasinet. What’s on the back cover I’ll leave as a surprise until January…