Okay, first things first, I am out of town! I'm driving, and I only have my phone with me. I'm going to see what my options are, but likely I won't be able to respond to comments or approve ones that need moderation (this is only for people who have never commented before), soooo I'll get to you on Friday when I get home! Second, if you are on a feed reader or something that puts the blog ahead of the comic (hi Anne!), skip this part and read the comic and come back to it! Okay, there. Anyway, you're probably thinking, whaaaaat, this is a comic about werewolves, what's all this magic business? Well, I hope by now I've dropped like a million really obvious hints that there are witches in this story. And maybe you picked up that Marisa seems to have a general handle on magic from the last few pages. She's a witch! It's pretty cool. When I started writing this whole thing, I came across a fact somewhere that historically when people were all gung ho to burn witches at the stake, apparently they also burned people who they believed to be werewolves! So, I figured that witches and werewolves work well together, which ultimately gave me the major conflicts that motivate the rest of this story. Since I'm not doing the whole alpha/beta fight to the death thing, there's gotta be another force in the story driving things forward. At the same time, it seems to me that in most contexts, a witch would win against a werewolf no matter what, which is why there are some limitations to how magic works in this story that will be clarified as things progress. Basically, witches tend to specialize. The magic circle things are largely inspired by Oh My Goddess/Ah! Megami-sama by Kosuke Fujishima. I went googling around for what the hell to do for magic symbols in this series, and didn't feel too comfortable with the runes and pagan symbols, just because I don't want to step on anyone's toes. All that googling brought me around to OMG, and I really liked that Fujishima largely sticks to magic circles tailored to the personality of each goddess in the series, and usually uses a lot of geometric designs and concentric circles. Soooo I'm kind of biting on his thing, but I made it my own as much as possible. Anyway, there are 4 more pages in this chapter and then we're into chapter 4!