Bonus: Anti-Smoking

Evil Emperor Nick on Nov. 24, 2009

First off FYI: Today's vote incentive is a word cloud of the chapter 8 script. If you want a little light spoiler actions go ahead and vote.

Second off please go check out Sarah and my own interview on The Xcentrikz and let me know what you think.

State of the Comic: Year 2

Well over two years of Cwen now. I finally feel we've gotten to the point that people are starting to know the characters and while they have many secrets yet to tell, such as how Cwen escaped from her kidnappers as a child, I hope most of my readers consider themselves to know Cwen, Riddly and Wendy.

My largest mistake this year was undoubtedly the handling of chapter 6. It was out of place. Chapter 6 should have either been chapter 5 or broken out as a series of bonus stories at the end of chapters. If I do more shorts or side stories I'll probably take this second method. As it stands coming after the story build up in chapter 5 it didn't work as well as it should have. I think the stories were fun and the artists involved all did a great job and I hope to do more shorts like that, but I made the wrong call in where to put. At the time I was only thinking of trying to build a buffer for the comic and not of the impact it might have on the flow of the story. If I ever move Cwen off of DD I'll probably re-post it as chapter 5 to try and fix things because I think otherwise chapter 6 turned out really well. My thanks goes out again to everyone who helped with Chapter 6.

On the up side the end of this chapter with the plot twist of Ulric being a younger Lord Attez paid off very well. It got more hits than any other update without ads running at the time. I think that says the story is going well. I decided I really wanted more Lord Attez after everyone's strong response to his second appearance with Sven and if everyone enjoyed it then I think the time travel nonsense paid off in spite of how confusing it was a points.

Sarah's art as it has every year continues to improve. I wish you guys could see some of the great chapter 8 pages. Sarah's decision to go full color on a few pages is very exciting. Sarah says she wants to continue to conserve color for impact but plans to do at least one full color page each chapter.

I've been growing unhappy with the quality of the Witch Queen's twitter and as you may have noticed stopped updating it earlier in the month when my projects picked up. I'm thinking of starting a blog of some sort to simply post short stories as I write them and move some of the old rant stories there so they are easier to find a read. What I'd like to do with the Witch Queen's twitter is to just change it to updating as new WQ stories get finished and then update the stories in a series of 4-5 updates per day until that story finishes. I think the daily updates without outlined or revised scripts is making the stories start off strong but then get lost somewhere in the middle with them limping over the finish line and I'd like them to keep their punch from start to finish. If anyone is interested I'd like to work with a decent artist to give some limited art to some of these stories. I'd really enjoy giving them a cover and few sketches like the old Dragon Magazine stories used to have.

Lastly I'd just like to thank everyone who's stuck with us and thank everyone who is just joining us. The fans of CQ have been really great in terms of feedback and very supportive. I hope year three will raise the bar for CQ and launch us into the top ten here of DD for good. Still if anyone would like to help Cwen grow more in year three then it has in year one and two the best thing to do is to simply talk about the comic, request your favorites sites to review it or best of all do some fan art. Comics get a LOT of hits from fan art links in people's gallery.

Thank you all my readers and my friends.

-Empire Out