Welcome new readers, to Fawna’s Quest, Volume 1: Ashes, an online fantasy comic. ‘Oh no,’ you cry, ‘not another fantasy!’ Please don’t run in fright just yet, my friends, for Ashes is not a typical dragons, knights, and castles fantasy. No, instead it begins in modern-day England, though the adventure will span both continents and time itself.
A young vixen named Fawna lost her memories when she was shot by a hunter, and has been terrified of humans ever since. However, she and her friends are about to be plunged into a dark journey to find one- a very special human named Arivan who is the only one who can restore light and peace to the dying world. She must battle soul-stealing Shadows, humans, nature, and even those who claim to be her allies. A fierce war between light and darkness is being fought- and both sides are after her! Who is her friend and who is her foe? What does all this have to do with a little red fox? And is she even the simple vixen she thought she was? Will restoring her lost memory help her to make sense of it all?
I began work on Fawna’s Quest back in 2001, when I was a freshman in high school. The original Fawna’s Quest began without any prior planning. I just wanted to draw foxes and squirrels, so I did. It was a silly, punchline-a-strip newspaper style comic done all traditionally in coloured pencils. I worked on it until I was a junior. By that time, though, I wanted something with a solid storyline, so I dropped the project for a few years. Later in 2006, I was recovering from a very serious and long-term illness. I had lost many of my memories and forgotten how to draw and write. As a therapy to try and regain my lost talents, I began the comic anew. This attempt, because of my illness, was worse than the first -_-*. But I kept plugging away at it anyway. A year into the project, I had regained much of what I’d lost. The story and art got much better, but I was mortally ashamed of the terrible beginning.
So what you’ll see starting in 2010 is my third attempt at this story. I am reduxing the beginning and doing it RIGHT. I will redux the first 9 chapters (which were awful), then repost the rest of the pages from chapter 9 onward that go up to the end of the first volume.
Below you can see a partial panel from chapter 11 of the first attempt. This is very close to when I stopped working on that particular incarnation.
And here is a panel from the second attempt. As you can see, the new version is a huge improvement on both these old ones.
