Welcome to the Art of Dina M!

You might notice that the site menu’s slightly different from what it was. It has mostly to do with my earlier hints that I’d do a slight re-focus with this site… when I first started up, I mainly wanted to have a place where I could post all my NSFW artwork, after the Great NSFW Ban on Tumblr. But things have changed a little since then. I have several other places to share artwork… Twitter, Discord and Mastodon, yes, but I’m also experimenting with sites like Pixiv. Pixelfed and Pillowfort… and it’s only now I realize that all those sides have names that begin with P. I wonder if that means anything…?

Um. Anyway. For ages now, this site’s main focus has been the comics and the writings… the blog, mostly, but also other writings. The single-drawing artworks don’t get a lot of focus; I haven’t even uploaded any single-drawing artworks to the site for a while, even if I had. Partly it’s because the art galleries that are available with WordPress and Elementor (which is what I use to power the site) SUCK. Either it’s a hassle to upload, or the gallery looks terrible. So the two art gallery pages have sort of been neglected.

If you check the pages now, you’ll see that the galleries have been restructured. I’m still not perfectly happy with how it turned out, and I’m looking for a better solution… but in the meantime, you’ll notice that the “comics” and “writings” pages are placed before the art galleries on the site menu… just to illustrate that these sections are probably the more important ones.

I realize that my website isn’t professional… I”m the only one running it and I don’t know beans about coding so I’ve had to make some compromises. But I’m always working to make it a better experience!

Oh, and I’ve made a blog post about April O’Neil. Mostly because I was making a hypno-stasis drawing of various April O’ Neil incarnations, and I had a lot to say about that drawing, why I wanted to do it, and why I think the outcry about April’s design in the upcoming TMNT movie is silly. You can read it all, and see the drawing in its glory, here.

Couple of new comics, if you haven’t seen.

One is Huldra’s Song… which is NOT part of the Huldratized series by Amanda Collier-Laisse (zombieslavegirl), even if it features the same Huldra and the same design for non-Chibi-Dina. I essentially did this because of a Twitter challenge… I asked people if there was any characters they’d like to see me draw more of, and HypnolordX mentioned the Huldra. Never one to do anything without exaggerating, I ended up doing a four-panel comic.

The other is the two-panel Angel & Devil, which you can find on the second One-Two Shots page in the Chibi-Dina Chronicles. This comic is essentially a dramatization of some of my own inner dialogue about whether I do too much hypno-art or not enough… with a twist hypnotic ending.

In other news, I’m pondering a slight rebranding of the site. Don’t worry, I’m not making any DRASTIC changes, and none of the content that’s up is going to vanish…but it’s getting pretty clear that it’s the comics, the blog and (to a lesser extent, if you add like a ton of goodwill) the writings that’s the main active part of my site, not the single artworks… so I have pondered for a while maybe restructuring the site a little to focus more on those three things. I’m not 100% how yet, but I’ll check out some other sites and see if I get any ideas.

So, I’m aromantic.

I don’t remember if I’ve actually stated this before, but I am. I don’t fall in love and I don’t really feel romantic attraction. Now, anyone who’s paid some attention to me would known that I’m not asexual… I’ve been pretty open about my pansexuality, and my liking for sexy ladies as well as handsome dudes and good-looking inbetwixters. But I’m not ROMANTICALLY attracted to them. It took me some time to figure this out, but there’s a difference between being horny and wanting romance.

For some time I presented myself as pansexual and “borderline aromantic,” but as of late I’ve figured that I might as well drop the “borderline.”

And so, as an aromantic, I don’t really pay much attention to Valentine’s Day. Not that the holiday is a very big deal here in Norway anyway… it’s definitely more mainstream now than it was when I was a kid, but still fairly easy to forget. And that’s what I usually do; I’ll be vaguely aware that Valentine’s Day is coming up because I see ads for romantic gifts and candy, but on the day itself I’ve forgotten about it and usually I don’t remember it until several days later.

So here’s a short comic about that.

In other news, I’ve added a prologue to Lady Vidia’s Disney Cavalcade, I’ve written about the Animorphs book series, and I’m doing some revising of the Witching World fanfic.

You might notice that I’ve changed the front page so that the last five updates are listed instead of just the latest one. I thought that would help a little, if people missed updates.

I’ve also written a blog post about the controversies around Hogwarts Legacy. Y’all know my attitude towards the creator of the Harry Potter franchise and her increasing bigotry, as well as my relationship with HP fan works, but the Hogwarts Lecagy controversy has stirred more controversy and feelings are higher than ever. So I wrote a blog post about my attitudes about it (summary: You’re not a bad person if you buy the game, but I’m not going to), and that’s all I’ll say about Hogwarts Legacy.

It’s a new year! And if you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a new comic up, Mannequins. It features the same main characters as in Turnstyles, but is not set in the same world.

Some people have asked about the continuity in my comics. I’d say that all in all, the continuity is very loose… kind of like in old Donald Duck comics. You know, if Donald ends up rich at the end of one story, he’s always broke again at the beginning of the next, with no explanation. A good rule of thumb is that if a comic references a previous comic, they’re set in the same continuity. If not, they may not be. Big changes to the status quo, such as Chibi-Dina’s wardrobe update might stick, but if someone ends up, say, a permanent hypnoslave or something at the end of onwe story, it doesn’t mean they can’t appear in another story with no real explanation.

In other news, Chapter 13 of Seven Favours is up, and this is the last chapter to go up for a while, as the story’s going on a hiatus. Still, it ends on a pretty good point.

I’ve also done a parody recap/review of the first episode of HBO’s Velma. Let’s just say I wasn’t impressed.