The making of a comic page. This is page four of "Sistrenday", an eight-page comic pilot that our artist completed recently for writer Mikael Lopez. In 2016, Lopez and our artist collaborated on the short piece "David Loses His Head", published in Sliced Quarterly and praised in Broken Frontier this year. "Sistrenday" is an ambitious new step in their partnership; and, with luck, it will mark the beginning of a lengthy new series.
In order, the steps pictured above are:
Completed page
Finalized artwork
Refined colors
Rough colors
Refined pencils
Rough pencils
Thumbnail
"Sistrenday" is a fantasy adventure story, set in a magical land roamed by huge, enigmatic gods. In the page above, sister-protagonists Enh and Tuh are hired to steal from Mother Ember—the most powerful of these gods. By the end of "Sistrenday", the terrible consequences of this decision are made apparent.
Since last month, Lopez has been posting teasers and concept material from "Sistrenday" on his blog. Those interested may find more of this project, including an unused test page, there.
Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon's Kickstarter campaign is over. In the end, an incredible 437 people rocketed the project to $10,149--a number that floors all of us behind the scenes. We cannot thank everyone enough for backing and sharing, and for the countless kind words they had for the Galahad team throughout the campaign.
These comics will soon be in the world; and we at Still Eating Oranges are overjoyed, and beyond grateful, to see it happen. Years of love went into the production of this book. We hope that readers will feel that love as they experience Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon.
The campaign is funded. Yesterday evening, Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon reached $8,000--and almost two years worth of dreams reached their fulfillment. More than 350 people have rallied to make this book real, and we cannot wait for them to read it. We offer thanks to every single supporter.
Four days remain in the campaign, however; and there are stretch goals within range. At $8,500, every backer of the physical reward tiers receives, automatically and free of charge, a mini-poster by the great Chris Lewis Lee. At $9,000, stickers designed by our artist become available.
We encourage anyone interested in Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon to back the campaign before it ends on April 26. This is your chance to receive a copy. The future availability of this anthology is uncertain: it has, to our knowledge, no storefronts or distributors lined up to sell it post-Kickstarter. Backing now is the only way to guarantee your copy.
Those unfamiliar with the anthology, or otherwise in need of reasons to be excited, may see our preview post for more information. And, to anyone who has purchased or will purchase Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon: thank you, from all of us.
Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon's fourth and final week on Kickstarter has arrived, and the campaign is within $920 of its goal. For those unfamiliar with the project: see our explanation and preview post, which contains everything you need to know.
Our thanks to everyone who has backed or shared the campaign. With the funding goal in reach, the stretch goals are looking more and more probable. We cannot wait for Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon to enter the world.
The crowdfunding campaign for Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon has entered its third week, and it now stands at 65% of its funding goal. A group of 250 people has pledged $5,219, which leaves just under $2,800 to raise. If you haven't yet backed the project, or are new to Galahad, consider this post your repository of reasons to be excited.
Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon is a 130-page collection of five interconnected fantasy comics, each one illustated by a different artist. The anthology was written and masterminded by Hansel Moreno, a rising talent in indie comics, whose last Kickstarter campaign (for Adventures in Nate's Perilous Challenge, in 2015) went off without a hitch.
Work on Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon began in mid-2015, when Hansel hired Still Eating Oranges' artist to illustrate the anthology's central story: "The Garden of Galahad", a 49-page behemoth about a suit of armor brought to life. Our artist completed it in January 2017, after roughly one and a half years of work. Read its first ten pages here.
Then we have the other four stories. Maria Frantz brings an intricate, lovely fairy-tale charm to the 26-page "Tougher than the Hills", about a young witch in trouble (snippet previews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Julie Godwin renders "When Magic was Free", about the anthology's tragic villain, in a slick and accomplished digital style (snippet previews: 1, 2, 3, 4). In "Broken Keep", Devin Kraft injects the story of two unlucky knights with an indie-comic verve (snippet previews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). And Chan Chau provides a remastered (and full-color) edition of "The Witches Laugh", the original version of which may be read here.
