To The Future...

I was so into my vacation when I came home, there were some things I forgot to touch on in my last post. It regards the future of my comics. What a fine excuse for another post!

New Worlds
I still get a lot of mail about New Worlds, asking about when it will be updated again and what's going on with it. Eventually I need to overhaul the webpage so there is no ambiguity about what I eventually plan to do when I have the time. It's a good reminder of how many people don't read this, and that's understandable. Of the small handful of webcomics I read, I generally don't read up on the artist past the comic they post, either. But nonetheless, for those curious: In my spare time I've been taking the story and writing it up in text form, with the intention of illustrating it in the future. I hope to have it up and rolling by the beginning of next year in it's new incarnation. It's allowing me to explore the world I created in the depth I originally wanted to, and reveal more about characters during the course of the plot. I've already got the plot up to the point where we last left Rouchambeau, written out in novel format. It includes several little interactions and segments that I wanted to originally include in the comic, but left out due to the way they might linger the plot of a comic that posts one page at a time. There are also several edits I need to make to the comic, including some of the characters. I will be changing Roark's name. I assigned the name at first, before reading The Fountainhead and I don't want anyone to draw any association with the hero from this novel, as they don't really resemble one another. I'm also toying with the idea of changing Jupiter's last name, since I'd been going with a Roman/Greek theme for most of their surnames since I created him. The strange infusion of his very Irish surname seems very out of place.

Better Days
When I look at Better Days, now, I think of it almost as a very long term experiment, almost like a testbed for trying out different style evolutions and forcing myself to draw characters over and over. It has changed so much from when it first started, and I've changed so much, also. I've learned about the kinds of things I like to create in comics, and the kinds of things I thought I would like to create in comics, but ended up not enjoying. There were chapters that were very hard to push through, even though they seemed really neat in my mind when I came up with them as concepts. Some of them just didn't pace real well when released only two pages per week. Some I just didn't enjoy illustrating at all. It took a lot of discipline to keep the posting schedule on track through these (something I'm kind of proud of). I found that I've started losing my taste for many of the extremely serious plot arcs. It's because of this that I've removed most of the stories that reveal explicitely what Fisk does for a living, from the future production schedule. I'd rather keep it something a little more mysterious, and when I thought about them, they usually just deal with situations more so than characters, which is... bad. I've been there and I don't like it. Chapter 23 is going to be the last really "heavy" chapter, in terms of it involving life and death moments, and I consider it kind of vital to explaining how Persia ends up where she is.

After Chapter 23, there are only three more chapters that I plan to do before the comic will "conclude". I expect this will happen around the middle of next year, maybe a little later. It's hard to say this far out. The characters are beginning to settle into their adult lives, which are the "better days" I intended them all to reach eventually. At least in my experience, adult life is far more rewarding and stimulating than childhood ever was. But I won't be done with the Better Days world by far. The posting schedule will be replaced with another comic that I've had planned out over the last month or so, involving some of the same characters, as well as some new ones. It'll be the sorts of pages and story arcs I've discovered I really enjoy doing while drawing Better Days over the past five and a half years. They're not really serious, and they involve humor and extremely cute things. For this reason, there'll be no year by year advancement of time. I know I said that I wouldn't do a comic like that, but, I think after doing a comic with a progressive timeline, I can sort of "relax" into a comic that doesn't age its characters. I'm also going to work on a nicer finishing style than just flat black and white line work.

That's all for now! Back to work.