Ashes

I am most eager to get this one off of hiatus. I have already started sketching and have 5 finished pages and 3 roughly sketched pages of chapter 2. I am aiming to start updates again in early 2012, as this will give me time to build a buffer.

Epic Fail

EF was updating every couple days last week, but updates are being cut back to once a week. I’m going to try to have a new page every Friday, but balancing EF work and Ashes work will be difficult, so some updates will be missed (including this Friday because Halloween preparations took up a lot of time).

Easily Amused

I still consider this project pretty much finished, though I may be adding a strip here and there in the future. Don’t really expect updates for it, though.

Dark Wings: Eryl

I also want to bring this one off of hiatus in 2012, though it’ll likely be later in the year as Ashes takes precedence over this project. I have the last three pages of chapter 2 drawn but only about a third coloured. I’ve just been lacking the drive to finish and upload them. Chapter 3-4 scripts need rewriting. Chapter 4 marks the end of the first book. The second book will take some doing, as I’m not liking how I’m telling it right now. It’s part of the reason I’ve felt so lackluster about the whole Eryl project since it went on hiatus some years ago. I need to rethink how the story is being told- which is not a particularly easy task.

Also, I dug this up today- an old painting from 2007 of Rava that I thought I’d lost. I don’t want to put it in the gallery as it does not reflect my current abilities, so I’m putting it here instead.

You may have noticed that when you mouse over the Epic Fail link on the left that it says the latest page is #14. ‘What?’ you cry, ‘But the last page was #17!’ Well I’ve overhauled the archives and removed all clay doodles, putting them in a separate page, which brings down the comic count by 4. You’ll also notice that the last new comic, ‘The Pidgeys and the Beedrills’ is not yet in the archive. It will be added after one more Harvest Moon comic goes up. I want those grouped together because they’re some of the few sequential comics in the archive.

PS: I now have photoshop and an ftp client, so the angst is over. :3

I also can’t post this on the Epic Fail website with all my other silly vg comics because the new comp doesn’t have an FTP client yet. But it’ll eventually go up there.

Edit 08-15-10: I upgraded the look of the website a bit. The dark blue was getting too dreary, so I lightened things up. I updated the links page, adding a new comic to me reading list: Ever Blue. And there is a new blog on the Ashes page with another panel preview and a look at how Rava’s character has evolved over the years.
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Even though the poll only got a handful of votes, I can see that it’s split pretty evenly between ‘update now’ and ‘don’t update ’til you have a big buffer.’ Also, friends and relatives are starting to poke me about getting this thing up so they can read it. So I’ve decided on a bit of a compromise for Ashes. I am going to aim to start updates sometime in September or October. That’s in the near future, but gives me a few more weeks to do some additional pages. I was originally going to wait until I had 3 chapters finished, but am finding that I have difficulty working when I’m not getting any feedback and don’t have update deadlines. So I have 1 chapter finished and the second barely started, but I will be updating only once a week, which I think I can keep up with. My buffer is about half a year long so I’m hopeful that by the time it runs out, my health will have improved even more and I’ll be producing comics faster. If my health gets shaky between now and autumn, I may postpone the start date, but so far, so good. 5 months without a crippling headache, which is the longest I’ve gone these past 2 years. So I hope that surgery really helped. Recovery is very very slow, but it is recovery. And I’m very eager to be sharing the Ashes redux, which is 100 times better than the awful original. So keep an eye out! I will try to announce a more definite start date in a week or two. In the meantime, enjoy the random artwork I’ve been posting in the ‘latest artwork’ gallery.

Comedic observation of the week: I am currently on 4 medications. They are called Florinef, Abilify, Remeron, and Tramadol. In order to easily identify my pills, I write the first letter of each pill on the cap. When the bottles are lined up, they spell FART.

I admit I was rather surprised to see Fawna’s Quest win the ‘Which comic do you want to return first?’ poll; and by such a large margin, even. I expected Dark Wings to win because it’s full colour and has more pagviews and readers. However, I am pleased with this outcome because I like doing Ashes (Fawna’s Quest) more. It’s more original and actually a lot easier for me to draw since it’s both greyscale and done traditionally instead of digitally like all my other comics. And call me old school, but I like the feel of pencil on paper much more than stylus on tablet. So I’m even more eager than ever to share the redux with you all. BUT I only have 1 chapter (16 pages) finished. So I’m kinda curious, which would you guys rather? That I update very soon, but only once a week for 18 weeks, then it’s ‘whenever I finish the next page,’ which would give it a sporadic and infrequent schedule of a page maybe once a week or once every few weeks. Or would you prefer to continue biding your time until I have a bigger buffer and then get one page a week regularly for a longer span of time? Even if one option wins, I may still opt for the other, but I will be influenced some by the outcome.

I have also decided not to post the prose version online just yet because A) I am an inexperienced writer and don’t feel comfortable sharing sub-par writing and B) I am an infrequent writer and wouldn’t be able to keep the prose current with the comic. I might post it later on down the road, but for now you’ll have to be happy with just the comic. Which, admittedly, omits a lot of the details, sub-plots, and character development that’s in the novel, but it still holds together on its own.

So go vote on the right or leave a comment here with your update schedule opinion!

Also, EA will start updating sporadically after this Wednesday, as I’m concentrating so much on FQ that I had no leftover time for it.

Epic Fail! updated sometime last week.

Excerpt from the Fawna’s Quest novel:

It looked like a shooting star, only it sped along its path below the cover of clouds. It lit up the night with its brilliance, turning the grey wintry landscape into a shining silver. Sparkling motes of light trailed behind it, glittering like miniature constellations before slowly fading away. Teze stared transfixed at it’s beauty, and it seemed to him that in that moment, not only he, but the entire world held it’s breath as the thing that would change its fate arched across the sky.