Merry MONSTER KING Christmas

Merry Christmas Cats and Kittens! We've got a new page of MONSTER KING up over at the main site at www.torcpress.com or go to it directly at torcpress.com/mkex.html. This is the last page of the first issue. After this we'll be reloading with the first page of issue two.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to ramble a little about the whys and hows of Monster King. When I started fixing my website, one of the things I wanted to add to the site was an online comic. I didn't really like the disposable nature of the previous online comic I did, so I wanted to do something a little more... integral. At the time I started tinkering with the webcomic, I was working on an Original Graphic Novel (which I've since trashed... I'm an idiot). The (since aborted) OGN was set pretty far down the road, chronologically, and I got the idea to have MONSTER KING (which was actually originally called "SDF: Dance", by the by), serve as a lead-in to the OGN, slowly introducing many of the characters and concepts that would be found in the OGN later on. The original plan was to do a series of short, sorta Graphic Novels that I would serialize on the web as a webcomic, and then release in TPB form. That way, there would be this trail of Graphic Novels leading into the release of the Big, Fat OGN. Brilliant plan, right?

Have I mentioned I'm an idiot?

I should know by now. NEVER MAKE LONG TERM PLANS. EVER. I can set things up. I can drop hints. I can seed ideas for later. That's fine. But making a plan that will come together over time? Stupid. Never works for me. My head is like a whirlwind, always swirling and changing and rearranging.

So, I wrote the script for the first issue. It was around 40 or so pages. I went to put the first page online...aaaand.... not so surprisingly, the black and white and grey page didn't seem so spiffy. What's the point of an online comic if it doesn't catch the eye, right? So, I colored it up. Bingo. Spiffy. Of course, now I've got a new problem. It's in color, so when I release it in comic form, it's gonna cost me a fortune to print. I could have done the print version in BWG, but that would be lame, wouldn't it? Plus, after awhile, I was specifically drawing the comic for color, which would have made a change in format even worse. Now what? Welp, another format change, obviously. I decided to turn the "first issue" into two 24 page issues. Simple, right? Wrong. I wrote the first issue in a rambling, drifting style, without concern for length. I went through the script looking for a good place to break the issue in half. The best place turned out to be Page 25. Goofy? Sure, but all I had to do was use page 25 on the Inside Back Cover. No problem.

Anyway, like I said, somewhere in the process, the Original Graphic Novel got killed. So, suddenly, Monster King isn't leading anywhere. I liked the first two issues though, and still wanted to see them in print. So, I continued to plug away at Monster King, figuring that I'd kill the Online Strip/Book after Issue Two.

But like I said, my Brain is a swirling tsunami of madcap ideas. And I came up with something new. I don't wanna talk about it much, because, well, again, my plans will change a hundred times before any of this comes to pass. Long story short, I know what I wanna do with Monster King, and it will continue past issue 2, so there's that.

Oh, and don't feel too bad about that lost OGN. A lot of the ideas from it will pop up in other places. It's gonna be cool, baby.