Plans for the New Year
Yet another new year is upon us and despite my best intentions back in the spring to really step up my use of this website, it never came to fruition. My attention for comics and illustration work exists firmly in the Twitch space, and now my comic updates over at Global Comix, at the suggestion of several new comics friends over at Twitch. This clearly means the function of this space needs to be reconsidered, and evolve into something that is appropriate for the new way I create comics and art and plan to for the forseeable future. Direct networking seems to be also moving over towards Discord, I may open up my own in 2024!
2023 turned out to be a year of both significant challenges and a renewed effort on Citadel, picking up right where late 2022 left off. Challenges aside, Chapter 4 is nearly complete…I will be finishing the final pencils this Holiday Weeeknd live on Twitch, and starting 2024 out fresh right from the get-go with traditional brush and tech pen inking of said pages. A new digital inkwash process will complete the work and after going back to my prior chapters to touch up the art and adjust some of the text…a collected Volume 1 containing the Prologue (Ch.0) to Ch.4 will be printed and ready hopefully for the Spring convention season…stay tuned!
The effort put into Chapter 4 taught me a lot and hopefully my goal of completing a chapter a year will now be on its way. I plan to be more prepared for Chapter 5, which understandably will start the year a little behind schedule as I’m still wrapping up Chapter 4. I have no idea how long the inkwash phase will take as it’s a brand new approach! I’m excited to dive in and really give this comic a hopefully unifying element that brings out the best in my comics art.
Back to this very website. After over a decade of using Frumph’s very simple and very successful Comics Easel WordPress theme, I’ve decided the time has come to move away from this approach. I’ve discussed at length with my editor, the very talented Ezra Veitch, that Citadel need not be published as a traditional “Web Comic” any longer. The industry has clearly moved away from that. Full chapters both in print and on the web are the way content is published and devoured. I plan to spend some time looking at a new way to theme this website and tailor it more towards full-chapter experiences as well as tying it more closely to my Ko-Fi for handling commission requests and print sales…if I decide to pursue that more. Things are going to look a lot different around here and I think that’s for the best. It’s time to move past the 2012 design aethstetic and move into this new way of presenting and trying to move people towards the existing platforms I’m on that offer more value and interaction. If this website becomes a gateway for even a handful of folks finding me, or vica versa, great! I want it to be something I’m proud to look at and not dreading to deal with.
