Black Rose

Hello, old friend!

As you can probably tell by the dates on the prior posts, Black Rose has been on hiatus so long you probably thought we had all died. Surprise, I guess?

We’ve been working slowly but surely behind the scenes, and rest assured we’re still determined to finish this story we’ve started.

Nobody wants to write a blog post explaining that they’re stepping back, so I kept putting it off for way, WAY too long — which was actually worse, because now it looked like we were ghosting on our fans. You guys are the best and deserve better than that!

Here’s where we are, and where we’re headed.

Coming up in Issue 10, the titular black roses…

Looking Back

We spent a good 5-7 years working full steam ahead on Black Rose: brainstorming, writing, drawing, self-publishing, and travelling to various conventions to sell books. Then shifting to publishing and selling online. It was awesome, exhausting, and all-consuming.

We tried to keep up an aggressive online posting schedule, but it wasn’t sustainable; we eventually worked through our print backlog and hit a wall on getting new pages done with the regularity an online audience expects. So we decided we’d take a step back and post the rest of the issue when it was done. Turns out that was longer than we’d thought.

I’m proud of the fact that Black Rose has always managed to pay for its own expenses, that we’ve turned a profit at every show we attended. But the three of us have never personally seen a dime from the project. The profit we make goes back into the project fund to pay for shows, print runs, and other expenses.

And our personal and professional lives have become infinitely busier since we started this journey — marriages, kids, becoming homeowners, personal crises, new jobs, grey hairs, promotions, and more. Our love for Black Rose is still just as strong, but our availability to work on non-paying side projects is not what it was in those simpler times.

So weeks turned into months turned into years. We continued to work on the project, but at a much slower pace. We’ve finished Issue 10, are working on Issue 11 art, and are reworking the Issue 12 script based on some new direction for Book 3. But that progress has been so sporadic that we haven’t wanted to post anything online, knowing that we couldn’t promise when the next batch of pages would be done.

Which bring us to now!

Also in Issue 10, we’ll finally reach our first major Ishtakaran city: The Rock of Sind.

Moving Forward

Creatively, our task ahead, while large, is fairly straightforward. Chris and I have developed an outline for the rest of the saga, and are looking at fleshing that out so we can write Book 3 with complete foreknowledge of where we need to build to.

Additionally, while our outline is for a 5-book series, we may look into truncating that, if we can do so without adversely affecting the story. Our original (and very loose) plan was for a 7-book series, and the slower-paced storytelling in Book 1 and especially in Book 2 had that goal in mind. I love the slow burn those arcs have, but speeding things up as we head toward the climax will help us get there sooner. Fantasy franchises have a tendency to get overly long in the tooth, and I want to make sure we can actually finish this thing!

(Incidentally, one of the other major tasks on my list is redoing this website. This was one of my very first WordPress websites, back almost a decade ago when I still did mostly print design. Now designing and coding WordPress sites is what I do all day every day, and boy howdy this code needs a fresh coat of digital paint!)

The main challenge we have on the creative side is working around Aaron’s schedule. Some of our peak years for Black Rose productivity were due to slower periods in Aaron’s illustration gigs. His workload has gotten much busier over the years, with his work on Black Rose helping land additional comic projects (that can actually pay him a page rate like he deserves!). Aaron loves drawing Black Rose, but paying gigs have to come first, so committing to a regular update schedule will remain a challenge. (If you’ve ever worked the feast-or-famine world of freelancing, you’ll understand!)

Which brings us to the main challenge: publishing. At this point, what’s our best publishing avenue? Continue releasing pages online as we complete them? Hoarding our pages until we can release an entire issue at a time, Netflix binge style? Moving away from the free webcomic model and try to increase revenue by releasing exclusively as a digital comic instead? Doing more conventions? Doing fewer conventions? Adopting a crowdfunded approach with Kickstarter and/or Patreon? Or stop trying to self-publish and doing another round of submissions with major comic publishers?

Obviously, we don’t know yet. And while I had wanted to wait to say anything until we did know, I think some honest transparency that we’re still looking — and still working — is helpful for you, our loyal fans, to know. I should have communicated that, and much earlier, and for that I apologize.

