I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: back in April, I wanted to start a members area-only side strip that would focus on Marie herself. I’m a long-standing fan of Robert DeJesus, and I tracked him down through his DeviantArt account (and other addresses). To my great delight, he responded with enthusiasm, but also a bit of caution. Fair enough, this IS the internet after all. So I provided character references and promised to pre-pay the first few strips, just out of good faith (I generally don’t pre-pay, since this IS the internet after all).
And so, we struck a deal, and I started writing a few scripts. Here’s the first finalized strip that came out of this:
I was pretty excited and sent a second strip to Robert. I received the following roughs:
Then Robert went radio silent for a month. When he resurfaced, late June, he explained he’d had a tremendous amount of work, and said he was going to get me the final version within a few days. That didn’t happen, and despite my repeated attempts at contacting him to continue this series, I never heard back from him. You can imagine I’m very disappointed, because I’m a huge fan of his work and I was looking forward to sharing this with you. And I suspected a series around Marie would get everyone excited, but that just wasn’t meant to be. We’re now in November, almost 5 months later. I can only assume that something either very bad has happened, or I might have done something wrong without meaning to.
Or maybe some faerie got to him and messed up his life so badly that he doesn’t dare answer my emails. Either way, I hope he’s fine. (And Robert, if you’re reading this, please contact me, I’d love to continue this series with you.)
Of course, if you readers want to contact Robert and plead with him to continue this series, I encourage you to contact him and politely ask him to get in touch with me. 🙂
Meanwhile, I figured I’d been sitting on these strips long enough, and having paid for them, I saw no harm in sharing them with everyone!
–Jaycee
