June 30, 2012

Setting Forth For Adventure

After a six month development period, I've finally begun storyboarding my online comic series Adventures In Idle.  It's a spinoff of the book series I'm working on (currently several in various states of completion) that will take place in its own universe.  The setting is the same fictional town in Rhode Island, known as Idle, and will feature many of the characters contained within.  However, I have tweaked certain aspects of them in order to make them unique to this series.  Ever since I first conceived my book series about a decade ago, I have saved hundreds of wordpad files containing storylines, character profiles, book profiles, and various other related notes.  And after putting down my horrendous webcomic August The 15th, I decided to go back to one of my first ideas for an online comic before I settled on that one: a comic book style series based on my other writings within a new timeline.  I planned on transitioning to it after August The 15th ran its course, but I never expected that to happen so early.  So with this new project I'm working with more familiar material that I strongly care about and have worked on for quite a while.



Without going too much into detail, the basic premise of the first major storyline of Adventures In Idle is that the main character has inadvertently unleashed several magical artifacts into his town, and he must seek them out while gaining allies and enemies.  For this means, I have developed 15 brand new characters in addition to the 15 I planned on reusing from other works. This is why I enjoy being a writer: even the development process is engaging and fun. But I have a feeling the execution of the comic itself will be taxing until I'm fully used to it, but no pain, no gain. And there will be a lot to gain. Hopefully not too much pain.

I originally planned on uploading the book one page at a time, but then I realized how agonizing it would be to read a single page in fifteen seconds with a week between each entry.  You'd be hard pressed to remember what happened only pages ago since it would have been a month since you read them.  You have to take into consideration that I'll be doing all aspects of the comic myself, and I'm a slow drawer in the first place. So I decided it would be best to publish each chapter in their entirety at a time. It'll be a four step process before publication can take place. Step 1: Devise the cast, plot, and chapter blueprint of the first storyline. Step 2: Create a storyboard of each page, one chapter at a time, to guide me as I draw the real thing.  Step 3:  Draw each page in pencil.  Step 4: Scan the penciled pages and use my computer to color them.

It will be interesting to see what the reaction to my comic will be, considering it will be my first major public work.  Especially since it's one where I have my hand in every aspect of its creation.  I'm not a professional artist, nor have I perused any kind of guide on how to craft comics beyond studying what I have in my own book collection.  I've always liked learning things on my own and creating my own style of doing things since I believe being influenced too much by other people's techniques could taint the individuality of my work.  So I'm aiming for moderate success, hoping to avoid colossal failure, but dreaming of a runaway hit.  Join us won't you as we begin the Adventures In Idle.

Links
Adventures In Idle

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