Welcome to the Art of Dina M!

I’ve talked a lot about Project ERYSS as of late, and now I can reveal that the first story in the series, Welcome to Paragon Bay, is done, It’s a one-chapter novelette of about 10 000 words, and will be posted to this site at some point… though it’s already up on my Patreon, if you want to read it now… along with the first attempt at a start of the series, Meet the Alliance (to be revised),

So, Project ERYSS. I’ll write up a more detailed introduction to the world and the story later, but just to give a bit more information:

Project ERYSS is a planned series of short stories, novellas and novelettes (you might call them “light novels”) all set in a world where superheroes and metahumand exist and have been part of human life for centuries.

The main setting is Paragon Bay, a modern island metropolis with.thirteen districts, almost 4 million inabitants, and an untold number of superheroes and -villains. It’s named for one of its founders and greatest heroes, the now-sadly deceased war hero Paragon… though the rest of the world also often call the city “Supervillain Central.” Not completely without reason. Because Paragon Bay is also secretly where you find the main headquarters of the mysterious Project ERYSS….

The stories will be very adult-rated, often feature mind-control, non-con and dub-con, superheroines in erotic peril and other things you shouldn’t show your kids. But hopefully I’ll also manage to have a bit of fun, adventure and character interactions. I can at least promise that I’m not going to have every story a copy-paste of the previous one, and the number of street thugs who effortlessly beat up trained warriors is going to be very low… it’s supposed to be SUPERHEROINES in peril, not completely ineffectual damsels.

Inspired by Astro City, as well as online erotic superhero universes like Metrobay Comix (I like Trishbot’s stories!), there won’t be one main character, or even one set of main characters. Different stories will focus on different characters, and while some chars might only get a single focus story, others wil be recurring.

So far, four stories are either finished or in the works, with more being planned.

• Welcome to Paragon Bay: Jenna Lee Foster still doesn’t know why Rosalynn Westwood, of the multi-billionaire Westwood family, offered her five million dollars to come see her in Paragon Bay… but curiosity, money and the fact that Rosalynn has been her biggest celebrity crush for years, made her brave the trip to the city everyone calls “Supervillain Central.” Of course, it may not have been that good an idea… (Finished,)
  
• Watch the Stone Shine: David is a normal (though not particularly friendly or likeable) store clerk who happens to find a ring with a magic ruby that can turn anyone who looks at it into his mindless hypno-slave… including female cops and superheroines. But will he bite off more than he can chew? (About 70% done.)
  
• Sage to Seraphim (working title): Seraphim, Paragon Bay’s oldest and most admired superheroine, looks back on her past, inclucing her history with the evil Lord Waric, Kaldor the barbarian hero, and Paragon, the war hero and co-founder of Paragon Bay. (In planning.)
  
• Meet the Alliance: A college student vanishes from her dorm room without a trace. The newly formed Alliance of Super Chicks, led by Ermine (the White Vigilante of Blackstone), have a mystery on their hands. (Under revision.)

Just a quick heads-up that there’s new instalments in both the Cavalcades of Lady Vidia: The Chosen One Cavalcade has a new pic that was a Patreon request, and the Disney Cavalcade has a Snow White-themed pic. The Snow White themed pic also features a cameo from a character named Ethereal, who is part of my upcoming erotic superhero project, Project Eryss.

And speaking of: I’m about half done writing Watch The Stone Shine, a novelette set in the Project Eryss setting and featuring a couple of the characters. It’s a bit of an experiment for me, since it’s a parody of some of those “errotic superhero stories” out there… you know, with some unlikeable main character who defeats seasoned superheroes and the narrative tone is “bitch deserved it.” I wanted to try my own take on that, complete with the kind of ending I think such stories SHOULD have.

It’s the first time I’m trying to write a main character that’s deliberately unlikeable… I mean, some of my chars definitely have unlikeable traits; Lady Vidia can be rather creepy and obnoxious, for one, but I’m sort of hoping she has enough charm that she’s engaging and likeable on some level. The MC of Watch the Stone Shine is supposed to come across as extremely selfish, self-centered and entitled… I’m just hoping that people reading the story start thinking “yeah, that’s just like me!”

I’m not 100% sure how I’ll release Watch the Stone Shine to the public yet… but I’ll begin posting the chapters on my Patreon before too long… in case you’re interested. There’s some other Patreon-exclusive stories, including a short story set in the world of Holly Potter and the Witching World, a silly little Sabrina the Teenage Witch fanfic, and the start of Project Eryss.

Patreons also get access to my Discord server, and first look at pretty much any artwork I make. In case you’re interested.

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.