I was nearly six months into drawing Paonia Pawns before anyone had anything* to say about it. A co-worker asked me about my coffee cup (which features the cast). I told him about the comic and he looked it up that night. The next morning:

It's kinda dark. I like it. --Mark

*Well, anyting positive. :-P

It was a long time after that before anyone else said anyting about Paonia Pawns. For a while, there was someone (whose IP address taced back to an ISP in Canada) who was voting for Paonia Pawns on one of the webcomic ranking sites. To this day, I don't know who it was, what inspired them to vote for the comic, nor what caused them to stop. Sigh.

In May of 2006, a fan over at Online Comics had this to say:

Clever style; appears literate (so far - haven't read entire archive yet); interesting. --Duke of URL

And then in July 2006, it finally happened. An email arrived from a fan! It was nine days before I realized it because I'd gotten so used to there being no mail that I only checked the inbox irregularly. I printed the email and re-read it when I sit down to work on the comic. (OK, yeah, that's probably pretty sad.) Anyway, it reads, in part:

If cute was illegal, you would be locked up for life. --Greendragon