So here we are, everyone! Page five-freaking-oh-oh. The big 500. I have made half a thousand Sakana strips in the past 8 years and MAN, THIS COMIC HAS BEEN SUCH A HUGE PART OF MY LIFE. 

If you'll let me get a little real and sentimental for a moment here: I really didn't expect things to happen like this in my comics career. When I decided (on a whim??) to go to college for COMIC BOOKS way back in 2008, I figured, hey, I'll learn to draw some pages and then either get a studio job, be picked up by a publisher, or have some sort of very stereotypical comic industry experience like every other comics person I knew at the time. The internet, fandom, culture, WEBCOMICS THEMSELVES were all extremely different 10 years ago. There were far less women in comics at that time, most everyone (myself included) saw only one path to prosperity in sequential art. Webcomics were only just starting to come into the limelight, and the most popular ones were mostly gag and videogame strips that had been around forever. 

And again, ON A WHIM, in 2010 I decided to continue a school assignment on my own and began posting the pages online. Did you know Sakana began as homework?? I wanted a chance to practice everything I was learning in my college classes, and I liked this silly fish market romance idea I had come up with, so I just kept on making more and more AND MORE PAGES. 500 PAGES??? That's a lot of pages. I've been making Sakana for almost a third of my entire life. 

Other projects have come and gone, I've gone on hiatus, come off of hiatus, I posted pages to SmackJeeves, Deviantart, MangaMagazine, and other sites, I was picked up by Hiveworks, ran two Kickstarters, and now I'm self-employed and making Sakana is my full-time job. I just want to say thank you to everyone for your readership and support over the years. I'm a private person online, so I don't often respond directly to things, but I see the fanart and the discussions and the fanfiction and honestly I'm incredibly surprised and humbled every day that so many people are enjoying my work and having fun with these characters I've created. 

Even if I get a little spotty with updates now and then, and even though I'm trying to branch out a little these days after so long working on one project, I just want you all to know that first and foremost I LOVE SAKANA. It is my pride and joy, a real labor of love, and it feels so good to have 500 pages to show for my effort. I won't say there's 500 more pages in store, probably more like 300? But you can rest assured that I've gotten this far and I will see this huge pile of anxious young fishmongers to the end. 

Thank you all for reading. <3
-Mad