About Us
ALEX KAIN (WRITER)
A Narrative Designer at award-winning Guild Wars developer ArenaNet, Alex has been writing and designing games professionally since 2007. Since then, he has contributed to over 20 titles on over a dozen platforms, including numerous independent titles such as Tooth & Tail (PC/PS4), Never Stop Sneakin’ (Nintendo Switch), Dust: An Elysian Tail (PC, PS4, Xbox 360), Armello (PC, PS4, Xbox One), and Salt & Sanctuary (PC, PS4, PS Vita).
In 2010, he also wrote and co-created the story Potential in the Eisner-award-winning and New York Times-bestselling collection Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard Volume 1 with artist Sean Rubin.
RACHEL BENNETT (ARTIST)
Rachel is a Brigham Young University alumnus with a BFA in animation. She balances an unrelated day job with freelance illustration work and Beyond the Western Deep. Rachel prefers to immerse herself in visual storytelling even in hobby form, as a consumer (and sometimes creator) of storyboards, comics, and video games.
JEROME JACINTO (ARTIST)
A graduate from the University of Santo Tomas with a BFA in advertising, he spends majority of his time at home working on big and small projects. Spare time goes to video games, martial arts, and parkour.
He started his freelance career back in 2010. Humbly beginning with small commissions like character pinups, he gradually began work on more elaborate pieces like book covers, tabletop games and TCG illustration. His most visible projects thus far are his artistic contributions to League of Geeks’ Armello (PC, PS4), where he illustrated and animated in-game cards and quest-giver portraits, and Pocket Watch Games’ Tooth and Tail (PC) where he co-created the art direction, character designs, and in-game portraits.
CONTACT US
Questions? Comments? Send them to hello @ westerndeep. net!
Hey guys,
I will start by saying I am really enjoying your work so far. I read every single one of the Redwall books and seeing life breathed into a world sharing such similarities with it warms my heart more than you can imagine. I’ll be watching this site much closer now.
Keep it up, glad I found this!
EULALIA
I completely agree with Jay.
I LOVE the Redwall books, and while I would be slight scared of reading a comic book adaptation of them, I am REALLY enjoying your very similar world in this form.
So congratulations.
I loved Mouse Guard, Watership Down and Redwall. Im about 25 pages in to this, and Im in love so far! Keep up the great work.
Hi,
I met you guys at comic con 2014 and i bought your first book and really enjoyed it, and i was wondering if you were going to be at comic con 2015?
Hi Jessica! We’ll be at Boston Comic Con this year (this MONTH, actually!) and I’ll be at Hartford Comic Con in September. I’m also planning on being at NYCC, though only as an attendee for the most part — though I do believe Action Lab will have some events I’ll be participating in. Hope to see you at one of those! :)
Hi,
Thanks for letting me know, I’m not sure if i’ll be able to make it to any of those but thanks for letting me know, will you have a second book available for purchase sometime in the future?
Like, do we have to email you or can we just comment? I found this webcomic (and I LOVE webcomics- it’s a terrible addiction) through chichapie on dA and went to have a look, because, well actually at first I thought ‘Beyond the Western Deep’ would be an expansion of the Redwall world and what lies beyond the Western Sea (because we never did find out what happens to Mariel and Dandin :( ). It wasn’t, but I stayed anyway because TALKING FIGHTING ANIMALS YES PLEASE. I was just wondering what your inspiration was? Was it Redwall? Or other similar things?? I am spying a lot of Redwall fans here and that makes me happy. Loving the comic so far! Keep it up. :D
Hi Evonnekey! Thanks for reading! :)
Redwall was a big inspiration for us, as Rachel and I both grew up reading the series. We wanted to take the things we liked most about the books and adapt them into a new fantasy world — one with deeper characters, a more robust world, and less of the ‘only black-and-white’ morality that you’d find in the Redwall books.
We really appreciate the kind words, and hope you enjoy the comic as it continues!
Hehe there is a space between Evonne and Key but I’ll forgive you. Ahhh cool! Good to hear! I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes so you’re welcome.
Sorry for the simple question, how’d you guys decide on the map layout?
Hi Joe! Nothing too crazy — I drew a really bad version in a paint application, laying everything out, then Rachel recommended some tweaks and prettified the whole thing.
Hmm, cool cool.
Absolutely gorgeous book! I love every page of it. 8D Is there a newsletter we can join that provides a notice when the next book is going to print, or notice of any crowdfunding releases? I’d love to stay in the loop on this series. Great work!
