Nahast Reaches a Milestone

On Monday Nov 10th, Nahast: Lands of Strife broke the 1,000 daily visits ceiling by recording 1,023 visitors to the site just one week after celebrating its 6th anniversary. Since the comic started in 2002, attendance has been slow but steady, gaining a small but loyal following that has been steadily growing over the years. In 2008, Nahast made the leap from its humble origins at Comic Genesis and to its current home in the SpiderForest community, followed soon after by its affiliation to Palace in the Sky. I can attribute this growth to a more aggressive advertising campaign, the support of the SpiderForest and Palace in the Sky member comics and a more stable updating schedule, which has previously suffered from several tumbles and delays as life interferes with the eternal quest for the Right Way To Do The Art, particularly as I consider myself more a writer who learned to draw than an artist with a story, and I’m always experimenting new tricks and techniques. The comic’s sister site: Chronicles of the 5th Age, has stalled for the last several months, but is looking at a revival soon, along with the opening of the third member of the overall Nahast project: Heroes and Legends, a site devoted to the role-playing and world-building aspects of the story, which were moved out of the comic’s site proper so they could have their own space and will include maps (finally!), a more detailed history of the world, a gazzeteer of the most important nations and rules for including parts of Nahast’s elements into role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Reaching this milestone is encouraging; it means a lot to an author to know that his work is enjoyed by other people, and hopefully, the 2,000 mark will not take another 6 years to reach.

Dr. Ravar Has a Degree in Pain.

For SpiderForest’s most recent community wallpaper event, the back to school fest!

Raise your hand if you’ve been to college. Now raise your hand again if you’ve had a prof who taught Pain under another title I see everyone has raised their hands. Thought so!

-Kez

Sudden Flash of Inspiration

Usually, I have ideas for one or two chapters of Nahast ahead of the current storyline; I have time to figure out the theme, goal, cool scenes and what I want to accomplish with it. This process usually takes me several days of random thought and inspiration, then several months of actual execution.

Well… today inspiration struck. Hard. Like a Mack truck.

I had the next episode pretty much laid out, but I started thinking that I wanted to squeeze in some aftermath to the current chapter, to bring closure to a few situations. Then the idea began to snowball. It grew during lunch, gaining cool scene idea after cool scene idea, then the theme to tie it all together came out on its own, dragging along the perfect place to drop a major plot point in the overall story.

So… the next episode is not going to be a fun action chapter peppered with some background plotting and the aforementioned major plot point dropped with not as much weight. It’s going to possibly be one of the darkest, most intense and full of pathos chapter so far, and in a very long while.

I’d give details, but I’d be spoiling, and in any case the current episode is not slated to end in at least 4 months at a steady weekly update pace. The only living soul I’ve told is my girlfriend, who is both my muse and my soundboard.

Which brings me to a second question: I thought to do as many other webcomics do, which is a full chapter update rather than a weekly update. I’d ask readers for patience and other artists for guest strips while I do the whole package to be uploaded in a single go. THe idea is that the story is going to be a very cathartic episode in the lives of four of the protagonists, and a weekly schedule might dilute the emotional effect.

Accomplishing the deed is another matter, though… without the pressure of a scheduled update I think I could produce three pages a week, the thing would be how much pressure I will get when the story reaches that point.

Made this for my bruddah’s birthday!

I made this for my big bro, who got his hands on a Beretta Storm. Nice! I’m jealous. Not too sure if the subject matter is appropriate for this blog, but, eh, everyone in my family is a weapons-freak. We don’t hang ours on the wall….we train to use them. BWAH HAH HAH.

Audience Interaction?

Something incredibly important for webcomics (and their creators) is to be able to, on some level, interact with the audience. Fan mail, fan art, chat-boards, forums, communication of ANY kind is necessary for a successful (or popular, if you prefer) webcomic, because it makes the audience feel they have a stake in your work. Personally, I’ve drawn up forum-goers as Ayenroki and done sketches of stuff they wanted to see, but mostly, I stick with something I call Cast Q/A. Basically, people send in questions and get them answered in comic form. Usually these questions are of the funny persuasion, meant to irritate a character into lashing out in comical violence, but the questions can also be deeper. Here’s my latest one. I usually don’t color them, and gosh did that first panel turn out weird (got lazy on that face there. Bad Kez. Bad.), but they’re always fun to make.

I try to update once a week, but that doesn’t always happen. I know Scribe of LadyStar does a Jessie’s Letters feature, where LadyStar characters answer an email in a blog post, and other comics do something similar also. Anywho, this is something I’ll probably keep doing on my site so long as questions keep coming in. I’ll know when to stop when no one sends any questions, and move on to something else interactive.

-Kez

dun Dun DUN~!

and there is a Cube.

Cube loves drawing Critters.

Patty Griffin’s “Rain.”

I recently fell in love with this song.

I can’t decide whether I like the music video being illustrated like this, but watching the hands play the guitar is mesmerizing.

-KEZ

Comic Page Preview!

Hey guys! I’m ahead on my comic schedule [for once] so I figured I’d post the line art for the next page! I had the sketch up earlier on my forum, but this one looks cooler, IMHO^^

I look forward to coloring this one! There’s a big ‘ol storm background in the bottom two panels, and backgrounds are some of my FAVORITE things to make in photoshop. I also would like to give credit where credit is due. I dunno who these roof-jumping dudes are over in GB, but their camera work is phenomenal, and I’ve been using some of their shots as references. Anyone doing any roof-top-jumping-leap-of-faith kinda shots, check it out. Checking out their stuff makes me want to go play Prince of Persia again…thankfully not jump buildings myself.

Ha, finally got some time to post here at last ;)  Work and commitments have been especially demanding of my time lately *shakes fist at manga club* but soon enough I will be enjoying the loveliness of summer vacation.

This is my wallpaper of the week but mainly an experiment in Adobe Illustrator’s mesh tool.  If you’ve never seen this tool at work, it can create some pretty incredible photorealistic effects - a lot like skinning in 3D but on a 2D plane.  I’ve mainly just been using Illustrator for lettering my comic, since in my opinion Photoshop’s vector tools are deliberately clunky precisely so that Illustrator will seem awesome in comparison but lately I’ve been trying teach myself all the lovely Illustrator fun that I never learned when I picked it up on the job.

Cat Legend is the Palace in the Sky Platinum Site of the Week!

“Konnichi-wa minna-san! It’s me, Jessica Hoshi! Me and all my friends are super happy we get to be part of Palace in the Sky and today I get to tell you all about our Platinum Site of the Week! Looky what we got!”

“It’s a comic about a boy named Cat Legend!”

“Yeah! It’s got zombies and monsters and villains and all sorts of neat stuff. We have an example page and everything! If you go to the main page, you can see the banner at the top where it says ‘Site of the Week!’ Have fun minna! Ja!”