1: Once Upon a Time in Thal’nasia
The deck has been shuffled, welcome to Thal’nasia… or welcome back to Thal’nasia.
I expect most people reading this upon it’s launch will be returning readers, but I hope that in time new people will come along as well. The way this reboot is structured, knowledge of the original comic will give interesting insight into how events have played out differently, but it won’t be required reading. Exposition about the idiosyncrasies of the setting that won’t be efficient to go over again will be added to the lore section of the site that I’ll be adding.
As I’ve said in the news post leading up to this, I’m working on the assets I need to create these scenes as I go, so the old two pages a week schedule is far too aggressive for what I am working with. I’ll be posting a single page a week for now and revisit the scheduling situation once I’m further ahead of myself.
Alterations to the site are going to be a long term process. But I will note that the original comic is still be hosted here, and you can navigate to it with the “Old Comics” button on the menu up top, or with the drop down chapter select that has both Old Comics and News posts to pick from. Everything is still here, but this is now the page you’ll go to when clicking “First”
Oh dang, when you said the new pages were going up on the new year, I didn’t think you meant right at midnight!! Happy new year! Do you have a set day of the week when pages go up, or is it just whenever?
Also dang, just from this page alone, we find out just how much things have changed. :0
Updates will be on Tuesdays. And as it has been since the old days, they are scheduled to post based on Greenwich mean time, so they go live on Monday evenings, technically.
I’ve always liked being able to check that things actually went up correctly, and don’t stay up to midnight on weekdays because of my day job. I’ve got a good number of internet friends with different time zones anyway, so as long as the pages are done, Greenwich is as good a timezone as any.
And so it begins…
Good it see it back.
Whewww. Made a few new posts on my welcometoeboncreek blog! One is the gesture sketches and base colors of all the portraits I drew, 1. Because I thought it would be interesting to show the very earlier stages of them, and 2. Because I wanted to prove that I did color the characters according to canon, they just look a lot different after I shade…
ALSO I finally finished the rest of the character commentaries cuz I wanted to get through them now that the new comic’s started. I’m really sick right now though and I wrote them pretty much all at once, soooo sorry if they aren’t as coherent as usual, lol.
Thank you, getting all of those in one burst was a real treat and it means a lot to me that you wrote up your thoughts on absolutely everyone. I know that for past write ups I’ve responded with extensive behind the scenes info, I think talking at length about the old comic might be weird to do in the comments of the first page of the reboot.
But there is one point that I can’t just gloss over. That’s the matter of Torblad and to a lesser extent Esra. They are perhaps the worst casualties of the reboot happening when it did, getting only a silly introduction before being slapped into the story as a plot device.
I won’t go into too much depth, but the idea behind Torblad was a man with an incredible wealth of knowledge beyond his capacity to fully process, and even further beyond his ability to communicate.
His “lolrandom” speech from his introduction was a synopsis of the remaining plot of the comic (if it hadn’t rebooted), an apocalyptic prophecy parsed through nonsensical metaphors… But he discovered a way to avert that path and through some miracle was able to convey this notion to others.
It would have been one of those story beats where something silly becomes tragic the more you learn about the actual story behind it. Getting a single scene isn’t going to be able to even begin to tell that kind of story.
There was hidden depth to that version of the character, but we won’t be seeing it now since that man lives a universe away. That’s probably all I should say for now.
Yeah!! I wanted to get them all done fast too- mostly because I knew the longer I waited to do it, the longer the reboot comic would also go on for, and the more awkward it would be.
And yeah, I figured that was probably the case with Torblad- there’s a lot of other characters I can think of that I probably wouldn’t have liked if they had only gotten their first intros in. Like… I probably would have been nowhere near as sweet on Alaster if his intro scene is all we ever saw of him. I also probably should have said more about what I liked about Torblad- honestly, I thought the connection of water–>time was really clever. I can also see why that means that we’d never see that version of the character again- it’s a completely different timeline, so of course the character most closely associated with ‘time’ would be different. Honestly I probably should have given him more of a chance, sorry about that. :/
Anyway, I’m probably gonna be posting a lot more things to the blog over the next couple days, with…varying levels of relevance to the plot. Maybe more fancharacters or I’ll do a short animation or something. I’m between semesters for school right now so I have a lot of free time.
Aaaand my school semester’s started, so it’s back to having no free time, lol. However, I have one last thing up on my blog for now. I always loved the idea of the Brinks family creating and managing Thal’nasia’s livestock, and always wondered what sort of critters you’d end up seeing on a Thal’nasian farm… so I went ahead and speculated about what a couple of those might look like! They’re on the blog, same as usual. 🙂
Wow, those are some awesome designs. I particularly like the shadow, water 2 and ice mage hounds. And the turtle thing and lamprey dragon are quite cool as well. They give me a Monster Hunter vibe, and I am quite the fan of that series.
I’ve never really been any good with animal models… all the bones go in quite different places than humans and they move differently. But it’s gonna be something I need to tackle at some point and I might as well do it in style when I do.
The ideas you’ve put forward today may come back in some form in the comic, if you don’t mind.
Aw nice, I’m glad you like them!! I actually bought my first monster hunter game a couple months ago- maybe some influence slipped in?
And I wouldn’t say you’re so bad! Those bone dog demons looked pretty darn good when they showed up. And I certainly don’t mind if you use any of the ideas I put forward, feel free to use whatever you’d like!