The Sleeper's Den

Gentle reader,

Here I am again with a new page of my wildly popular comic, The Darkest Hour. Universally acclaimed on Twitter (1 like), Facebook (2 likes), Tumblr (8 likes) and Instagram (7 likes), this epic, crafted with much sweat, tears, but even more love is bound to assure me a careless old age living off the profits.

...I realised that the last time I posted here, I was on page 86, so - that's a few pages ago! I'll just link you back to The Darkest Hour p. 87 in case you were waiting for that - and which just happens to be baby Arthur being born!

Page 102, incidentally, used to be page 85. The comic has expanded quite a bit in the redrawing, but I hope I'm done now and can just continue to the end with the pages as they were planned.

I've been religiously making teaser pictures for every new page with the intention of posting them here, but I'm not exactly doing a great job of it. I apologise for my lack of replies, too - especially because your comments mean a lot to me. People close to me sometimes tell me to ease down on the self-imposed deadlines for things like the comic, which doesn't make any money and isn't exactly a huge hit. But though it brings its own frustrations, making this comic is something of a consolation as compared to my often thankless job. (Never become a professional writer, kids: everyone thinks they write better than you.)

I'm getting to a point where it's beginning to look as if the early pages were inked by someone else. This bugs me very much, but, um, I can't really afford to start all over again. I mean, I really would like to get to Gawain some day and, you know, maybe do some Green Knight and Loathly Lady and stuff. And I'm positively *aching* for the Castle of Wonder, that Ygraine Payoff in, oh, 2000 pages or so.

...Yeah. Well, if I can keep up this 'a page a week' rhythm, I may not go on Summer hiatus this year. If I manage it, Arthur could be born in September...

I still haven't managed to make a new buffer of pages, so for weeks now I've been scrambling to post a page every Thursday XD. So I don't get round to posting links here every week, but sometimes I make time :p. We are six pages behind again...


If you want to hear me talk and giggle my way through an interview about my Gawain comic, the Arthurian Mythia podcast episode with me is out :).

Well by gum, I dropped the ball for a while there...

Truth is, ever since my return to work after my holiday, things have been incredibly busy. And there were my hoggywartyxmas and snapecase deadlines, too... Yes, I kind of forgot about posting new pages here. So now you get 4 in one go :P.

I don't think I ever mentioned it here, but I have a Ko-fi page, in case people want to support the comic by buying me a coffee (I consume loads of those)... There is a gallery with my complete set of Inktober 2019 images, which I can't help mentioning because I'm still proud of finally having completed an entire Inktober ;-).

There is a stupid reason why this didn't get posted on Thursday: I couldn't take a good, clean teaser crop on my tablet XD... And I didn't open Photoshop until today. Ah well. I repeat the drill: new pages post on Thursdays :p. And the reminders on LJ are a bit ... sketchy at the moment. Sorry about that!

Designed three years ago, finally inked and coloured (...well...): my Darkest Hour cover. 

I'm going to have to cut The Darkest Hour in 4 in order to fit it in these 'informal' comics. Oh my goodness — I was so happy to have one good cover, now I'll have to figure out four! :D