These comics are accompanied by a host of pin-ups from great illustrators. Matt Smith of Lake of Fire (2016; Image Comics) fame contributed this wonderful piece, while Sourya Sihachakr of Ankama's Label 619 brought this one. The renowned Jen Bartel provided her signature look as well. Find the full list of pin-up contributors, with their art linked where available, below.
Matt Smith
Sourya Sihachakr
Jen Bartel
Leland Goodman
Kevin Jay Stanton & Andy Bennett
Ein M.
Tait Howard
Feefal (+1)
Christopher Bruce Johnston
Nicky Soh
Even the cheapest reward tier for Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon offers everything mentioned in this post so far. At higher tiers there are posters and postcards, a behind-the-scenes PDF (40+ pages) on the creation of "The Garden of Galahad", additional comics, original art and more.
Almost two years, and countless hours, have gone into making Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon a reality. Everyone involved appreciates any and all support, whether through backing or sharing--or simply telling a friend who might be interested. The Kickstarter campaign is in the home stretch. One more push, and it will be through.
In just over a week on Kickstarter, Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon has raised nearly 50% of its funding goal. As of this writing, 196 people have backed the project--a huge show of support, and an incredible encouragement to everyone involved with Galahad. More ground remains to be covered; but we enter the second week hopeful, and grateful.
Hansel Moreno, the mastermind behind the anthology, has added several new reward tiers since the campaign's launch. The latest appeared yesterday: a limited tier (maximum 3) to commission an artwork from Still Eating Oranges' artist. Our artist has never before taken commissions, and has no plans to take them again soon, which makes this tier a tempting offer. Character art and cover art, illustrations, printable postcards, styles from pole to pole: everything--at least, everything fit to print--is on the table.
Take a look at our artist's diverse portfolio for an idea of the possibilities, and please consider backing Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon on Kickstarter.
Since our update in February, six more pieces of our writer's fiction have seen publication. Among them: "The Orphic Mystery", an absurdist comedic short in SPANK the CARP; a microfiction piece called "The Charcoal Woman", published by 101 Words; something entitled "The Only Surviving Fragment of 'The Sack of Brooklyn' by Marcus of Bushwick, with Annotations" in The B'K; and a psychedelic story about glass toast and the business world, "Or is This Only What the Other You is Dreaming?", featured in TL;DR Magazine.
Meanwhile, "The Feeling of Guilt Felt in Private by a Child" (in 50-Word Stories) won its publisher's Story of the Week award earlier this month. The piece is now competing for March's Story of the Month prize. Yet the last of the six new publications, in our collective's opinion, is the major highlight: "Honko Dies", a tragicomic nonsense story published by Sick Lit Magazine this month.
These six pieces join "Geese Teeth" and "Several Judgments and Adventures Courtesy of the Young Ms. James" from earlier in the year. Two or three more are due to appear in April, and we will update our readers then.
The Kickstarter campaign, almost two years in the making, is here. Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon is now seeking backers to fund its printing and shipping costs, and even the lowest reward tier offers a copy of the book. For the moment, softcover print editions ship only in the United States, but a digital edition is available for international backers.
Each interlocking story within Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon was penned by the great Hansel Moreno and drawn by a talented artist. The 130-page collection features comics by Chan Chau, Devin Kraft, Julie Godwin and Maria Frantz, and pin-ups by Matt Smith, Leland Goodman, Kevin Jay Stanton and Andy Bennett, Sourya Sihachakr, Chris Johnston, Tait Howard and more. At the center of the anthology is "The Garden of Galahad", a 49-page epic illustrated by Still Eating Oranges' artist from 2015 until the comic's completion this year. The wrap-around cover that our artist painted for the anthology is above.
Any reblogs are greatly appreciated. Those who choose to back the project--to buy a copy of Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon--have our undying gratitude. For people on the fence: we posted a ten-page preview of "The Garden of Galahad" on Christmas, and even more art may be found on the campaign page. This project has been an incredible journey for our artist, and for everyone at Still Eating Oranges; and we hope that you will join us as we near its end.