Hey David and Liz! I’m so happy you enjoyed the book! We don’t have a newsletter, but if you follow me and Rachel on Twitter (which it seems you already are!) then you can rest assured you’ll know about any book plans as they happen. We’ll also be posting news and whatnot with each page update, so readers and Twitter followers can both keep apprised of our shenanigans :)
We haven’t done any crowdfunding yet, but the topic has certainly come up regarding a Volume 2 hardcover. As we get closer to having the page content ready for primetime, we’ll try and nail down some more of those details.
Thanks again!
I noticed that my local public library recently got a copy of volume 1 and was displaying it on their recommended reading shelf.
I just started reading this two days ago, and I’m already caught up and absolutely in LOVE with this story! Keep up the great work!
I kind of have a silly question- would y’all be okay with people making fancharacters based on the comic? I really love the story and setting, and I think it would be fun to try and make up some of my own characters to explore it with, haha…
And hey, since everyone else is mentioning how Redwall nostalgia drew them to the comic, I’ll… do the opposite! When I was younger, I was intrigued by the idea of the Redwall books, but just couldn’t really get into them. I didn’t care enough about the characters to get interested in the setting, which made for a very dry read. This comic, on the other hand, retains the stuff that made me want to check out Redwall in the first place, but does a really great job of making the characters immediately interesting and likable, and ties them into the setting in a way that helps me make sense of and get into the world as a whole.
Hi Cat! Thanks so much for your kind words! :)
We love it when readers create their own fan characters based on the comic! We’ve featured a few fan-made characters as guest art in the past, and it’s always fun to see what people come up with. If you do create one, feel free to share it with us at thewesterndeep(at)gmail(dot)com!
Hey, i think i messed up something when trying to post a comment (i don’t know how this comment system works yet), but i just wanted to tell you i want to send some fanart to you, that’s all.
By the way, your comic is amazing!
Hello, sorry for the inconvenience, but I would like to translate the comic into Spanish, an act for which I want to ask permission, since I feel that it would be rude to simply translate without taking your opinion into account. I was hoping that my request was not untimely, in which case I apologize for the inconvenience. thanks for taking the time to read my comment in any case
Hi Zatao! We don’t mind if you want to translate the comic into Spanish as a personal project, so long as you make sure to credit us and link back to the Western Deep website wherever you decide to post it. Also please make sure that it’s clear that the translation is a personal project and not a professionally-sanctioned localization, and that you don’t try to sell it anywhere :)
it’s absolutely wild that you wrote for both tooth and tail and armello, because those are both games i really enjoy, as well as this comic
Hello.
I just found this, and it has sort of blown my mind.
You see, I first started reading fanfiction back in the mid 2000’s, specifically Redwall fanfiction at first, and there was this one author who wrote a few hundred thousand words of the stuff that was, to my teenage mind, absolutely amazing. There were three stories that showed me the strength of first-person writing, rubbed into my face the built-in racism of the Redwall world, and the third and best taught me just what an outstanding antagonist can do for a story. I had even copy/pasted the entirety of the stories into word documents for easier rereading on my own time, though those files have long since been lost.
This past night, I had the sudden urge to go back and reread those stories and see how well the writing held up now that I’m about fifteen years older and a more discerning reader, only to find they no longer existed. Eventually, a desperate Google search of the main character’s name/author’s penname lead me here.
Right now, I’ve read up to the second page of chapter one, including the posts you made with each page about the creation process. Unsure if I’ll continue reading those as I go, since I tend to prefer letting the story speak for itself before going back and taking into account any insights the creators might give.
Really really looking forward to diving into this intricate world full of compelling characters (and having fun translating all the symbol cypher text!), but it’s just past three AM for me, and I’m starting to come down off the high of finding this to be a thing that exists and I have a decade of it already ahead of me to read and reread at minimum twice, so I’m going to hopefully get some sleep and really start binging this in the morning.
I absolutely love your comics! I really love the overall plot of it! And as for the art, omg it’s is so amazing! I’d have to say my favorite character is dak. Great comic guys! I really enjoy!
Missing yal at ECCC. Didn’t see you here
Found the first two chapters in print a while ago and binged the rest! Keep going Alex and Rachel your comic is becoming one of my obsessions so I have something to blather about other than Genshin!
Oh and yes, I’m a Redwall fan. I have about 20 books sitting in my room that I won’t let my family get rid of.