comic

Sorry for the Break …

… which grew a bit longer than expected, but well, that’s how life works.

Had to get several things back on track concerning my life (in fact, I’ve had partial success only, but hey, better than nothing) before I could come back and resume publishing TSoD.

Anyway,the hiatus shall come to an end now – next chapter The White Wolf is Waiting will start this week, Thursday, and will be published page-wise on Mondays and Thursdays as before.

Thanks for your patience. 🙂

How to Proceed: Next Chapter(s)

First: thanks to the lots of great feedback you gave “This Side” over the last couple of weeks.

I’m happy that you enjoyed it’s story & artwork, and am hoping you’ll drop by for the last, defining chapters of the prologue story.

For these chapters, I’ll try a somewhat different approach, an idea I owe to Egypt Urnash:
I’ll switch to page-wise update, twice a week, but will still stick to the one-url-per-chapter approach (i.E. the chapter pages will be built up over a couple of weeks, instead of been filled by a single upload).
This for once makes things a bit more consistent and thrilling, and for another has the advantage to get away of the large single files with potentially bad user experience concerning download times (however I’ll make the single-file chapters available via download link, additionally to the PDF version).

The next chapter, Moon Wanderer, will start next week, Thursday, 02/12/2015. New pages will be uploaded on Mondays and Thursdays.
I also hope to solve that chapter navigation issue until then …

The Crossroads Battle

Time for more “Hrug’s War” WIPs again.

I’m about to block out the comic’s first “real” “military” combat action:
south of the Great Cataracts of Melondel, two ancient roads cross – one, which once connected the North of Olveare with the ancient seaside towns at the Oriador opening, and another one, which leads from Eastern Olveare right to the Cliff (note to self: need to provide a map …).
It is Moruk land.

But Hrug’s minions and allies do not care.

Horseback Moruk warriors are about to drive a band of their old enemy, the Boneheads off, when they run into another enemy: a company of Northmen, well-trained elite warriors clad in iron, on their way to strenghten Hrug’s advancing forces …

Crossroads Battle #1
Crossroads Battle #2
Crossroads Battle #3
Crossroads Battle #4
Crossroads Battle #5
Crossroads Battle #6
Crossroads Battle #7
Crossroads Battle #8

C&C welcome.

Into Oriador!

Time for some new WIPs!
I’ve started to concatenate some scenes of the book’s PoV threads, which resulted in a consecutive sequence of 167 pages so far.
Things are gaining momentum slowly, but irresistably – the second-last scene of the sequence:

Descending into Oriador #1
Descending into Oriador #2
Descending into Oriador #3
Descending into Oriador #4
Descending into Oriador #5
Descending into Oriador #6
Descending into Oriador #7
Descending into Oriador #8
Descending into Oriador #9

At the moment, I’m indeed thinking about splitting Hrug’s War in two parts, as there’s almost a rated break point in it’s middle, which would provide a very nice cliffhanger, and yet result into two parts with sufficient pages to read, probably >300 each.

I’m also thinking about color.
A quick experiment: adding a quick color layer to a greyscale image:
Cin'Thele Cat Girl in B/W
Cin'Thele Cat Girl colored

Not sure yet, and there’s still plenty of time to make that decision … if you like, write me your opinion.

Announcing New Chapter and some Site Reorganization

Yes, the next chapter of This Side of Darkness will go online in a few days, at Sunday, twelfth of December.

Another year rushed past, and has seen this site in an intermediate state, a weird chimera of a near-webcomic and a production blog.

As the making of Hrug’s War will keep me busy quite for a while and, together with what one calls ‘life’, leaves only little time to deliver too much additional content here, it will remain that way even longer, but anyway, at least the site can use a bit of reorganization.

So I did the following:

  • Hrug’s War got a menu entry of its own.
  • … and in the same turn, “Read Comic” has been renamed This Side of Darkness.
  • The German version is offline, for the moment.
  • I’ve added a World menu entry. There’s not too much content available at the moment, but I hope to add more soon.
  • In general, I’ve cleaned up the menu a bit, and grouped some stuff which previously cluttered the menu bar into submenus

Chapter 6 is online

Comic Action in Essen is over, too. This means: three exhibitions within one year, one organized by me, one attended on my publisher’s invitation to sign my book, one with our own booth, Jenny’s and mine.
Wow. From complete newbie to … well. Almost newbie. 🙂

Comic Action has been another cool experience.
The nice guy from Comicguide.de even caught us on photo:
Jenny Dolfen & Helmut Schulz at Comic Action, Essen

(Katharina joined us at Saturday, but managed to evade the fate of public visibility.
Next time, then. 😛

Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to present the next chapter of “This Side of Darkness”:
00-intro

Enjoy.

Ulog, Nala, Morm … aaaand: HORSES!

To be honest, I’ve always been afraid of drawing them.

But now, they just slipped in somehow, as besides Anukhai and Onoghu, there are also the Moruk, another human people living in Olveare, and they use to ride on them: horses.
As it happens, I’ve lived the last four years in immediate neighbourhood of a farm with a paddock, and I used to walk along it’s fence almost every day. Strangely, I did not pay too much attention, at least not from an artistic point of view, because when I came along it’s inhabitants, I usually had Sayuri with me, our four-legged wolf descendant companion, who likes to attract a lot of attention to herself.

However, when finally approaching the Moruk theme, I relied on the super learning effect: it would somehow just work magically, out of the box.

And, in conjunction with my relaxed digital shape finding technique, it almost did!

Hrug on his new mount

Not perfect, but hey … enough to enable me to work on the scene.
Which I did.

Still, I’m one scene behind completing the Ulog-Nala-Morm-thread, which is a bit … exhausting, from a mental point of view, because closing the gaps always tends to feel extra-tedious, and gaps magically grow larger, the closer you get on them.
However, this one is almost finished, and it once again brought forth new, cool and unplanned aspects of the story and ways to tell it.

If you want to have a look, click on the image below to open the PDF file (be warned however, it’s “lettered” manually, and it’s Pidgin English).
Ulogs Moon Wanderer

Finally Ready: the “Movie” version of “This Side of Darkness”

It took longer than I anticipated, but now it’s finished and available for download: the “movie” version of “This Side of Darkness”!

What is it?

tsod_slide_1

one step more from comic sequential art towards movie/animated picture: half an hour of playtime, the original comic pages re-edited to widescreen format, featuring a truely epic score from audiomachine including tracks from the albums Chronicles, Epica, Existence, Helios and Tree Of Life, this version of “This Side of Darkness” is as close as I could make it, towards a “real” movie flic.

It’s available for download in English or German as of now:
get your copy here (English) or here (German).

Chapter 5, Erlangen, Epsilon

Let’s start with the long-made promise: finally, chapter 5 is online, renamed from “Fire and Ice” to “In the Realm of Flies”. Enjoy: 00-intro
(btw, in order to prevent trouble with the gallery auto-scaling feature, I decided to drop the gallery option completely and use “endless” image files instead – tell me, if you’d like to have the galleries back 🙂 )

Then, for something else:
the German print version is no longer published by me.

In the future, printed copies (hardcover, yay!) will be available via Epsilon Verlag, starting at the Comicsalon Erlangen 2014, which will open Thursday 19/06/2014 (meaning: in three days).

I’ll be there, too, at Epsilon’s stand.
If you’d like to drop by for a chat, or want your printed copy signed (or both), just drop by. 🙂