After a few setbacks, the artworks are now public. Above: the Steam trading card and profile background illustrations created by our artist for Ohr, Rail Slave Games' newest release. Like the game's cover, which we unveiled last year, these pieces are experiments in digital collage and "net-art" causticity. Each one depicts a character from Ohr as envisioned by our artist, who enjoyed near-total creative freedom throughout the project.
Our artist's behind-the-scenes descriptions of these artworks were, at Rail Slave's discretion, included alongside each piece on Steam. Rather than repeat that information, we will offer something new here: details of the illustrations' creation. Still Eating Oranges has worked in digital collage since 2015--a technique on display in our past posts, and in the comic "David Loses His Head". From a technical standpoint, however, these pieces for Ohr are the most advanced results yet produced with our artist's peculiar method. Below, we have created subpages to house each illustration's surviving progress files:
The card illustrations started with pencil linework. These lines were refined with ink, then scanned and colored with Photoshop Elements 1.0--a program from 2001. Afterward, the collage process began. Our artist worked with stacks upon stacks of corroded textures and Elements 1.0 effects; continually distorted, screenshotted, stretched, cut, pasted and layered test versions of each image into a "master" collage, whenever an aspect of the tests looked interesting; and used Elements 1.0's rudimentary dissolve brush to "paint" with pixels, which created a fuzzy, photocopy-like effect. Much of the initial linework and coloring disappeared during this process.
The profile backgrounds started--like most of our earlier collages--with leftovers, scraps, sketches and textures. They are warped composites of pre-existing images, which have been cut up, edited and painted-over until almost unrecognizable. (The backdrop for the cow card, incidentally, relied on this technique as well.) Barring these differences, the three backgrounds were produced with the same methods as the trading card artwork.
We thank Rail Slave Games for giving our artist this opportunity--and we encourage our followers, as we have in the past, to play this company's work. After misunderstood masterpieces like Uriel's Chasm and Selfie, it is clear that no other developer today pushes the envelope as far.
Two weeks and change ago, our artist was hired by Technocrat Games to design the lead character for their latest point-and-click adventure game--working title Judgement Effect. The character's name is Andi; and, above, readers may find the design and turnaround that our artist created for her. While public details are scant regarding this new Technocrat project, we can confirm that it will use 3D graphics, and that Andi was conceived with 3D modeling in mind.
We thank Technocrat Games for giving our artist this opportunity. The company is part of the incredible Wadjet Eye family, responsible for projects such as the Blackwell series, Primordia and The Shivah--games we cannot recommend highly enough. Technocrat's previous title, Technobabylon, is among the best-respected adventure games of the decade. We cannot wait to watch this new game develop.
Already, 2017 has been an incredible year for Still Eating Oranges. Enough has happened since our December review to warrant an update--and so we begin.
In January, our artist completed "The Garden of Galahad" after more than a year of work. Response to the previews we've posted online has been phenomenal, particularly on Twitter; and we're pleased to announce that the comic is coming soon. "The Garden of Galahad" and its four companion stories form an anthology--entitled Galahad and the Far-Off Horizon--that's slated to appear on Kickstarter in March. We'll have more information in the next few weeks.
Since the year began, our artist has worked on the Far-Off Horizon anthology's cover art, a character design for Technocrat Games (of Technobabylon fame), promotional art for Rail Slave Games and two covers for Xalavier Nelson, Jr.'s latest projects. Only one of these, the cover for Nelson's Tell Virgo, has been released publicly; but we will be posting the others as soon as we're able.
Meanwhile, our writer has had two stories published this year: "Geese Teeth", in Five 2 One; and "Several Judgments and Adventures Courtesy of the Young Ms. James", in the Scarlet Leaf Review. (Excitingly, "Geese Teeth" is accompanied in Five 2 One by our photographer's debut publication, an experimental installation video.) Another five stories are scheduled for publication in the near future. In addition, our writer is collaborating with several game development companies--including Illuminated Games and Flump Studios--on promising new titles.
