Djinnborn Comics

The Future

After some serious soul-searching with the comic the past month and especially the past week, I’ve decided to go with option #2 from my previous post. That means I’m officially drawing the curtain on Metamorphosis as a webcomic and I’m going to start actively developing a new webcomic idea

What’s this mean for the site?

Officially, this site will be a webcomics- and gaming-related blog. It will be much more than that, though. I intend to share the majority of my development process here. Character and location designs, written concept development, various musings on my experiences in both comic design and development and writing. This site is not going inactive. Far from it. I plan to make weekly postings at the minimum and can probably do more frequent blogging from time to time.

I invite you all to jump in with me. Leave comments, feedback, thoughts, ideas. A big reason I’m going to do this publicly is to get reader involvement. Bring your friends, let’s make a whole party out of this. Needless to say, not every idea will be used. They may not fit my vision of the project, or they may get used for a while, then dropped in favor of something else, or any number of other things. Please don’t take it personally. The brainstorming really helps get new ideas and considerations on the table, but isn’t meant to be a list of everything that will be included. That being said, the concepts tend to evolve as the rest of the setting develops, so something from an old brainstorming session could come back to relevance later on.

I won’t share everything about the process. If I reveal the whole character or story to you at the beginning, there’s not much reason for me to make a webcomic out of it, is there? ;) But this is an opportunity for you readers to get involved as much or as little as you like.

Metamorphosis will get archived in time, but will still be  available. I am still deciding how I want to show the rest of the story. Summaries would be faster but prose fiction might be more enjoyable. I always envisioned that if each story arc was presented in another medium, they’d take up a full hour slot TV show or would be individual books in a larger series. I will tinker and see what works best for me.

The base site address will change (I’ve been wanting to change www.kaitoukage.net for over a year now but haven’t really had a chance or the money) but all of the URLs you might be used to using, like psmetamorphosis.com or metamorphosis-comic.com will be available at least another year.

How’s it gonna work?

Most of this I’ve covered. I’m going to post a concept every week or so and we can run with it. Sometimes the concept will be visual, sometimes written, sometimes a little of both. If discussion continues to be lively on a particular concept, I may postpone putting the next one up until things settle down. Or I’ll keep things going and encourage more discussion on other topics!

After that, I’ll write up a refined version and we can go from there until something sleek and beautiful comes out. Then it’ll get moved to the gallery of finished products. Some ideas might get revisited again down the road.

Concepts are much easier to produce than comic pages since concepts can be loose and unfinished. Pages have to be polished and complete. Therefore, I should be able to keep up with this kind of schedule better. Plus, it’ll motivate me to keep on top of development since I am setting a bigger responsibility for myself than just “get some work done on it.”

What else will be here?

Some test runs.

I am going to develop the fantasy and the superhero projects roughly at the same time. I’ll run a few sample comics here and there. This will enable me to try the characters live in sequential art. It’ll also let you guys see them in action and get feedback from you.

I will also talk about life as a webcomic artist/writer. I want to share some things I learned, both so I remember them and so you can get a glimpse into my thought processes. This’ll include all kinds of valuable lessons for myself, from how I deal with some issues to neat tricks I learned, to introspective ramblings.

And I will continue to support my friends and fellows in the webcomic business. I have been lax on this, but I will start publicizing for my buddies more often. I’ve had a LOT of great support over the past year and a half and I want to keep those connections strong for when I get my next project underway.

Wrap-Up

That’s what’s going on in a nutshell. I hope that most of you stick around to see what’s coming. I have plans to get at least one concept sketched and posted for you this weekend. Hopefully it’ll be a great step for me and I look forward to hearing from all of you.