My Senior Year, MFA Thesis project is DONE! What a wild ride it’s been the last month and a half! I’m not going to talk about the content very much, as it will soon be coming to RKdia Comics as my very first, official web comic in FULL COLOR! What I will discuss is the final 48ish hours of the project, which included the layout, production and binding of the 2 books I turned in to the thesis committee.
I created 2 books for this project: My single issue, 36 page comic Citadel Chapter 1 (Part 1 Arcadia and Part 2 Daikogen) and a companion, 80-page, Faux-classic Video Game Guide “Citadel the Official Guide.”
The comic book was created as a “flip” comic, with my two 15+ stories, each converging on the middle Forbidden Forest spread I presented earlier. The cover is a full color, two sided cover stock with an original illustration on each side, flipped. The content inside is your standard comic fare; black and white dual-sided printer spreads. For the upcoming webcomic presentation of Citadel, each page will be further edited and then fully colored like the covers.
The whopper 80-page “Official Guide” book was created using a Perfect Binding technique showed to me by CCS Class of 2010 classmate Laura Terry who passed it to me from CCS Class of 2011 classmate Beth Hetland. Thanks SO much to these two wonderful ladies for all their assistance! Perfect binding is of course spreads cut in half and bound directly to the cover by glue without stitching.
The companion book features all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into building the world of Citadel that the reader will never see. That was my goal this entire year, and I feel I’ve succeeded far beyond what I imagined. It features everything from characters, to locations to script drafts and even monster/creature designs. It also covers all the miscelaneous side projects (N-man and other illustration gigs) I took on during the 9 months of study.
I set the bar high for myself this year, really wanting to not only complete a complete package I was proud of, but set up my future goals and leave a window open to move this narrative forward. I haven’t yet decided whether or not to print more copies of Citadel in it’s current state and sell them here and at conventions, but when this chapter is fully colored and has completed it’s run here at RKdia Comics, I will have a full color edition made, hopefully in time for SPX in the fall.
I will also begin drawing the next chapter this summer, so as to keep one step ahead of myself. I hope you’ll all stick around for the ride!
