What's up with Semper Fidelis?

First of all, hi, everyone who joined this Patreon for charr comics! I am very happy to have you and I'm already working on the next two short stories from the Legions.

But that's by far not my only project.

While my Patreon is a bit of a multi-target venture these days, splitting my work between my original stuff and boatloads of charr, I haven't forgotten what brought this coin jar into existence in the first place. For those uninitiated, I have been poking around making comics for over a decade now (including the fan-comics I made back in the ancient times... hm... perhaps I could upload them here for completion's sake; but I digress), and a lot of that time was dedicated, sacrificed to and spent on a project many of you know as Semper Fidelis, or SemperFiComics.

This anthro adventure series started as a set of convention mascots (which is a story for another time), but when me and the con parted ways, I decided to take them adventuring. It's pretty much a mix of my young-adult life influences – a bit of Uncharted, a bit of Stargate SG-1, a bit of Indiana Jones and a bit of The Mummy.

The original plan was simple. Make first four episodes alongside my partner and co-creator, add a short prologue, epilogue, some bonus materials and bam, you have a book.

This Patreon was originally started to help bring book one into existence. The funds I collected on that time are safely stored and still dedicated to that exact thing, but for the longest of times, the project was in a bit of a limbo.

My skills were simply no longer up to par. Artwork was hampered by inability to draw night cityscapes properly, concept of short six-to-eight pages was no longer viable for the ever expanding story and the result was an unenjoyable mess. It wasn't even coherent enough to read for the uninitiated. When my computer drive fried and seemingly took most of the pages from issue 3 - both finished and in progress - with it, it was kind of a mercy kill at that point.

You can still find what was done online if you're curious, because I decided in spite of my nagging conscience that that's where things should stay at the moment. It was a mad ride back in its day, and although it was cut short, it was a blast nonetheless.

That said, this is not a project I killed off back in the day and decided to revive with nothing better to do. It has never been written off and I kept coming back to it as much as my work and other commitments allowed to poke here and there; and slowly built up what I have on my hands right now. And yes, it took ages; last four years haven't been particularly kind to me in terms of spare time. But I now arrived at a new starting point where I can actually dive in and just start filling the blanks. All the groundwork is done.

(I also pondered whether to finish issue 3 before anything else, but since the break has already been this long, the drawbacks by far outnumbered the benefits.)

First order of business, which was mostly done late last year, was complete overhaul of the lettering. That included a new logo, which you may have encountered floating around the twitterscape:

One of the reasons I'm not taking down anything old is pretty simple: This is not a rewrite, a retcon, a restart, or anything else of the usual like. This is simply continuing where I left of, albeit with some additions benefiting from experience I gained in the meantime. Some dialogue was adjusted in the old stories that hadn't been coming across clear enough in the original run, some scenes were expanded or added to let the characters breathe a bit easier or to better tie them to future or past events, but nothing major changed with the actual story. You'll still recognize The Silver Sword, but you'll get to read it closer to the image I carry in my head of the full story and the characters that have kept me company through the years.

Some time ago, I made myself a mock-up A6 book to flip through and put notes in, and when I brainstormed some ideas with a friend and fan of the series, we finally managed to crack the last puzzle that was blocking the progress.

I rearranged some pages here and there, wrote 3 completely new short segments and edited some old ones, and the result is (at least in my opinion) a much neater, tighter narrative that gives the book some much needed unifying element.

That in turn leads us here:

This is a page layout. A very useful tool when you want to make sure your chapters start correctly, your two-page spreads are not cut in half or that the content of your book is balanced and not like... 99% bonus sketches or something. (It can also double as a very nice motivational checklist to cross out as you go.)

This particular one reads as follows:

• Ochre –  Back and front cover of the book
• Pale yellow – Technical pages; vacats (intentionally empty dividers), chapter covers, masthead, anything the book needs to have a book structure
• Blue – Principal numbered episodes of the comic
• Green – Minicomics; prologue, epilogue and three interludes
• Dark orange – Bonus content

That puts the book on grand total of 144 pages (while bound books require the page count divisible by 4, the most cost-effective way is 16 in this case, since it doesn't waste any paper), 104 of which are comics, comics and nothing but comics.

That said, even though there's quite a lot of work already done from the past, it's still gonna be a massive undertaking.

If everything goes at least semi-decent (and I have the luxury to leave quite a lot of padding in my plans right now, temporary as that is), I would like to start publishing the first stories in early 2022 and adopt a pretty steady pace from there.

I cannot give an exact date just yet, as it will largely depend on (and I apologize for the personal life tangent here) the results of a surgery I'm to undertake in January. Even with that in mind, I have already completed some work in advance, so I'll be more than happy to share it with you once the time is right.

As I hinted above, I will start over, but that doesn't mean those of you who have stuck with this mad undertaking from the start (and again, you have my deepest thanks for that) will have to wait for ages before you see anything new. Quite the opposite: we have 22 pages to chew through before we get to something you've seen before, even if the first 16 will be slightly stylistically different than you've seen before.

In the meantime, there's two more charr shorts currently being wrapped up to be shared soon, and I would like to share the first pirate comic somewhere between now and the SF launch, and one more silly little thing I would like to share around the holidays and that is currently in early testing.

That is it for today's tech update; I hope it brought you some useful insight into the tangled mess that is my work process. If you've made it this far (and I don't mean just reading through the wall of text above), you have my sincere thanks. I should see you again soon with some charr pages.

Until then, stay safe.