It's been ~2 months since I finished Beasties! #2 and because of some very bad art block I've made very little progress on #3 in that time, (the first two took me about 2 months each, which was already much slower than I'd have liked.) mostly due to having trouble plotting it out and racking my brain trying to come up with honestly very simple things and getting in my head about it. The good news is that I am still working on it and will release each page as soon as it's done (the cover and first page are mostly complete so expect them soon) as well as physical copies on my ko-fi shop like the others. However, since nobody's bought any physical copies I've decided that #3 will be the last issue in the 8 page zine format for now (I may make more in the future as side content to the main story).
Initially, my plan was to make a 4th zine and then start work on the "main" comic which would have been a full length, full color comic book that I would have tried to publish. Having thought about it some more I'm going to change that plan slightly since focusing on a comic intended for publishing would mean spending a lot of time working on something I couldn't upload or get feedback on, and I'd like to maintain and hopefully grow whatever small audience I have (and appreciate!). So, I've decided that after Beasties! #3 I will switch the series to longer form stories in full color and a proper comic book aspect ratio and upload it page by page. I'm hoping this change will make uploads more consistent than trying to make a full project all at once, although progress might be a bit slower per-page due to being full color. I want to generally split up story arcs into 24-32 page chunks so that I can potentially try to publish them in standard comic issues at a later date. The first 3 zines can be considered a sort of "issue #0" for the main series.
In terms of story I have a pretty good idea of where things are going. #3 will feature some new creatures and some hints at the deeper lore of the world. Things will be going in an overall more fantasy/adventure direction, but still with good amounts of the slice of life/character stuff at the core (my main inspiration for Beasties! was Moomin and it'll approach its fantasy elements in a similar way for the most part). I'm very excited to write the Smilo parts since her arc is something I've had in mind basically from the start.
Anyway, Beasties! will return sometime Soon™ with zine #3 and the series proper will start sometime after that and continue into the foreseeable future.