Flag

 One of the things I thought about a while, but totally forgot was that I wanted to create a flag for my characters, which will debut in the comic soon, although I did a sneak peek of it on Instagram last week.  Here's what I came up with:

Portraits

One of the things that I've been thinking about doing for quite a while are more realistic portraits of the characters to give a better understanding of how they look in my mind, as opposed to how they look on paper.  

I had a few ideas for that and then I found the Artbreeder website, a fun and unique tool to check out.  I dabbled on there one night and came up with this portrait of Cord:

Nope, not a real person - this is a life-like face that I created using the Artbreeder website.  While I thought it was really cool and I was happy how it turned out, I decided that I wanted to do this in my own way, so I took the image above and drew it in my style and this is what I came up with:

I was also very happy with this and am now working on some more, the next one up will be Master Mind, but I'm not done with hers het. 

Issue 30

What I can say about issue 30?  It's probably the shortest issue that I did.  When I did this issue the laptop that I had been using stopped working and I had just gotten a new one and finally went out and bought a drawing tablet, which I'm still struggling with!  The end result was an issue with less than 30 panels - if you can call it an issue just to wrap up the Time-Hopping storyline and introduce a character called The All, who will play a role later on in the series.

Here's the original character sketch for The All:

Issue 30 - Here's a link to the issue if you want to read it - trust me, it won't take long!

Issue # 29

Issue 29 brings an end to the Earth-Hopping adventures of Titan and Phantom.  In this issue they get to Alternate Earth 14, a world where the Roman Empire (in the classical sense) never fell and where organized religion was outlawed.

This led to the creation of the Godboy, a sum of all religious energy and dogma for the religions that never formed on that Earth.  The island of the Godboy has an emotional effect on the heroes and they decide to return to their own Earth where Phantom discovers something about himself that he decides to keep secret - but for how long?  You can read it here if you'd like: Issue 29

When I was creating the draft for the Earth-Hopping storyline I had several ideas that I wanted to touch on, and originally the Roman Empire and Godboy elements were going to be on two separate Earths, but I decided to combine them partially to save space and also because I thought I worked well together.  

My original intent was for these stories to be back up stories in the regular issues, but then I realized that it would be going on too long for Titan and Phantom to be away from the team; while they were only gone a week it would have taken about ten months of real time to cover that!  Which is why I decided to move it a long a bit. 

The other part that the story has touched on is Phantom being bisexual and how that plays a role in his life.  When I originally created the character, that was not an element that I had built in, but when I was getting ready to launch the comic almost 30 issues ago, I wanted to make sure that my universe was diverse in several aspects and decided right before issue 1 came out to make him bi, and this is something that comes to light during this storyline and will play a role in the future. 

It also deals with Titan being straight and for the first time he hints that he has feelings for Crossbow in a subtle way, which will also be explored in the future. 

On a creative note, this issue marked a turning point for me.  Originally this was supposed to be the back up story in issue # 28 (which was running long), but I started to run out of time and to have computer problems (as mentioned in a previous blog) so I decided to make this a stand alone issue.  This is also the last issue that I created on my old computer and the last that was penciled and inked on paper before my old computer stopped functioning.  

Enjoy the issue, and perhaps one of the most bizarre final panels in comic book history!