Small WIP panel crop from Nightmare’s Embrace I’ve been drawing recently – as well as, I soft-launched the info page for the comic last week, on July 22, 2026! I plan to retouch some of the artwork on it, as two of the profile artworks use older art (while the third is one of the paintover practices touched-up from last year), before sharing the page more widely. (That’s also when I’ll update the RSS.) In the meantime, the page in its current form is up at Landylachs.com/nightmare
In addition to the character profiles, the bottom of the page has a small gallery showing some of the various artworks I’ve drawn of the Nightmare’s Embrace characters from over the years. The art gallery is a similar layout as The Harbinger’s Path page index.
Update about when Nightmare’s Embrace debuts
I also have some new info about this mini comic I will probably wait a bit before mentioning it elsewhere, but I’ll mention first here for myself (and you if you happen to stumble upon it). The original plan for this comic was to complete it and then post it in its entirety on the Nightmare’s Embrace website. I would have aimed to do this by about the end of this summer.
However, I learned an update a week or two ago that has changed my plans slightly. Now, I am leaning toward holding off posting this comic until at least after November – because this one I’m thinking of debuting it in print first instead, during a new event taking place this November in LA!
Similar to Manga Ichiba, this event is the first time they’re trying it out. I’ll post more about the event in another post when I have a chance to organize the info more coherently, as it’s still pretty new to me.
Comic Progress Update & Thoughts
I also think slightly extending my timeframe for when I wanted to post Nightmare’s Embrace will prove useful to drawing the comic, as it probably isn’t too surprising to learn I ended up adding several new pages that weren’t part of my original draft for this mini-comic. Right now, I’m prioritizing finishing the original drafted pages first, as they are the most important for the story – but when reading the original draft layouts, I noticed that there is some context that is probably clear to me but might be a little unclear to someone reading the comic without knowing who the characters are yet.
It’s been such fun adding these pages with additional context, as much of it covers parts of the characters that have been part of their backstory for a long time, but that I’ve never depicted visually before. It is also, as always, continually fascinating for me to compare how I draft new pages now with how I drafted pages from the original layout – those were originally started at least a year or more ago, now! I still marvel at how much longer those older drafts take me to “fix” compared with when I start a new page now. I wonder if it will often be this way when working on pages drafted a while back vs newly-drafted pages, or if it’s something that might equalize over time as my workflow for comic pages becomes smoother over time.
Offline site development
The current live version of the Nightmare’s Embrace site is mainly an info page with character artwork, but since the soft-launch, the offline version of the site has all the comic pages at their various stages of WIP. Something about seeing all the pages in their web layout is really exciting for me with drawing these comics. I think that’s when they start feeling more “real” or tangible to me. It makes finishing them seem more within reach when I can browse through all the pages in their web layouts. It gives me a different impression compared to looking at the pages within explorer or an image viewer on my computer.
Maybe it’s because I can interact with the pages in how their final layout will be when the offline pages go online. Or maybe it’s because it is very satisfying for me to work on a page, update that page in the offline site, and then browse that part of the comic and see what impression the new page has compared to how it looked when I began working on it that day. It almost feels like a little trick you can play on your mind to make the task of finishing a comic seem less daunting.
Compared with The Harbinger’s Path, the drawing process for Nightmare’s Embrace definitely feels much smoother, and I am very excited about how it’s turning out so far! I still seem to prefer working on all the pages at once – this means that all the pages are in various stages of completion, instead of being drawn sequentially. This limits how much I can or want to show as I work on the pages, as most of it will probably be finalized at around the same time, instead of page-by-page. But I wanted to share something! And so this post was written.
Profile artwork + Panel WIP’s
I ended up starting to update some of the profile artwork – I’ll put the current versions along with the older versions for comparison in the full post below. The updates are on the more subtle side – you may likely need to flip between them to spot the differences. Also a progress WIP for the second panel afterward!
