About Us

About the Author

Hello! I’m Shannon Manor, I am professional illustrator and character designer. I currently work on the TV show Archer along with creating my own work and comics.

This is my first dip into webcomics and I have no idea if an about me page is normal but I made one anyways so…yeah. I talk a lot when I get nervous and making a webcomic is nerve wracking so here’s a page for me to just talk I guess? Why not.

This comic is supported by Patreon! Patreon backers get a lot of bonuses for this series especially! Any comic page I finish will go up on Patreon first. Backers will get to see roughs and progress reports as well as character designs or break downs. My goal is to stay ahead of what’s live on the site so Patreon will usually be way ahead of what’s public. Thanks so much to all my backers who have supported me both financially and emotionally and this comic wouldn’t be here without them!

 

Other places to buy or support my art:

Storenvy – So far, there is only one Dragon Sanctuary print but I will hopefully be making more and maybe other merch like stickers or pins. I’m always welcome to ideas!

Gumroad – My other comics are available here as well as digital versions of my sketchbooks. There is a DS sketchbook in there that I made before deciding to make this a webcomic so it may have spoilers? Not massive but I do a quick run over of the plot and the characters.

Ko-fi – Basically a tip jar.

About the Series

This isn’t a summary or anything, just a quick run down on where this story came from for those that aren’t aware.

Dragon Sanctuary is a story I first created when I was 10 years old. Obviously what you’re going to be reading on the pages now is barely the same creature. It’s been gutted and rebuilt so many times that most characters are barely who they used to be when I was a kid.

It was something I made up cause I just liked dragons and wanted to play pretend about a world with dragons and someone who got to have them. Basically I read too many fantasy novels and just wanted to have fun making up my own thing. So I did and I would play it with my friends. As I grew, I would change the characters and the stories to reflect my change in tastes and maturity. There was a hot minute in there were I was a huge anime nerd and the story turned into an anime. I even labeled it as seasons and ‘season 2’ involved dimension hoping into the real world where they met 3 school girls. I made a logo in Japanese. Yikes! It was bad. It was real bad! It’s our embarrassing high school pictures! I made a lot of bad choices but trust me when I say they are gone! Around the time I was in college, I started to flesh out the bones of the story that still exists to this day–the world, the characters, the motivations, the conflict. This is where I started to grow and get more comfortable with my ability to tell a story. Then I gave up and put everything on the shelf. From 2010 to 2015, I didn’t touch this story or these characters. I’d let myself be convinced that there wasn’t anything else to do with the story. I let people tell me that if something isn’t %100 original from top to bottom, that it isn’t worthwhile. I believed them but I still missed all these nerds every day. They were a part of me. They helped me learn about storytelling, character design, world building and so on and so forth. In 2015, I did some silly little monthly challenge called OC-October. I decided to redraw a bunch of old characters of mine and I redrew the main cast of Dragon Sanctuary. Seeing them again made me regret ever giving up on them because I didn’t stop growing as a creator in 2010 when I put them away. I kept growing and they weren’t there to grow with me. So I redid the story again, I redid character designs, I redid the world, I redid the lore, I untangled the story and fleshed out everything. I caught them up. And in 2017, I decided I wanted to make it a web comic. So here we all are 20 years later! We’re all very different people from when we started but the important part is we’re here.

Also if you EVER want to see any of the other terrible and embarrassing things from Dragon Sanctuary’s past, I am more than willing to share! Images at least. I found an old Geocities for DS I made in 6th grade and yikes, you’ll have to kill me and steal my laptop to get that one.