Not Dead.

Three weeks!? Three weeks!?

It's been three weeks since my last post? Damn. I'd love to say that it's been because I've been off around the world exploring exotic locales or doing volunteer missionary work in the Pacific islands but the sad fact is that I've rarely been more than a few feet away from my laptop.

I have only the Xbox and an overbearing feeling of indifference to blame for my absence and I beg your forgiveness for this.

Now lying in a sickness induced sweat I decided to actually write something, you know, in case anyone was still checking for updates. I know Den has been and I thank him for his concern- and offer of involvement in juicy projects! I was looking forward to providing you all with yummy new work that I have been doing (between bouts of Halo 3: ODST and Fable II) but tragically it seems my laptop had come to enjoy its relaxing period of disuse and hoped to extend it by contracting a particularly nasty virus that locked me out of all functions on the machine other than installing 'Antiviruspro 2010'. Being the naive and trusting individual I am I naturally saw no other option but to format my entire c: drive and start windows again from three year-old settings.

I'm sorry to say that all my recently produced work was lost, including everything I've produced for this blog, saddest of which (witch, lol) was the newly completed rendering of Bellatrix Lestrange I was intending to include in the post. I'm afraid all the new work I had been doing on Deadend is also gone, thus teaching me that using a Wacom, though versatile, is no match for a real sketchbook. Boo.

Thankfully all my older stuff is stored on a backup drive, which means although I cant bring you anything new, I can still give you some Darkside, so here you are; I've decided to skip to one of the later colour rendered strips, just because I like this one, and it's particularly geeky being that you can only really understand it if you've read 'Heir to the Empire' or are familiar with the Extended Universe...

Frantic, part 1.

Most of the pictures I've posted here have been completed drawings or at least well finished sketches. It might be helpful to know that ideas dont necessaraly pop out of my head in such a complete fashion. Above are a series of standard pages from one of my old books, presented sequencially so you can see how ideas have developed. Most of the subject matter is Deadend but there's also a few bits of Star Wars and even a few bits of stuff based on an Iain M. Banks novel (though I forget which one).

I thought looking through some of this stuff might help inspire Simon to get on with some Deadend stuff, which he seems to be enthused about according to his blog here.

More to come in a minute...

You'll learn one day, won't you?

Ah, the simplest ones are often the best.

Take my land.

Heh, This has always been one of my favourites. It's just something about the way I captured Anakin's demented look of evil concentration upon the bugs that works for me. This one (like all the TFTD strips) was produced between the releases of Episode II and Episode III and was my attempt to hypothesise how Palpatine would go about corrupting poor Ani (ugh, even writing it makes me feel dirty) behind Obi wan's back. Let's just say Episode III came as a disappointment and leave it at that. I had planned to do a whole series of strips where Anakin would be blatantly evil all over the place while Obi wan puttered on, blissfully unaware of goings on. Of course, I never got round to it.

Might have to change the name of the blog to that- "I never got round to it" has a good ring to it (^_^)

I dont care, I'm still free.

C'mon, say what you like about the prequels, the one thing you can't deny is that these guys frakkin' rock. I know it. You know it. Genndy Tartakovsky definitely knows it, and I wouldn't argue with him, he's like, God or something.

I rolled a natural 1 for my search test...

Ooops! With all that waffle about TFTD I completely forgot to mention that I now have five (five!) followers! Hello all of you out there, including the one that I've never met or heard of (that one was a surprise) and a special hello to old friend Den Patrick!

Den has been blogging forever and his is pretty much one of the first I ever started reading and the main reason I chose blogspot as a host. He also used to run a mean Star Wars roleplaying game.

Ah, those were the days. Making a fifty mile round trip weekly to sit in Den's lounge, roll dice and make notes on character sheets. Simpler times. Happier times.

Below are a couple of pics of 'Phil' (can't remember her full name) my character from those old sessions (if you're wonder why I roleplayed a female I'd say it's useful to have at least one character in your party who has the option to 'seduce' as an alternative to attack!) the large hole in her shirt is as a result of a critically failed dodge roll as I remember :-)

Nice to have you Den!

It is here.

So yes here we are, finally. Tales from the Darkside. I've stayed away from posting on this subject for a while simply because I'm worried by the amount of posts it could end up taking up. Not that I don't want to share it with you- quite the contrary in fact, the problem is that there exists the possibility that I could get carried away and deluge you with too much material...
I'm acutely aware that for a lot of people, reading a blog is a diversion- a tea break filler and I've been very careful to try and limit the waffle for exactly that reason. The problem is I want to post everything at once but then I would have more of a gallery than a blog, and thats not what I'm trying to do here.

What I'm going to do is post no more than one TFTD strip per day, intermingled with various other posts as I have been up to now. To help anyone who wants to sort through the posts or is only interested in the TFTD strips I'm going to go back through all my previous entries and start tagging subjects so it's easier for you to find everything.

Today's strip is the first full TFTD I did.

The idea came to me whilst watching ROTJ a few years back. It occured to me that it would have to be very traumatic, not to mention humiliating for the elite forces of the empire to be defeated by a ramshackle band of three- foot teddybears led by a scoundrel, a girl, a gay robot and his dustbin friend. Then I noticed something that really made me pay attention. Right at the end, during the celebration scene (the proper one, with old Anakin- not the CG abomination that we get force fed these days) you an see an Ewok playing xylophone on a group of trooper helmets.

Am I the only one a little freaked by this?!

Playing music on the battered headgear of your fallen adversaries? Are the heads still in those helmets? What have they done with the rest of the bodies? Is there a group of ewoks just out of frame feasting on the tasty flesh of the empire's finest? For me this painted a grisly scene of postwar carnage that I simply had to explore on paper.

As a sidenote I'd point out that this was the subject of the first TFTD sketch I ever did- the ewok image I posted yesterday. It's a really important picture because it was the first I did using the construction style I've used ever since for the TFTD strips- normally I strive for a generally realistic style of proportion but for TFTD I went a little cartoony.

Anyway, as I recall I have frequently had conversations with other Star Wars fans on the subject of stormtrooper armour, how cool it looks, and which type looks the best (have you seen the new Clonetrooper armour for the Xbox Live avatars? How neat is that?!). That kind of got combined with my ewok musings and the fusion produced the first ever Tales from the Darkside strip. It was pretty much downhill from there...

Above you can see the original art for #1, below is the finished properly lettered piece.

Very soon...

Soon...

It is coming...