What’s this? Could it be? An update not months in the making? Yes! ’cause I plan on being awesome this year. (don’t hold me to that!)

Do to the Chutes and Ladders nature of the word balloons on this page I skipped on having a real background. Would’ve been too busy I thought.

I’m debating on whether or not to continue this particular “Attack on Shiloh” story or make it a stand alone vignette about Samuel and Bethani. I guess we’ll find out next update.

I’ve got some paying work before the next page but I’m going to try and update sooner rather than later. (don’t hold me to that!)

Not only am I the creator of The Saga of Samuel, the swankiest bible-based fantasy comic around, I am also an illustrator/graphic designer of little, to no, renown.

You can view my art website here: www.ArtistXeroCreations.com

Prints of my art are available here: www.zazzle.com/artistxero

My Heroes of the Bible coloring pages are selling like hotcakes, if hotcakes were PDF files you print out and have your kids color. You can find those here: The Heroes of the Bible coloring pages

If you like The Saga of Samuel, perhaps you’d like to donate some of your loose PayPal change. The “Support the Saga” coin pouch, off to the right, will let you do that.

Don’t have change to spare? I hear ya. Instead, please use the “Share the Knowledge” buttons below, and now, above to share on various social media networks. The more people I got coming here the more I’ll feel the need to update (or at least feel extreme amounts of guilt for not updating…either-or).

Thanks for reading The Saga of Samuel!

It is with great sadness that we must now say goodbye to our friend the First Philistine. While we will come across many, many philistines throughout The Saga of Samuel, only one can be the “first”. His morally questionable life comes to an end at the hands of a mysterious masked man but, for us, we will always remember…

I got this page done faster than usual (it would’ve been posted earlier if not for a certain MMO with lightsbers and such) because of Reddit commenter “Sock Goblin” who said “Really liking this comic, just which he’d update more often”. So, apparently, I can be cajoled into updating faster with guilt-inducing commentary. Who knew?

Yes, I know I’ve committed a great sin among my digital art brethren and used the much-derided “Lens Flare” but I polled my people at The Saga of Samuel Facebook page (join today!) and Lens Flare won by a landslide.

I’m going to go back to naming the strips rather than using page numbers and I’ll probably go back and name the batch before this one. Just cause.

I’ve also included below the whole of what is Page 2. Click to embiggen and view it in all it’s glory!

…and that’s all for now.

Not only am I the creator of The Saga of Samuel, the swankiest bible-based fantasy comic around, I am also an illustrator/graphic designer of little, to no, renown.

You can view my art website here: www.ArtistXeroCreations.com

Prints of my art are available here: www.zazzle.com/artistxero

My Heroes of the Bible coloring pages are selling like hotcakes, if hotcakes were PDF files you print out and have your kids color. You can find those here: The Heroes of the Bible coloring pages

If you like The Saga of Samuel, perhaps you’d like to donate some of your loose PayPal change. The “Support the Saga” coin pouch, off to the right, will let you do that.

Don’t have change to spare? I hear ya. Instead, please use the “Share the Knowledge” buttons below, and now, above to share on various social media networks. The more people I got coming here the more I’ll feel the need to update (or at least feel extreme amounts of guilt for not updating…either-or).

Thanks for reading The Saga of Samuel!

While I still think a rock to the head probably wouldn’t be very bloody, it’s more visually interesting and it’s not like I can run field tests.

I wasn’t expecting Bethani to be quite so ruthless but a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.

I think the philistine’s face wins this strip. I thinking of making it into a shirt for myself and pointing at it when someone blows my mind.

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Not only am I the creator of The Saga of Samuel, the swankiest bible-based fantasy comic around, I am also an illustrator/graphic designer of little, to no, renown.

You can view my art website here: www.ArtistXeroCreations.com

Prints of my art are available here: www.zazzle.com/artistxero

My Heroes of the Bible coloring pages are selling like hotcakes, if hotcakes were PDF files you print out and have your kids color. You can find those here: The Heroes of the Bible coloring pages

If you like The Saga of Samuel, perhaps you’d like to donate some of your loose PayPal change. The “Support the Saga” coin pouch, off to the right, will let you do that.

Don’t have change to spare? I hear ya. Instead, please use the “Share the Knowledge” buttons below, and now, above to share on various social media networks. The more people I got coming here the more I’ll feel the need to update (or at least feel extreme amounts of guilt for not updating…either-or).

Thanks for reading The Saga of Samuel!

Choreographing the fight scene between these two was a bit of challenge. Some action figures may have been posed and manipulated to help in the creation of these panels. Though, I assure you, none were harmed in the process.

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Not only am I the creator of The Saga of Samuel, the swankiest bible-based fantasy comic around, I am also an illustrator/graphic designer of little, to no, renown.

You can view my art website here: www.ArtistXeroCreations.com

Prints of my art are available here: www.zazzle.com/artistxero

My Heroes of the Bible coloring pages are selling like hotcakes, if hotcakes were PDF files you print out and have your kids color. You can find those here: The Heroes of the Bible coloring pages

If you like The Saga of Samuel, perhaps you’d like to donate some of your loose PayPal change. The “Support the Saga” coin pouch, off to the right, will let you do that.

Don’t have change to spare? I hear ya. Instead, please use the “Share the Knowledge” buttons below, and now, above to share on various social media networks. The more people I got coming here the more I’ll feel the need to update (or at least feel extreme amounts of guilt for not updating…either-or).

Thanks for reading The Saga of Samuel!

