Here's Madeline de Verninac up to more trouble again, this time drawn by Emmy-nominated animation director Guy Moore. 

As you may recall, Guy is a longtime friend of Nicky and Andrew's, and has worked on such animated series as Beavis & Butt-Head, Daria, The Venture Bros., Codename: Kids Next Door, Kindergarten: The Musical, Muppet Babies, and the upcoming Super Free Play. He also created the drawing of the "Muppet Baby" versions of Charles and Arok that serves as the title page to this series of prequel tales.

Nicky wrote this two-page story, Research, with Guy in mind. In fact, the Aetherium of the 13th Hour, where the story opens, was originally dreamed up by Guy for a role-playing game that he was in with Nicky and Andrew. 

This story presented an interesting challenge: Nicky had ideas for multiple extended tales of adventure that we were eager to see rendered in Guy's delightfully cinematic art style, but we knew Guy had a limited time window between animation gigs and was only available to do a single short story.

Research is the result: three wild Madeline capers packed into two pages, each caper summed up in just a couple of Guy's spectacular panels and two or three sentences of narration from our unflappable antiheroine.

Click here to see higher-resolution versions of the Research pages and panels on Guy's portfolio site, plus a few of the sketches Guy made as he worked on the story!

We'll be back on September 3rd for the beginning of our next prequel tale, in which Agents Rex and Ruiz of the Reality Patrol pursue the deadly Arthur Resyk to the City of the Ever-Open Eye!