At the end of August, when I got back from visiting family in Asia, I decided to spend some time on my own to try to figure out what I was actually trying to do with my life. Five years of working as an educator was genuinely rewarding work, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world, but at the same time it was exhausting and the last two years of being the head of an experimental academy program while trying to keep my team from going crazy and simultaneously dealing with an incompetent at best and actively malicious at worst district and campus administration sucked my soul right out of my ears.

Coincidentally, the author for a webcomic I really enjoy, Kill Six Billion Demons, announced that he was going to run an original character tournament (or OCT), in which participants are pitted against each other in a tournament bracket and must draw comics featuring both characters within specific gimmicks and limitations. Considering I had not drawn a comic in literal years (the last one I did was the predictably aborted pole-land reboot back in 2014), I figured this would be a good way to decompress and also get myself back into practice.

One recurring element you’ll see throughout these pages is the use of animated elements, such as Rabbit’s holographic mask. You’ll also notice that the initial art for these pages is pretty damn rough; this is because at this point in time I was emerging from a two-year art void where I had not drawn anything seriously at all.