johnnywander

New BARBAROUS 6 interior art: Fortuna

Added 2025-10-29 18:44:22 +0000 UTC

The BARBAROUS Chapter 6 Kickstarter ends in TWO DAYS, on HALLOWEEN!!! 🎃✨

In celebration, I wanted to show off some more interior art I did just for this collection!

This was the final large illustration I did for the book. We didn't want to change the placement of the spreads (a spread being a set of two facing pages), so this illustration of Fortuna needed to stretch across 2 pages -- hence her long lion tail trailing behind into the right-hand page. In print I think it will look both eye-caching and also be a nice moment to relax the eyes (imo this is actually really important in comics!)

I feel like as time has gone on, Fortuna has become more extruded and and more angular... more like a strange alpaca hybrid than a dog, and it makes me want to go back and make her weirder in older chapters. BUT NO, I must resist my baser instincts to go back and redo art for the sake of ego. U___U

I've mentioned it before, but older familiars are supposed to be references to classical statuary. Fortuna in particular was designed to look like a dog made out of acanthus leaves. In a much older draft of BARBAROUS, Fortuna was originally named Artemisia, but we eventually opted for Fortuna since it's a much simpler (and more intriguing) name.

Thank you again to everyone who's supported BARBAROUS and supported the current Kickstarter - we couldn't be sharing this kind of work without you! Here's to many more comics from us to you!