maiji: a blind biwa player, a lady warrior, and a demon

[Set of 2 images. 1) Digital ink brush style illustration of three figures cascading down a page. On the left is a musician with a long flowing beard playing a biwa/Japanese lute, his eyes closed, with a hazy moon in the sky. To the right is a woman in Kamakura-era armour astride a horse. In the centre foreground is a man in Kamakura-era armor with shoulder-length hair tied back, holding a long sheathed sword in his left hand. He seems to be about to draw it. Superimposed over the illustration is the North Bound logo with the text: "a blind biwa player / a lady warrior / and a demon". 2) Same illustration without the logo and text.]Something I'm excited about with regards to finishing fight / flight is that now I can finally post a new batch of images to Pixiv! Not just fight / flight, but also other illustrations I finished over the period of time and/or forgot to previously post to the North Bound series there. I really wanted to do one last illustration of these three to close it off. I usually wait a day, several days before posting art/comics to other platforms. Partly to spread out the update spam, partly to try to increase visibility, but mostly because 9 times out of 10 if I post things too fast I almost immediately discover some silly mistakes and then I'm crying inside because I'm repeatedly editing, reposting, finding another mistake, repeat etc... and/or I can't edit a post on some platforms and have to delete it all and start over. So I try to pace myself a bit, giving myself a little distance and opportunity to be more aware and mindful. (Sometimes it works. Sometimes I'm like, who cares, no one will notice except me, and move on with my life.)It's always hard to assess your own work objectively. Projects like North Bound are particularly interesting because of the funny elasticity of time that you have with all the different pieces of it. That some ideas are so old and you're finally getting to them after all these months/years or other people are finally seeing them when you've already long moved on to something else. That different things are a varying stages of conception and sketching and refining and finishing, and so on. Webcomic creators are very familiar with the concept of "webcomic time". I think anyone who works in a field where there's a lag between the initial conceptualization of something and the actual publishing/launching it out into the world know what I mean. (Webcomic time maybe even more so because the barriers to entry for webcomics can be wonderfully low and webcomic creators often do SO MUCH in the production so lots of people get to commiserate in this funny space/feeling together.) To be honest I think I feel it with North Bound even more than I ever felt it with Now Recharging. The latter I worked on in a relatively regular fashion to hit specific posting schedules, while North Bound really is whenever I can squeeze in the time and motivation and also problem-solve narrative issues.)Looking back, Mirror Most Dark (completed 2017), I Heard A Cicada Cry (completed 2020), Survive (2021) and fight / flight (2024) form a four story set as "this is North Bound Hokushin's formative time before he meets Raizen". But what I really like is that they feel pretty self-contained - more like "this is an interesting little supernatural historical fiction-y series of stories". (Enough so that I actually woke up one night thinking, "Hey, this set of stories would actually make a pretty robust printed book! The 3 comic stories alone come to 108 pages! I wonder how many pages Mirror Most Dark would come to if I re-laid it out as a printed illustrated story... I'd have to redraw the illustrations in black and white to be able to print it more cost-effectively and match the style of the comic stories..." and then I was like no, you already have enough things to work on, and you don't need another box of books sitting in your closet for the next 10+ years.)Working on these helps me really appreciate the art and craft of storytelling and building out/fleshing out a character, and also pushes me to try so many things I otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to. Mirror Most Dark, the oldest work in this group, still holds up not too badly (though there are a lot of errors and issues, and many things I would change if I were attempting it today...), and some panels and sequences I've been very proud of throughout the stories. When I reread them I do always see little things I'd like to fix, but overall... I made them, I learned from them, they exist, and it was all a very worthwhile experience!