The Saga of Samuel

Thus arrives David: King of Israel.

I will remember the creation of this page forever. I had been looking forward to it for a long time. After page 10, I went right to work on 11 here and was chugging along with it rather quickly. Then, when I was about halfway done, my mother’s health took a turn for the worse. My father, my mother’s caretaker and I began a deathwatch that lasted almost a full week. During those final days I would sleep but not get rest, eat but not feel fed. I would pop open PhotoShop stare at David blankly for a few minutes, then I’d close it down and go into the other room to see if my mother was still breathing. When I finally returned to this page it was hard to look at, I thought about scrapping it and starting over, but that felt wrong. For an artist, at least for me, memory lives within the art. In the lines and colors of this page lives the end of my mother’s life so, yes, I will remember it always. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

With page 9 we’re finally leaving this dang cave. Man, I regretted having to draw those cave walls over and over again. Let’s just say that what takes place on the next few pages was originally set in the cave but I managed to devise a way out, so I went for it. Page 10 (maybe page 11) it’s blue skies and green grass..yay!

In other news: I created an official “cover” for the comic (not that a webcomic needs a cover exactly, but it seemed the right thing to do) The new cover page replaces the image I had there, which was a placeholder I put up when I was building the site. The cover was some art I originally intended to us as a promotional image but was never really happy with. Since I really wanted to solve my “cover” problem I revisited the piece fixed what I didn’t like, changed the layout and here we are:

Now, I like the piece so much I deem it worthy of being the first ever Saga of Samuel poster! Since the comic is still in it’s earliest stages I’m going with trusty (and less hassle for me) print on demand companies. In the future I hope to oversee the printing process and do limited edition prints and such but that time ain’t now.

If you would like to have for yourself a shiny, first ever Saga of Samuel poster you can buy one at either:

deviantART or Zazzle (click the storename you wish to buy from)

..or since Zazzle has the better ready-made promotional tools just click the image below.

The Saga of Samuel Cover by ArtistXero
View other artwork at zazzle.com

I had drawn out and almost fully inked a totally different page then the one that appears here but I came to realize that it was just full of empty chatter further establishing that these two men don’t like each other all that much. So I dropped it and cut to the chase.

Note to self: Video games, namely Dragon Age: Origins, seem to disrupt the comic creation progress making a relatively easy comic page take way longer than necessary.

This page took so long I entertained the idea of just letting them kill Samuel in the next page and ending the comic right there. You’ll just have to wait and see what I decided now wont you?

Here is page number 3. Since I haven’t advertised/announced this comic yet congrats to you for stumbling upon it. I like how things are turning out so far, though I admit it’s slow going. In the very first page of the classic comic strip Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond there’s a mysterious planet rushing towards Earth, an airplane crash, a mad scientist, a kidnapping and a rocketship blasting off to certain doom..so far I got 3 pages of a guy walking. You win this round Alex Raymond!