This was initially a concept with some very old characters from 2018. It was a quartet of Polistes dominula featuring the dominant foundress RoadBlock, Mutt and Muss (the bullies), and Lepidolite (originally named Crystal) who has a blank face, which in theory, ranks her as a subordinate. One thing led to another, and thus, the "get back to work" cartoon was born. The original drawing didn't have coffee mugs, or a crown over the foundress' head, but I figured adding these items would in turn make the final product more humorous. 2018 is bittersweet for me, as I had a mental health crisis that year. I don't miss the mental turmoil, but I do have a few memories of some artwork that I created back then, this being one of them.

Over the years, I've come up with several characters, named them, but never actually incorporated them into an actual story, other than a couple of random scenarios.

A friend and I have been brainstorming for a few years about a story incorporating an erythristic grasshopper being bullied for her differing appearance. Along the way, she meets and bonds with other fellow hexapods with unique quirks/physical abnormalities, and develops a long-lasting friendship with them. There's the main character who is an erythristic grasshopper, an orange-belted bumblebee with deformed wing virus, a yellowjacket with a developmental anomaly, a stink bug with a mutated antenna (in the sketch, it's completely missing, but that will change), a ground beetle with a bifurcation on his front right leg, and last but not least, a gynandromorph black swallowtail. I'm struggling to come up with a deeper storyline and plot. A lot of adult insects don't live for very long, usually one season, so I feel like the topic of death would be too dark, especially if this story is also aimed at a younger audience. I welcome ideas if anyone can share some insight. I don't plan for this to be lengthy, it's a short story, so if published into a book, there'd be something like 20 pages max.

An adult female polyphemus moth (Antheraea polyphemus) laid eggs on the wall outside my home. Obviously this isn’t great because she should have laid them on a host plant, but I managed to carefully gather both her and the eggs. Females only live 1 to 3 days after laying, and because they cannot eat (they don’t have mouths) she will die soon.

A Bornean short-tailed python (Python breitensteini) in Sabah, Malaysia

It's the same version included in the final anthology even with the errors...yeah.

This goes for some of the dudes here that wanted at least crumbs of the ideas I had on my head. So enjoy