Yeaaaaahh, I’d say I’m pretty happy with this. Kind of rough getting back into the hang of using the pens again, but I think I’ll do alright.
So this is what’s really going to happen come August 1st:
It’ll look prettier then, some of them will even have words, and it’ll update M-W-F. With these new strips I’ll be telling some of the backstory of Merunga and the world she lives in. We can see here she’s only 6 or 7, I think she looks like she’s 6 or 7 anyway. Each story will only be a few weeks in length, and mostly disconnected from one another.
I read in an introduction to a collection of Conan stories once, that Conan stories worked best when presented in publication order, not chronological. You get the sense of just sitting in a tavern with a guy, enjoying tavern-y drinks, and listening to the tavern folks tell stories, first this one, then that one, just each story as it comes to mind. That’s the tack I’ll be taking here. And not all of the stories will feature Merunga. There’ll be some with Lupa, Ekho, previous vampires Merunga has palled around with. Vasilia and Baba’s first visit to Torgo (previewed already,) and anything else that occurs to me in the meantime.
So as to why exactly I’m doing this, I don’t like not updating. Working each week and pushing to get the next pages done in time to post, I really enjoyed that. Telling a story by degrees and getting feedback on it, way more fun than working in a vacuum for an extended period of time. Having all summer to work on one project has resulted in one project being over worked to the point where no work has been done on it. Just in the time that I’ve been drawing this strip, and writing the main chapter, has been immensely helpful to progress finally being made. Erasing all other promises of completion, I have no idea when the next main story volume will be done, but at least now I feel like it will be good instead of just finished.
Slightly related to this, when my daughter goes back to school in about a month, I’ll actually curate my languishing Patreon page and post updates there of the work in progress pages, both unfinished strips and pages, notes and sketches, that kind of stuff. Tuesday night streaming on Twitch will be work on these new strips, penciling, inking, lettering, whatever step I’m on for that, so if you’d be interested in a sneak peak of what’s coming up, that’d be a good place to stop by.
These are/were the first three pages for ‘The Lesser,’ originally the next chapter in this story.
However, as I was breaking down page 15, it occurred to me, it was really kind of boring. That revelation had been sneaking up on me over the course of the summer. I was struggling to find that image on each page that I saw as the focus. The picture that really said, this is what this page is about. At 15 I hit a wall. I flipped back through what I’d completed already, flipped through my notes for what was coming up, and the realization hit home that none of it was very compelling. If I hadn’t read the story the whole summer, and this was the issue waiting for me, I’d be pissed. It was a lot of talky-talk, more set-up for grand things, but that’s kind of my pat-line isn’t it? I set-up other set-ups, and have never satisfactorily landed any of them.
So instead of ‘The Lesser’ being the next chapter, I’m skipping ahead to ‘House of the Devil,’ which wasn’t actually the next story, but the one after that! I really need to work on being exciting, because another chapter of set-up is a terrible idea. However, I’m not one to let a bad idea go entirely unrewarded, so I’ll be mashing ‘The Lesser’ and it’s follow-up ‘Road of Whispers,’ into a prose tale with complementary illustrations. Which I’m still aiming to have ready by August 1st.
As for ‘House of the Devil,’ I’m going to say Oct 1st. Which is way longer than I would like, and a bit of a stretch to ask you guys to wait, but I want to get this thing right. It’s going to be longer than a normal 22 pages, I don’t want it to look rushed, I want to get the web-site ready for the new format. In a few years time hopefully we either won’t remember this hiccup or we’ll look back on it fondly as the turning point towards a better, more consistent story.
So in October, we’ll be going here:
and meeting this guy:
Is that what Instagram is for though? I’m not certain, there’s too many of these sharing things for me to keep track of/stay interested in. Also, I’m one of only three people to use a Windows phone, and it doesn’t appear as though there is an Instagram app for it, if Instagram is in fact the app I’m thinking of. It could be Tumbler, is that one? Are they the same thing? Honestly, I don’t know, but I don’t really care either, I’m not signing up for either (I say that now, fully acknowledging that I might someday still sign up.)
But anyway, I don’t feel like the site itself is a good place to post random sketches and doodles, it seems like that would just be a lot of clutter, and I’ve never known what to do with Merunga’s Facebook page, until today. If it’s a sketch I’m really quite happy with, I might share it elsewhere, but for now, random bits of art will find their home over here.
This is only a snippet of page 6 from our next chapter, I’ll be uploading more sneak peek images coming up. Pages 1-8 while not 100% complete, are 100% penciled. Scanning, effects, and lettering are all the remains. 9-22 are in various stages of roughed out, semi-sketched, and about to die from over-erasure and be moved to a fresh sheet of paper.
My day-job is being a stay-at-home dad, I love the work, so the summer months demand quite a bit more time than the winter months. That was part of the reason to moving to a hiatus schedule, and part of why I haven’t been able to update as much as I would have liked. Next week she’s going to camp however, and for a few brief days I’ll be fighting off the loneliness by spending all of my time on the internet. Mon-Wed I’ll be spending at least part of the day streaming, if not most of the day. Some pencil work(if I can get it to show up on camera,) some digital work (as I redesign the site,) and possibly just the camera looking at me as I ignore the work I need to do and bum around the five sites of my standard internet trawl.