I stumbled upon your site today, and as a longtime reader and fan of PE I thought I'd give you my take on Sanctuary and its many problems. I actually think you can distill it all down to one serious issue, and that is that Drew seems (or rather seemed, as the newest issues are quite good) to have lost interest in his story.

You can see it starting around issue 18 of the Sirius issues, I think. The art starts deteriorating, for one thing. Try holding up any issue between 18 and 35 next to any issue between 1 and 12 (by which I mean the Sirius 1-12) and compare the time spent on the artwork. The backgrounds are sketchier, the detail is all but missing, the facial expressions look like rough drafts. I think I know why this is. I was at the San Diego con in 1995, which happened right after the Sirius issue 1 had shipped, and I saw Drew there. Next to him on his table was a photocopied pile of completed pages through issue 6. For the first year, Drew gave himself an amazing head start, and as his monthly schedule caught up with him, he began to take less and less time on the art, in my opinion.

The same might hold true for the story. I don't know if you remember this, but back before Sanctuary had even started, Drew had announced it as a 50-issue story. This, of course, made me assume that he had the whole thing planned out, and I'm sure in some ways he did. Over time, though, he seemed to lose interest in his epic tale, and finally gave it a truncated ending 11 issues early. If you read all of Sanctuary with this in mind, you can see Drew's growing boredom with his tale and growing frustration with his schedule. By the time he'd hit bottom he'd already written himself into a situation that had to be resolved. I think this happened around issue 24 or 25. I also think this explains the overuse of the Purple Marauder and the constant parade of old characters. Drew probably was trying to keep himself interested in Sanctuary by giving himself familiar and funny characters to draw. (The Maurader is nothing if not fun to draw.) This could also, if stretched a bit, be an explanation for the monotony-breaking "Luse-as-a-woman" bit near the end.

I can't see the final 10 issues or so of Sanctuary as anything but desperate. Drew seems willing to take any shortcut to wrap up this story as quickly as possible, and considering how much I like #40, I don't blame him. Hopefully, these shorter tales he's tackling now will creatively rejuvenate him. I just don't think Drew has a "Church and State" in him, to be honest. His stories always work best as smaller, more immediate bullet bursts that weave into a larger whole. "Sanctuary" could easily have been a tightly plotted 8 or 10 issues (at most), and it probably would have been all the better for it.

The other point on which I agree completely with you is the overabundance of spelling and grammatical errors. Another poster called them "comic book speed bumps," and I am just the sort of person to be tripped up by them. When I see a misspelled word, it takes me right out of the story, no matter how deeply I was into it. A misspelled word is an intrusion into the fantasy world of the tale being told, and as Drew's tales take place in a fully fleshed-out world of their own, its doubly annoying to be violently wrenched back to the real one. I also agree on the laziness of the text layout. It seems as though the philosophy was to make all of the columns the same length on each page, regardless of where the breaks fell. Hence, sentences get ripped apart. Drew should take a lesson from the text pacing in "Jaka's Story," one of the more perfect examples of how this style should be done. (Just for the record, I don't buy his argument that text enhances the story, and that other creators are simply afraid to use it. Text blocks are just easier to put on a page than panels of artwork. It's more laziness, I think.)

In my humble opinion, the best thing Drew could do right now for his creation is take a few months off, and then return on a bi-monthly schedule. This would give him time to get a head start, form a new direction (if he hasn't already) and concentrate on making Poison Elves the great comic it has the potential to be.