A R MA G E D D O N Q U E S T
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Originally published as a graphic novel in trilogy form anno 1997, AQ is back once again--as a WEB COMIC in this incarnation. But also as real-life hold-in-your-hand POD comic books. "Publish On Demand" being a modern digital printing technique.
A two-page spread is posted every day, in the tradition of a good old-fashioned newspaper comic strip. One advantage of being online, however, is that you can always click to the backlog and catch up on everything you've missed so far. AQ is almost 900 pages long, so it will run for about a year and a half. And in the tradition of good old-fashioned paper comic books, each of the 20 Chapters/Books will be available for purchase after having been posted online, published by Ka-Blam Digital Printing.
These comic books are a reprint of the original AQ story, but also an expansion of the AQ mythology. The 900-pages of AQ are composed of 20 Books/chapters, generally ranging from 40 to 52 pages in length. However Dave and I agreed that each issue would be based upon a 52-page standard and offer the buyer some new material. Which means that 4 to 12 empty pages had to be filled up with...well, something. Actually, Dave had the absurd notion that I'd just polish up some of my older comic stories and squeeze them into place, but that solution seemed unworkable to me. And too much work.Then I had a veritable stroke of genius (ripped off from Alan Moore, of course): new and original short stories--text, not comix--written to fit into the time frame of each issue! All those little sidelines I never had room for in the original graphic novel, peripheral characters telling their stories-within-stories. I could even illustrate them. I mean, how much work could that be, right? Well, I'm finding out how much work it is: lotsa. But I'm also enthusiastic about being back inside the AQ Universe, so do tend to get carried away. I started with a simple story about Padre Giorgio for Book 2, a cute little 4-page vignette. It was pretty easy--hey, I can do this. Actually, the hardest part was to compress words and pictures into the limited space. Especially once I get rolling on an idea--the last 12-page GHOST'S STORY turned into 40 pages of text with about 14 illustrations, so I had to serialize it.
Below are examples of some of the illustrations I've done for those stories so far.
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This cosmic event is the result of a collaberation between myself (brilliant author/artist 3R) and Dave Baxter (fearless champion & devout evangelist for the web comics concept).