I’ve decided there will be blood. While I still maintain that The Saga of Samuel is a T for Teen/PG-13 rated comic (I say that in the Disclaimer) at this stage it looks pretty kid friendly. So I debated with myself, after finishing the prologue, on making the comic a bloodless affair. In almost all of my childhood cartoons, there were guns and swords aplenty but nary a drop of red to be had. So I was thinking of going that way as well. In the end though, I decided to go with the blood. Not gratuitous, over the top, buckets full of the stuff, that’s not me, but if a sword cuts there, will be blood left in its wake, so on and so forth.

On that note, while a sling-stone would obviously do bludgeoning damage, I thought Samuel’s shot to the Philistine’s temple area might cause a spurt of blood. None of my research (such as it is) flat-out contradicted that, so I went with it.

Also, if I had a band I would totally name it “Eat. Rock. Philistine!”. It’s better than a lot of the names bands come up with these days. I’m looking at you random, indy, hipster band.

______________________________________________________________

Not only am I the creator of The Saga of Samuel, the swankiest bible-based fantasy comic around, I am also an illustrator/graphic designer of little, to no, renown.

You can view my art website here: www.ArtistXeroCreations.com

Prints of my art are available here: www.zazzle.com/artistxero

My Heroes of the Bible coloring pages are selling like hotcakes, if hotcakes were PDF files you print out and have your kids color. You can find those here: The Heroes of the Bible coloring pages

If you like The Saga of Samuel, perhaps you’d like to donate some of your loose PayPal change. The “Support the Saga” coin pouch, off to the right, will let you do that.

Don’t have change to spare? I hear ya. Instead, please use the “Share the Knowledge” buttons below to share on various social media networks. The more people I got coming here the more I’ll feel the need to update (or at least feel extreme amounts of guilt for not updating…either-or).

Thanks for reading The Saga of Samuel!

Here’s the next strip of page 1. Speedlines are a great thing.

…aaaaaand, we’re back! What took so long you say? Well, comics is hard! Other than that though, once I finished The Prologue, ideas were shooting out of my head like snot rockets at a flu convention. I sketched several of them out but none of them felt “right”. None of them felt like the beginning of Samuel’s story. So I stepped away for a bit. Designed a logo for Quippley (he’s not using it yet), totally redesigned my art website: ArtistXeroCreations, goofed around and generally avoided the comic.

Once I got back into the comic making saddle, I knew where my story began. In hindsight I always knew but I was trying to avoid it cause I wanted to start small, where this part of the story is, well, let’s say a little bigger.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed and with some gnashing of teeth I decided that if I break a single comic page up into several comic strips, I could get the Monkey of Overwhelming+1 off my back and produce the comic in smaller but faster installments.

So, I’ve done just that. Enjoy!

In Other News:

I’ve had an increase of people asking me if I’m going to publish The Saga of Samuel. I tell them; “Yes, one day, but not anytime soon.”  With the rise of various tablets and e-readers, the death of brick and mortar bookstores, and the comic book industry dying a slow, laborious death like the great dinosaur that it is, I just don’t feel compelled to get my comic off the internet and onto a book with any sort of rapidity. When I am ready perhaps books will be a thing of the past and we’ll have those flying cars we’re all hoping for. We’ll see.

The New Thundercats: I LOVED the premiere, the ensuing episodes…not so much. I was hoping for a tightly plotted, ongoing epic like Avatar the Last Airbender but three episodes into the series and the new Thundercats, while still a great improvement over the original, feels like an 80′s cartoon with minimal connection between episodes and little plot development. I still have hopes for it though. We’ll see about that too.

…and that’s that, If you read this whole post I’ll give you a cookie! A digital cookie, but still…

Finally! I am done with this prologue. It took me almost 2 years to get these 21 pages finished but they are DONE!

The past 2 years were also possibly the worst years of my life, encompassing the last year of my mother’s life, mourning her, looking to reestablish myself as a freelancer only to realize the only art I want to create is my own, to trying to find a job in this terrible economy, to finding a job in this terrible economy that I thoroughly enjoy, to having life go back to a semblance of normalcy where I no longer have the specter of death hanging over a loved one. I also managed to get about a page a month done of this here comic if for no other reason than sheer stubbornness on my part.

I would suggest that you go back to the beginning and read through it all in one sitting. I did edit some of the text to make a few of the conversations between characters flow better, nothing drastic, but still necessary in the end.

From here on out I’m going to tell shorter stories that form a greater whole. There will also be the occasional short story to read as well, I’m thinking. All in all I hope to let loose and do some great things with this here “Fantasy Epic of Biblical Proportions!” Stay tuned and enjoy!

This is exactly what I wanted to do with this page but I’m not sure if it comes off as EPIC! or a badly executed experiment. In the end I decided to go for it…mainly because I had no back up plan to speak of. Also, Speedlines make everything look more exciting!

While doing this page I had to raise from the grave some traditional art skills I haven’t had to use since going digital and, while it stirred up a kind of nostalgia in me, I don’t really miss the old ways. If civilization collapses and all technology along with it, then I’ll go back to ink and paint and canvas and the like…maybe.

In closing, there is only one, count ‘em, ONE more page in this prologue that has been almost two years in the making and you wont have to wait long as I only have some finishing touches to add to it. So I’ll see you again in a couple of days!

I got this page done pretty quickly and I’ve spoiled you rotten with 2, count them!, 2 consecutive updates but I’m thinking the next page might be harder. I have an idea of what I want to do but I’m not totally sure how I’m gonna do it. So let’s see how it goes.