Back in the DargonZine 19-7 Editorial, I told you about Carlo Samson, one of our most loyal writers, who had recently founded Arcane Twilight, an electronic magazine he began with another former Dargon writer, Mark Murray. For many years, Carlo also created original artwork to illustrate our issues, and without his images over the last year, our story pages looked pretty bare. As a favor, Carlo agreed to produce the graphics for DargonZine 19-7 as a one-time thing, but there was no expectation he’d do anything more.
Well, I’m happy to report that Carlo has agreed to continue illustrating all our stories for the foreseeable future. So you can look forward to more colorful visual representations of the people, places, and things we write about. We’re absolutely delighted with Carlo’s return.
But Carlo isn’t going to be limited to two or three graphics every couple months. For years we’ve wanted to add illustrations to our Online Glossary pages. Well, over the past month Carlo has cranked out over a hundred character sketches, and I’ve added the necessary code to make it work. There are still plenty of characters and places that don’t have pictures, but now you can go to the Glossary and actually see what major characters like Clifton Dargon or Sian Allyn or Anarr actually look like! It’s a huge step forward in terms of the Glossary’s value as a tool for both our readers as well as our writers, and it’s something that could never have happened without Carlo’s artistic contribution.
In this issue, we bring a very successful year to a close with a great new standalone story from DargonZine’s most dedicated writer, Dafydd, as well as the fourth installment of Nick Wansbutter’s “Great Houses War”.
This year we printed 19 stories by ten writers in nine issues. We finished the immense Black Idol story arc and began the Great Houses War series. We moved to a new web hosting company, had our first printed ads appear in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, reorganized our leadership and roles, drastically changed our new writer mentoring program, added character sketches to our Online Glossary, and got back in touch with a number of former writers, many of whom are helping out in various ways. 2006 was a year of change, and those changes will continue to percolate throughout 2007.
Speaking of which, I want to let you know that we’ve set the contents for the first four issues of 2007 already, which you can see if you visit our Publication Schedule page. Our 23rd year on the Internet will begin with more of Nick Wansbutter’s Great Houses War series, punctuated with new singleton stories from Liam Donahue, Jim Owens, and of course Dafydd. So we’ll see you next year, and keep an eye on our What’s New page and these editorials for news about more upcoming enhancements to DargonZine.
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