Drew some more concept art of my flagship characters for my original series, The Black Carnival.  I’m edging towards another reboot/revamp given my newfound time during the summer.

For those interested, here’s a little summary of the starting monologue I plan on using for the series to introduce the premise.

My name is Gillian Akers and this is my Uncle Flynt.  Well he’s not really my uncle, he’s a supernatural ‘Guardian Angel’, charged with protecting me from those who intend to hurt me.  You see, 3 years ago most of my family was massacred in an attempt to seize the family’s prized possession, ownership of The Black Carnival.   I was one of the few survivors and the heavens literally sent help from above to keep me safe from those who want to take my right to one day own it.  The Black Carnival is a controlled ‘haven’ for all things dangerous, discarded, and devious.  Ownership provides you access to some of the most powerful and dangerous people and beings around.  But my whole life I never really cared about that, at least until my family paid the price for it.  To help me survive, my Uncle Flynt has trained me as a part of his protection initiative.  I intend to use my newfound skills to return to the Black Carnival to find the people who murdered my family.  My uncle and I now work as a part of the Black Carnival Sheriff’s Office, occasionally taking out the Carnival’s trash and simultaneously investigating those who tried to take everything away from me.  I will work day and night to find them and return the favor.

So how’s the reboot going to work?

We’ll dive into it below.  This will include two pieces of concept art about the two flagship characters, the first strip, and a summary of the structure of how the story will be told.

Story Structure

The above summary was always intended to be the general basis of Gillian’s story.  I’ve undergone a number of revisions, but I think this newest incarnation is my personal favorite.  Now I’m going to try to start the story NOT from the beginning of Gillian’s journey, but rather the middle of where I intended the original story to be.  All the ideas I got excited about during the middle of Gillian’s journey can now be realized without the very difficult means of setting up the motivation and precursors [hooray lazy writing!].  The new format intends to use flashbacks and references to the past to fill in some of the blanks and more relevant pieces of history.  Overall I’m very excited to jump right into some of my favorite story arcs I have planned for this series.

Medium Structure

The new story will still be a comic, although not a necessarily chronological or continuous comic strip.  The comics will follow isolated instances during Gillian’s and Flynt’s adventures as deputies at the Black Carnival Sheriff’s office.  This style will have a general chronological flow, but not as necessary page by page chronological order as attempted previously.  Overall the tone will be lighter, where necessary, attempting to characterize characters through their actions and dialogue.  I guess the best way to describe the story format change is that it will be more like a webcomic series that a comic book format.  Think isolated instances, reoccurring characters, and punchlines.

Scheduling Structure

Previously, I tried to promise a page a week, which under my schedule at Georgia Tech, was damn near impossible after a couple of weeks when really hard tests came in.  Now that I have nothing to do this summer, I don’t really have much of an excuse to not try to attempt 1 page a week.  That being said, I won’t promise that because I’ve failed you all before.  I will have inspiration pangs where I can do 2 pages a week and then disappear for the next 3 weeks being occupied with another inspired project.  Basically the underlying idea here is that I’ll draw and post pages whenever I get them done.

New Concept Art

I’ve included two more pieces of concept art about the new characters.  Now these two concept pieces will be no where near the quality of the pages themselves, but I thought it fun to try to get a theme and general concept for future reference.

Concept art for Gillian Akers.  Some notes about the piece.

• She has a silver lined gauntlet to block sharp blows when dueling with sharpened weapons.
• This gauntlet can also be used as an offensive tool to subdue silver-sensitive beings
• Attached to her belt is a silver lined blade, meant to subdue silver-senstive buildings.
• Attached to the back of her tunic are two silver-lined throwing knives for long ranged foes

Concept Art for Uncle Flynt.  Some notes below.

• Flynt prefers his pistols and rifles, but is still skilled with his dual silver-lined blades attached to his hips
• The blue patch on his eye restores his once lost vision and gives him ‘godly’ accuracy

Black Carnival #1

And of course, the starting panel itself! Enjoy.

Next

I’m fairly optimistic about this revamp, but I’ve had my failures before.

I’ve tried writing from the start, that failed.

I’ve tried drawing from the start, that failed.

According to Charlie Day’s very inspiring commencement speech, I will fail and fail often before succeeding, so I’m going to put my heart into this and see where it goes.  Thanks for reading guys, let me know what you think!