Beyond the Western Deep

Hi everyone–because of some personal events that occurred over this last week, it made sense for us to delay the next page of Chapter 4. And with Memorial Day coming up, we decided that the next page will go live on June 5th. Here’s a little thumbnail teaser to tide you over:

Ashtor’s disapproval just radiates off the page, doesn’t it? I think readers are really going to like where this scene goes, and we’re excited to get back to it in just a couple weeks.

So what are we going to share with you instead of a new page? How about a really freaking OLD page? How about a BUNCH of really freaking old pages?

So, for those not in the know, Beyond the Western Deep began its life as a prose novel, which then transmogrified into a comic book pitch that materialized pre-2010 and underwent significant rewrites throughout 2011, resulting in its final form in late 2011–the one you can see if you hit that “First” button just above this text!

And when I say “comic book” by the way, I don’t mean “Oh, we outlined our full graphic novels and pitched them as an omnibus,” I mean we’d planned to tell the entire story across eight 32-page books, or 256 pages. For those keeping track at home, the final page count for just our first three chapters?

273 pages.

So yeah, it was an, uh… aggressive plan to say the very least. Thank goodness nobody picked it up–for a multitude of reasons. First and foremost was the fact that this first draft of the story was just not good! Characters weren’t very well-rounded, they didn’t really experience conflict or grow in any meaningful way.

Look at Quin here, for instance–he’s supposed to be at his most confused and anxious, standing before his king in a brand new role that he feels wholly unequipped for, and he’s just totally fine with it!

That stretched to characters like the core Sratha-din, who Rachel gave an incredible amount of personality to off a handful of prompts we put together, but at the end of the day their entire story, their individual arcs, how they change as characters, even their general purpose in the story–none of that was really nailed down.

I do think it speaks a lot to how strong Rachel’s visual language is that a lot of the core shapes and silhouettes for these characters have remained pretty much the same throughout their many years of development and iteration. But of course things have come a loooong way. Like, just looking at that first group image and then looking at him in a recent page like…

It just blows my mind how far we’ve all come–and not just Rachel and me, but our characters, our readers, everyone!

Anyway, next week I’ll go into a little bit more detail about the changes between the old Beyond the Western Deep (which went by the moniker “The Four Kingdoms” and even before that “The Twelve Tomes”–I don’t know why I was big into numbers in the title?) and the final version we all know.

Thank you so much for your continued support, and if you thought I’d forget to plug the Ringo Awards you are SORELY MISTAKEN! ;)

Please consider voting for Beyond the Western Deep in this year’s Ringo Comic Awards! You can do so by following this link right here: https://ringoawards.survey.fm/ringo-awards-2021-nominations

Nominations close in just a few weeks, so please help us spread the word!

See you all next week!