The master plan

As posted in my message board this morning...Here's my plan for the next couple of years (!).

Hunter's Moon has about another year to go. Now that RC has finished up, HM is my #1 priority and it will be at the forefront of the project list until it's done. (It'll resume updating twice weekly on July 11th, and shouldn't have another hiatus until it's complete.) The Kismet short comics will probably go to the back burner for now.

I'll also be working on Freebird in monthly batches of pages while Hunter's Moon proceeds.

After HM finishes, there *will* be another long Kismet story (I have a couple in the works -- need to decide between them) but I'll take a break from long-form Kismet for a while, and work on the short comics. These will fill in a lot of gaps in the lives of Fleetwood, Jackie, Linton and other Kismetians. The short comics will also let me play with the funny stuff more than I can in the long ones.

While this is going on, I also plan on launching one other long project. It will either be the next Raven's Children story arc, or another certain project I've been keeping on the back burner -- whichever I feel more like working on at the time.

The general idea is that I will always be working on one Kismet project (Hunter's Moon, the short stories or another long Kismet story), with one or two additional projects going on at the same time.

After the RC book comes out in September, the next graphic novel project will be the dead-tree version of Hunter's Moon, followed by whichever one of the following gets done first:
- Freebird (enough of it to put in book form)
- Raven's Children story arc 2
- the other project I mentioned above (which will be pretty short compared to most of my "long" ones -- about 80-100 pages)

This should be enough to keep me out of trouble for a while.

I've also been in discussions with my sister about drawing a story that's written and colored by her. This'd be another long project, but I doubt if we'll even be ready to start working on it anytime soon, let alone posting pages.

Hey, Watership Down fans...

I'm not sure if there are other people who read this journal who love this book as I do, but I was Googling this afternoon to see if the incident in the book where "Dr Adams" and Lucy release Hazel into the wild is based on something that actually happened, perhaps some of the inspiration for the book, and I came across this wonderful webpage:

http://www.mayfieldiow.freewire.co.uk/watershp/watermain.htm

I had the general idea that the major landmarks in the books (Watership Down, the river Test and so on) were real places, but what I didn't realize is that the small-scale geography of the book is accurate in almost every detail, including the power pylon (the rabbits' "iron tree"), the railroad tracks, the Crixa bridle path crossing, and the two low bridges that cause problems for the rabbits when they're escaping from the Efrafrans on the river. Most of it is fairly accurately depicted in the animated film, too, but there's something almost shiver-inducing about seeing photographs of places that had been completely fictional in my head -- particularly since I read the book for the first time as a child, but didn't see the movie until I was an adult, so my mental image of these places was already fixed.

I've done this sort of thing a little bit in both Freebird and Raven's Children, but not to this extent. Somehow the book seems much more real and alive to me now.

Pissed-off Easter Island head

Working on homework for my Sequential Art class ... we're doing single-panel gag cartoons this weekend, at least one of which has to be wordless. ( This is my wordless one. )