[3] For the 500th strip, entitled The Book of Woo and published on 29 July 2013, Knörzer and Andini created four illustrated pages inspired by the Voynich manuscript.
[9] The crucial obfuscation step was the translation of the English plain text into the constructed language Toki Pona by Matthew Martin.
Sandra lives together with her single father Richard in an unnamed town in the north of the United States.
Cloud gets trained in sword-fighting and combat by his Burmese mother Ye Thuza, who was a rebel in her home country before coming to America.
[13] In strip #718 it was revealed that she was born with Wolfram syndrome, which means she has a lifespan of about 30 years, giving us some insight of her aggressive determination to live while she can.
[16] Other recurring characters include Woo's love interest Lily, the fox Shadow and the red squirrel Sid, who live in the large forest near Sandra’s house.
[13] Brigid Alverson from Comic Book Resources noted that "it includes a bit of bad language and a few references to serious subjects, but the cute animals and the clean artwork have plenty of kid-appeal.
"[20] Other critics were reminded of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, which is also given as the main influence by the webcomic author, because of the similar style of humor.
[27] Sandra and Woo was also the topic of two journal articles by linguist Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ulrike Preußer from the University of Duisburg-Essen published in German teaching magazines.
In his review for Adventure Gamers (3.5/5 stars), Peter Mattsson was fond of the likeable characters and the interesting story, but criticized the design of some of the puzzles and minigames.
[40] El Santo, author of The Webcomic Overlook, found that "the ongoing character transformations from playful students to responsible adults are natural, believable, and never heavy-handed.
Since 1 April 2023, a remastered version of Gaia is being rerun on the website at the rate of one page per day, accompanied by Knörzer's commentary from the making-of book.
[44] The comic is drawn by Finnish artist Elli Puukangas, who previously created the webcomic Tistow.
[45] One of the main inspirations of the comic is Numenera, a science fantasy role-playing game set in the far distant future of Earth where technological artifacts have effects that are indistinguishable from magic.