Those looking to follow Still Eating Oranges more closely have a few options. We now house a complete list of our off-blog work, old and current, in our new Projects section. This page is updated frequently--much more frequently than the blog proper--, which makes it the best place to see what Still Eating Oranges is doing. We've also updated and expanded our About section, and our artist (@Magicalseaside) and writer (@NowIsNotGood) remain very active on Twitter.
As a final note: we learned recently that "David Loses His Head"--a short comic illustrated by our artist and written by Mikael Lopez--received glowing praise in Broken Frontier this month. Reviewing Sliced Quarterly #5, of which "David" is part, writer Conori Bell-Bhuiyan singled out our artist's work as "a personal highlight" from the anthology. We extend our thanks to Broken Frontier and Bell-Bhuiyan for the kind words.
The posts since our last update may be found organized after the break.
Misc. art
Necropolis protagonist
Galahad: Moss Edition
The first few minutes of a film
The con men
Young Lance
SCREW YOU, BEAR DAD! cover
Ohr cover
Tell Virgo cover
Misc. writing
Hyper Bounce Blast giveaway
Changes
Regarding... Strange News from Nowhere
The Toothbrush Vanguard, nominated
Still Eating Oranges year in review - 2016
Comics
Making of a comic page
The Garden of Galahad, page one
The Garden of Galahad, page ten
The Garden of Galahad preview
Experimental writing
Something About Hope and Alcohol
Footrace
Upon the Earth Distress of Nations, with Perplexity
Since Xalavier Nelson, Jr. launched his game SCREW YOU, BEAR DAD! last October, its success has been astounding. Previously we mentioned the game's front-page feature on Rock, Paper, Shotgun; but recently we learned that PC Gamer, both in print and online, singled out BEAR DAD for praise. To quote the magazine's Christmas 2016 issue:
The title implies silliness, jokes, light-hearted humour -- and the game delivers on all that, but also weaves in a story of difficult father-son relationships in a way that's unexpected and touching. It's also incredibly well-written and very funny.
Our artist's cover artwork accompanies BEAR DAD in this article, just as it did in Rock, Paper, Shotgun last year. And this brings us to the image at the top. Tell Virgo is Nelson's newest project, although little public information about it yet exists. We can confirm, however, that in mid-January Nelson hired our artist to paint the enigmatic cover above. Its reference points are classic, 20th-century posters and book covers, in the style seen here and here.
We will keep our readers posted as Tell Virgo develops. In the meantime, we recommend following Nelson (@WritNelson) and our artist (@Magicalseaside) on Twitter for the latest updates on all of their projects.
For our collective, 2016 has been unpredictable, successful, transformative and other adjectives. Such an abundance of adjectives, in fact, that we ceased this blog's regular updates back in June: there was simply too much work to do. For those who've remained with us despite the change in schedule, we are forever grateful. But let's continue--to the review.
Our artist was employed as an illustrator on two comics this year: the five-page "David Loses His Head", written by Mikael Lopez; and the 49-page behemoth The Garden of Galahad, written by Hansel Moreno. With assistance from our collective's writer, our artist also colored and lettered Lopez's and Nick Smith Williams' "In the Cards", published in The Psychedelic Journal last month. "David Loses His Head" will be published in Sliced Quarterly sometime next year.
The Garden of Galahad, meanwhile, will be the centerpiece of Mr. Moreno's upcoming comics anthology. We shared the first 10 pages of Galahad on Christmas--but this moving story has only just begun, and much more gorgeous artwork remains to see. The project will launch on Kickstarter next year, and we hope that our followers share our excitement for it.
Beyond the foregoing jobs, our artist also served as the cover illustrator for three video games: Hyper Bounce Blast by Flump Studios; SCREW YOU, BEAR DAD! by Xalavier Nelson, Jr.; and Ohr by Rail Slave Games. Ohr's digital trading cards and Steam profile backgrounds, set to release in January, were created by our artist as well. These three (excellent) games have been featured in publications such as IndieGames.com, Hardcore Gamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun--the last of which adorned its front page with BEAR DAD!'s cover artwork.
