Ladies and gentleman, but in all likelihood primarily gentlemen. It's been a long road -- longer than most of you know, most likely, but the end is in sight: Volume One of Heathen City will go on sale on June 26, and will be championed at Anthrocon by our friends at FurPlanet. Read More...

Ladies and gentleman, but in all likelihood primarily gentlemen. It's been a long road -- longer than most of you know, most likely, but the end is in sight: Volume One of Heathen City will go on sale on June 26, and will be championed at Anthrocon by our friends at FurPlanet. Read More...

As some of you may know, I, Alex Vance The Magnificent, will be attending Further Confusion this weekend. In partnership with FurPlanet we’ll be selling some merchandise specifically with the purpose of raising funds for the printing run of HC #1 when it comes out in the summer.
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2008 is just around the corner, so it’s time for some announcements. HC #1 is coming in summer 2008, and yours truly, Alex Vance, will be attending Further Confusion in January to show off some teaser material and shake some hands! Read More...

This weekend was RBW, the biggest furry con in the UK. Among its guests were 2 the Ranting Grypon, Uncle Kage and Timotha Albee - as well as HC’s enigmatic financier, Zaroi. I’d furnished him with some quality glossy prints of in-production artwork to show off and impress people with. Mission accomplished with flying colors. Read More...

Even though I’m only the writer (and creator and producer etc, etc) of Heathen City, I am not without my own artistic inclinations. Read More...

Here we are, after only one week of promoting Heathen City in any significant way, and the hit counter is still spinning like the wheels on a one-armed bandit. We’ve been stunned at the responses we’ve had, not only from people who can’t wait to buy the first issue (believe me, with the money we’re spending to make this perfect, we can’t wait to sell it to you!) but also from some well-known artists who see Heathen City’s potential as a game-changer in the furry community. Read More...

I’ve looked forward to reviving Maranatha for some time, but actually seeing the pages come in is a spectacular thrill. I’m deeply grateful to the staggeringly talented Ayato and Distasty; their interpretations of my admittedly control-freakish scripts is a consistent inspiration.

Seeing new pages come in, all pencilled and colors often opens up entirely unexpected avenues of possibility. To save them both the frustration of having new script revisions sent to them every twenty minutes, I’ve adopted a policy of passing them only a small number of script pages at a time.

It’s going to be a hell of a challenge to get this comic done in time. To keep it under budget. To get it printed, and to keep it affordable.

Fingers crossed!

Check out FurPlanet.com. Right there, on the front page, is the enigmatic first Coming Soon poster for Heathen City.

Now, I know it’s gorgeous. And I know that Ayato and Distasty have done incredible work -- but the response has still been staggering.

We’re not in the clear yet, though. We still have to make every penny stretch, Ayato and Distasty are still slaving into the wee small hours to get every panel just right and bring the whole thing in on deadline, and I’m still arguing back and forth with printers and publishers to make this comic a reality.

It’s time to show Heathen City to the masses.

A bit nerve-wracking, I’ll admit. The artists, Ayato and Distasty, have been working themselves to death (or at least exhaustion) to churn out the pages while I’ve been trolling the various businesses with which I’ve had dealings in the course of running BDB to get the best possible deal. The artists need payin’, after all, and Heathen City must be printed in color or not at all.

Presenting Heathen City to the world sets my heart a-flutter. It’s going to be hard to explain that, even though Heathen City borrows heavily from Maranatha, it’s a story all of its own.

One of the earliest decisions I had to make was to decide whether to make Heathen City a conclusion to Maranatha, a sequel or a retelling. I had to present a story that would thrill new readers, while also satisfying the readers of Maranatha, who’ve had to wait for years to find out how that story actually ended.

The solution?

Heathen City was written for people who haven’t read the ending of Maranatha.

Which, you know, is everybody. Since I never wrote it.

There’s more to tell, of course. Over the coming months this blog will be updated with introductions to the important players, some background information and obviously updates from the workfloor.

Subscribe to the RSS feed, or to the newsletter, and you’ll be kept up to date on the latest developments with Heathen City.

Aaaand production is underway. Just like that. Ten pages sent off to the artist, Ayato. Sketches by him, review by me, finalization by him and then coloring by Distasty. Production schedule is terribly short; the first issue needs to be done by January. That’s a crazy tight schedule, folks.

I really wish there were more time for this first issue, at least. Plotting out all the issues at once while writing the first issue, sowing enough seeds to make the payoff at the end work...

It thrills m. Juggling the characters, weighing the excitement of introducing a new character against the risk of having too many threads to tie up in the end. Heathen City is one adventure, one story, with beginning, a middle, and an end. Not just a vaguely defined thematic goal, an actual end.

Of course, I have the beginning to worry about first. Le sigh!

The requirements of comic writing are very, very different from those of fiction writing. You get to tell more of the story implicitly; if you want a character to be hiding a gun in his pocket, you can show the bulge in his pants, the faint gleam of the butt in one or two panels, and have him whip it out later, without having to actually tell the reader that it’s there.

On the other hand, there isn’t a whole lot of room to tell stories in anyway. Thirty-two pages, with at most a hundred words of dialog per page... to a writer who’s used to keeping going for bloody ever, that sounds like a simply awful prospect.

It’s tremendously exciting, though. Structuring the story to suit the medium, with scenes typically comprising two pages, a major revelation in the last panel of the right-hand page... shuffling and reshuffling. I’ll expand more on the unique stresses of comics writing as I go along.

Bad Dog Books is fairly successful. More than fairly. Still, is it fair for the editor-in-chief of a cutting-edge publishing house for the furry fandom to rake in the money made on books and sink it into a project to satisfy himself?

There was a time when all my creative energy went into writing.
From that period spawned, among other things, the story series Maranatha, which, you know, was simply fabulous. Terrifically popular on Yiffstar. It was longer than most of the Potter books by the time I quit it.

I say ‘quit’ because it was, unfortunately, never finished. One hundred and ninety thousand words, hundreds of readers, and it couldn’t be finished. Was it writer’s block? Was it loss of interest? Was it distraction by other projects?

No. It was my bloody fingers. Years of furious writing finally resulted in enough nerve and tendon stress to cause some substantial pain in the primary fingers of my right hand, and for reasons of health, I elected to quit writing and turn my attention elsewhere.

This led, of course, to Bad Dog Books. Together with Ben Goodridge and now also Cinnamon I set out to provide a print publication to showcase the finest works of furry fiction from talented amateur and semiprofessional authors: the erotic FANG and the wide-audience ROAR anthologies of furry fiction were the results.

Still. Maranatha’s unfinished status gnawed at me. And my fingers, while the pain was much less frequent, did itch

So... might as well do a comic, huh?