We definitely couldn’t have teased Arion’s new armor all the way back in Issue 2…

Honestly, we’ve had a very good run so far. Not a lot of self-publishing comics do break even financially, or have as long a run with (IMHO) as high a quality. I’m grateful to Aaron and Chris for their incredible creative partnership and friendship — and to everyone who has bought a copy of Black Rose, shared our website with their friends, or otherwise supported us over the past few years. Our fanbase is small but dedicated, and we want to thank each and every one of you for your interest and support. The least we can do is be open and honest about where we are and what’s next.

Expect more news and progress to follow — I can’t tell you when, but I can tell you it’s coming. As always, thanks!

If you’ve found your way to our little corner of the internet, you’re obviously a comics fan. We’ve got two other comics projects we’d like to call your attention to, if you haven’t heard of them already:

First is Amiculus by Travis Horseman and drawn by Giancarlo Caracuzzo. We met Travis on the con circuit and are mutual fans of each other’s work. Caracuzzo is an accomplished artist, having worked for Marvel, DC, IDW, and more. Amiculus: A Secret History is an original, epic three-part graphic novel series telling a lost history of the Fall of Rome.

I backed Volume I on Kickstarter last year and finally devoured it the other night in one sitting. It’s a solid read with great art, and reminded me a lot of HBO’s Rome series — a great attention to historical detail that somehow doesn’t bog down the excellent storytelling. Now Volume II is up on Kickstarter with some very affordable reward tiers. It deserves your dollars, so go check it out!

The other project is one our artist Aaron has been working on for the past year or so (and part of the reason Black Rose is on a short hiatus — you try drawing two books while freelancing at the same time!). I’ll let him tell the story:

“I’ve had the luxury of working with the band These Machines Are Winning drawing the interior pages for their graphic novel “Slaves for Gods”. Half of the series is finished, and they have launched an Indigogo campaign to raise funding for the production of the second half.

“Regarding cover and album art, I am in the company of some of my favorite artists. You’ll see killer original artwork from James O’barr (The Crow), Jock (The Losers, Wytches), and Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead), as well as Antoine Dodé (The Crow: Curare), Dustin D’Arnault (Outlaw Territories Vol.3).

“Tiers for the campaign consist of pre-orders for their two new albums and other merch exclusive to the campaign including t-shirts, hoodies, and original artwork.

“These Machines Are Winning is comprised of some of the nicest and most talented people that I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with. I hope that you’ll consider checking out the campaign; and if you like what you see, please help us spread the word!”

If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go find my wallet…

Over the past few blog posts, I’ve been discussing the changes we made when printing our first trade:

• The Intro
• Atmosphere

We also had the chance to fix a few continuity gaffes. Most of these were in the form of dialogue, where the evolving backstory of the Black Rose world caused an existing character line to become erroneous information.

One in particular was an elementary-level math error. At the end of Issue 3, a squad of handwavers is assigned to hunt Aliyana down for reasons (at the time) unknown. We knew one of their number was a Necromican Judge, but either forgot that all Judges are masked or failed at basic addition, because nobody was wearing a mask in the original page:

So Aaron went back and added a mask to the character in the foreground, turning them into our missing Judge as shown here. Phew!

There were also two instances where we added a splash page to existing scenes, creating a sort of time warp where the same event is stretched across more panels and thus spans more “time” on the page:

One of the most important turning points in Book 1 comes at the end of Issue 4, where [SPOILER ALERT] Aliyana heals Arion of his mortal wounds, saving him from certain death and revealing to the reader that she has handwaver talents. The scene originally played out on a single page:

For the trade, we added a splash page and rearranged some panels, stretching that moment a bit further and giving it the proper narrative weight. You can see those pages here and here.

We used a similar time-dilation effect during the climax of Issue 6, where Arion is thrown overboard by Trellis’ crew. As I discussed in a previous post, we originally opened Issue 1 with a flashforward of this same scene. Once we removed the flashforward in favor of a more straightforward intro, there were a few panels no longer being used, including one of my very favorites: Arion in midair, silhouetted against the stormy sky:

So we pulled that panel and blew it up into a splash page, again lending some visual heft to this important juncture of our narrative. Ordinarily, enlarging a panel so dramatically would be very noticeable – in a bad way – leaving pixelization artifacts or some obvious variance in line weight/detail, etc. But Aaron’s art is extremely detailed and (fortunately) we were mastering everything at a very high resolution from the start (I’ll talk more about the technical side of file prep in another post for you process junkies), so it worked very smoothly!

That covers the creative changes we made to Book 1, and should give you a glimpse of how things work (or don’t!) behind the scenes. Next week I’ll dive a bit more into the technical side of comic production!