Life in a Northern Town

The last in my series of backstory posts for Raven's Children is going to be more of a definition post. I'm going to be talking about cultural appropriation quite a bit as I go through the series, so I thought it would be a good idea to start out with some basic information and definitions.

( Explanation and links under the cut )

And that's it for the introduction posts! Posting of actual pages starts tomorrow.

This is part 2 in a series of posts on the history of Raven's Children. As mentioned in the last post, these are entirely skippable; when I get into the commentary on RC pages, I will be linking back to the pertinent posts as necessary.

In the last post, I mentioned that I spent a lot of time coming up with little tribal societies when I was a kid. Aside from that, I also enjoyed making up planets, just for worldbuilding kicks. Some were more scifi-ish, some were more in a fantasy vein. Some of them resembled Earth in most ways (the Raven Tribe's world was one of these), while others were built whole-cloth from the ground up, with mostly made-up plants and animals.

The main one of these that I worked on in my later teen years was Fivemoon. When I did the wholesale reworking of the Raven Tribe in 2000 that resulted in the current version of Raven's Children, I transplanted them from their geographically Asia-like, never-quite-described-in-detail world into Fivemoon, because I had done such a tremendous amount of worldbuilding on Fivemoon and had maps and cultures and everything, so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. However, this turned out to be not the brightest idea, because some aspects of the two worlds didn't mesh well at all. That'll be discussed in tomorrow's post.

Meanwhile ... Fivemoon.

( Day 2: Fivemoon )

Tomorrow: putting it all together and trying not to make a mess!

Continuing onwards with my introductory posts to my creative projects:

Raven's Children is a series of copied-and-stapled minicomics that I produced and sold from 2000-2003 (plus a final, online-only chapter in 2005 to complete the story arc). I collected them into two graphic novels, "Shadow of the Snow Fox" and "Dogs of War". Both are now out of print, although by "out of print" I actually mean, "In fact, I still have several boxes of them, but I think selling them would do my career more harm than good at this point."

Raven's Children was the result of me realizing that I could spend my whole life fantasizing about making comics, or I could just get out there and do it. So I got out there and did it. It's a massively ambitious, massively flawed project. The amount of improvement in my ability to visually tell a story, from Issue #1 to Issue #13 (the last one) is absolutely staggering. But the story also went completely off the rails in the process. There is a lot about RC that I'm proud of, and a lot that I'm embarrassed about now, and a few things that I'm ashamed of.

Starting in (probably) April 2012, I'm going to begin serializing the old RC pages, with commentary: what I think worked, what I think didn't work, and all the things I've learned in the 12 years since I started it. It'll be a good opportunity to talk about writing and the creative process, as well as to do something useful with my huge backlog of RC pages (about 300 of them, not to mention vast quantities of sketches, promo art, covers, parodies and so forth).

( A little more about the project under the cut )