Beyond the Western Deep

This page serves as a mid-chapter break for Chapter 3, which we will be returning to following the conclusion of our upcoming short story by a special guest artist! More info down below, and even MORE info will be coming in the next couple weeks!

Personally, I think it’s gonna be a great morning. A SPECTACULAR morning. I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be. I have complete confidence in these canid soldiers and you should, too.

So, as you might know from following the pages the last few months, we’ve been starting to explore options for a Kickstarter campaign to reprint the first volume in hardcover (along with create some additional merch for long-time fans). We’ve also been discussing the long-term plan for Western Deep, or at least planned to start discussing it in further detail. See, when we weren’t sure whether we’d get the rights back to the world of the Western Deep, it made long-term planning a little more difficult.

Now, though, we have the full IP rights again, so I want to take some time to really hammer things out with Rachel and make sure we’re all in the best possible position moving forward.

Because it’s hard to work on Kickstarter stuff AND make tweaks to the pages for a new Volume 1 pdf AND read through long planning docs with a part-time job and the weekly page requirements, we decided that the best thing to do would be to bring on a guest artist to do a short 10 page story and give Rachel and I some time to figure things out.

I will be writing this new side-story, and I’m looking forward to announcing the artist (and showing some of their work) in next week’s post!

Instead of Western Deep-related guest art this week, I actually want to point everybody here to GHOST OF A TALE, a PC game available on Steam/GoG/Humble that just released its full version after five years of development. Jerome Jacinto, the brilliant artist behind Song of the Eastern Sands, helped create most of the character portraits seen in-game, as well as pieces of key art like this amazing Secret of NIMH-inspired poster:

The game was developed almost entirely by Lionel “SeithCG” Gallat, a former Dreamworks animator who worked on such titles as The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Despicable Me.

The dialogue for the game was written by a wonderful writer named Paul Gardner, and I helped out in the last few months to polish up his dialogue and game text as an editor.

Check out the trailer below!