Meanwhile, our writer's story "The Toothbrush Vanguard" was published by Squawk Back in January; and that journal's editors nominated the piece for the Pushcart Prize in October. Since then, four more stories have seen publication: "The Coin Boy", with Short Tale 100; "Single Parenting", with Winamop; "Weathervane", with The Drabble; and "Crawlspace Kenneth", with Postcard Shorts. Another four are scheduled to appear in journals next year. Finally, the aforementioned Hyper Bounce Blast--on which our writer served for nine months as design consultant, testing lead, team go-between and marketer--was released in May, to positive reviews and a TIGA award nomination.
Last of all, in a proud milestone for us, we received word that a teacher in Oman included our 2012 article "The significance of plot without conflict" in her high-school class this year. Even four and a half years later, the spread of this article continues to astound us.
Moving into 2017, our collective's future is bright. Many new projects are already taking shape, and we hope that our readers will join us for the ride.
As a Christmas gift: the first ten pages of The Garden of Galahad, a 49-page comic written by Hansel Moreno (@hanselthelost) and drawn by our artist. It tells the story of Galahad, a suit of armor brought to life by the retired knight Lance. Created to be a farmhand, Galahad is a gentle soul who adores the natural world--and this love, in the course of events, drives him on a long journey across the land. One character not shown in these ten pages is Brynne (pictured in the sketch at the top), a mischievous and permanently-disheveled hedgewitch who befriends Galahad soon after this preview's end.
The Garden of Galahad will appear on Kickstarter in early 2017, as the centerpiece of a comics anthology helmed by Mr. Moreno. Three lengthy back-up stories, which explain more about the characters and their enchanted world, are being illustrated for the book by the talented Devin Kraft, Julie Godwin and Maria Frantz. Stunning pinups have been contributed by Leland Goodman, Kevin Jay Stanton and Andy Bennett, Sourya Sihachakr, Chris Johnston, Tait Howard and others. We will share further details about The Garden of Galahad and its companion stories as the Kickstarter campaign approaches. Until then, we hope that this teaser lets our readers share in our excitement for this project, and for 2017.
Late last month, our artist was contacted by Rail Slave Games--a developer we have discussed in the past--with a job offer. It has been one year since the company’s last game, את; and, at last, a new release is on the horizon. The game is Ohr, a bizarre side-scroller that somehow involves cows, cassette tapes, evil businessmen and an anthropomorphic giraffe. Our artist has been occupied entirely with The Garden of Galahad since September, after dropping all side-projects for the final push. However, one cannot turn down an opportunity to work with the most forward-thinking developer of our time.
As a result, our artist is producing the promotional artwork for Ohr. The cover illustration above--a sort of decaying, net-art religious icon--is the first piece completed thus far. The game is set to release on December 2 and, given Rail Slave’s track record to date, we at Still Eating Oranges can only be excited. Our readers can look forward to seeing more artwork from Ohr in the weeks and months ahead.
A page from The Garden of Galahad, the upcoming comic illustrated by our artist and written by Hansel Moreno (@hanselthelost). After roughly 18 months in development, the project is set to launch via Kickstarter early next year. Our readers can expect more details in the coming months.
It is now public information: our writer’s short anti-story “The Toothbrush Vanguard” has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Yearly, magazines in the small press sphere submit six pieces each--essays, poems, stories, et cetera--for Pushcart consideration. Squawk Back, which published “The Toothbrush Vanguard” in January 2016, has included our writer’s story among its six nominations.
Although the Pushcart Prize receives thousands of nominees annually, consideration for the award remains a tremendous, and relatively rare, honor. We at Still Eating Oranges cannot thank Squawk Back enough--first for taking a chance in publishing the story, second for this nomination. In our writer’s estimation, it is overwhelmingly unlikely that “The Toothbrush Vanguard” will win. The nomination alone, though, is electrifying.
