Issue 10

Issue 10 is up!  It took me much longer than I thought to get this one done, but it's finally finished.

Here's a link:Issue 10

This issue was a bit of a challenge for me, it took place in Italy, in the towns of Rome, Popoli and Fossacesia, the last two being towns where my ancestors came from.  Besides doing my comic I'm also bigt into genealogy and I wanted to pay homage to my genealogy work.  While most of the rest the characters I've been using so far were created a long time ago, Italus (who debuts in this issue) and all connections to Italy were created in 2015 as I was outlining the stories I wanted to tell for the first two years and I'm happy with how those parts turned out.

The tricky part is that I was using some very real places - besides the ones in Italy, I was also using Times Square in NYC and Seattle, Washington, so I was trying to match colors as much as I could, and that slowed me down a heck of a lot more than I thought it would - but that's alright, tonight I'll relax and tomorrow I'll start working on the next issue.

This issue also introduced a few new characters and concepts that will go on to play a pretty big role as the series advances.  

Lastly, there was only one deleted scene which I'll include here.  In the issue Titan asks Phantom, Phantom Queen and Serpent to go on a mission and I did two panels showing them betting ready to go, but I realized after I inked it that I really didn't need to panels for that, so here's the one that got cut:

Writing Ahead

Before I launched my comic I wrote several months ahead - of course if I could only draw as fast I wrote, I'd have a lot more issues out by now!

Right now I have enough issues written that should take me up to Summer of 2020 and I'm just beginning to draft what comes after that.  

One of the things I plan is for more characters - I love creating them, here's a super sneak peek of one that will debut next summer, I won't say anything about him, but this is the first draft of the character that I created this year...

It is possible that his final appearance might change a bit, I don't know yet.  

One of things that I was concerned with when I started the comic is if I would still be able to create new and interesting characters?  Most of what I created I did in back when I was in grade school, but so far I'm learning that the creative side is still there and I'm creating a ton of new characters.  

Also, you may wonder why all of these, and the ones posted on the photo site, are all in the same pose? Well, these are actually the color guides I create to help make make sure that the characters are colored the same throughout all of their appearances.  I basically just have male and female templates that I use for the bodies and then I just fill them in, not as creative to look at, but the consistency makes it a lot faster to color.