Casting a long foreshadow…

This week’s comic was our end of Episode 15, also marking our (eventual) intended endpoint for a Volume 2 trade paperback, assuming we can get that funded successfully next year. I kept promising some reveals and I hope they satisfied, even though the answers to some of the mysteries that have lingered for many years of this comic’s run might only raise more questions.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? In an ongoing story you don’t want to lay down all the cards, right? How do you reward the loyalty of your audience while also keeping them looking forwards to more? I think the best stories are ones that find a balance of that, and also the ones that can manage to evoke a sense of time well spent both in the casual fan and the fan that does a deeper delve and has been pondering and discussing small details not everyone noticed, or perhaps noticed and forgot.

And sometimes the story itself becomes more satisfying in the course of its telling. Sometimes you as the creator(s) find a detail in your own work that informs upon that course in a way that you may not have laid out at the beginning but seems right and true. Sometimes, for example, Dawn draws a cover for Episode/Issue 4 where you’ve given her the basic layout but she ends up covering part of the photo you wanted with a gun, and then you start thinking about what might be under that gun… and that roils around and develops until you finally bring that photo truly “in universe” four issues later as you begin your second arc, and then you end that second arc with the same photo and it’s arguably now become one of the most important objects in the whole series because of what was hidden and now is revealed.

Chekhov’s Gun is supposed to go off in Act 3, of course… but in a work of fiction with an indefinite number of acts (i.e. this webcomic), why not Act 8 or Act 15? And even then a creator can play… we can figuratively load up multiple bullets and distribute them point by point, so that as the smoke clears the audience now sees further but yet can’t quite make out the final destination. And I should probably stop there before I start hopelessly muddling my metaphors.

I hope you enjoyed, and continue to enjoy.