And that's it for chapter five! Normally at the end of a chapter we would take off two months so we could have a break and work on the script and thumbnails for the next chapter, but this time we're putting the comic on hiatus for a year.

We would have liked to complete chapter six (which would be the conclusion of the story arc we've been working on for the past two chapters, instead of the cliffhanger you get here - sorry!) but decided against it. We've been working without a buffer since Maria first updated in December of 2013, which has made things very tiring even with long breaks between chapters. Additionally, the story was originally meant to be 32 chapters long, but much of that content was filler. When the site we had planned to pitch the longer version to shut down, we decided to cut out pretty much all of the filler chapters, but never actually went back and completely reworked the draft; as a result the material we base the scripts for each chapter on is in considerable disarray.

During the hiatus we'll work on the story and scripts, and create a buffer, and Maria will return with chapter six in March of 2019. You may see some progress updates on my (Elaienar's) art blog (@Elaienart on Tumblr), and you'll definitely see some non-Maria comic projects during the hiatus.

To everyone who has been reading Maria up until now: thank you for reading, and for your support. If you've been enjoying it, comment and let us know - we love to hear from readers! (If you've not been enjoying it, you can still comment and let us know - we're always interested in hearing what could be improved in our work.) Thanks again, and we hope you'll come back and read again when Maria begins updating again next year.