Wow! You not only read the comic, you actually came onto a forum to talk about it more!
That shows dedication, well done!
This will be the place for Harkovast related information that (while interesting) doesn't get explained fully in the comic, questions and opinions on the comic and general nonsense.
Hooray for general nonsense!
And thank you for your continued support of Harkovast!

I have a boring question for starters: what brand/type of coloured pencil is Mrs Harkovast using to creat these rich textures?
Also a suggestion: can we do suggestions here? I think you should find out how to make highlighted text in your sig, something like Harkovast Forum be an actual link that will bring you here when you click it. Then tell me how you did it, because I have absolutely no idea how to do that.

Also, can we start a pool on how long it will take for this thread to be locked?

That is an excellent question actually.
The answer is prismacolor pencils, which she buys mostly online.
They are made in the USA (like her) and she says they are the best for blending colours effectively.
She also uses cool blending stumps (which are hard to describe if you haven't seen one, they are the shape of a pencil, made of recycled paper) to mix the colours and make the pencil marks less obvious.
I originally planned to do Harkovast in black and white, but Julie insisted it needed some colours and stepped up to the plate to add some in. Thank goodness she did, because it looks about a million times better and because it gives the comic it's very unique look.
I will have to post an image of a page that has been outlined in pen but not coloured so you can see the difference.

With regard to me getting locked….is bocaj a DD admin too?

No, but that all seems to be sorted out now anyway!
I look forward to seeing that - I know of the primacolours but haven't used them. I use Karismacolour, which I believe are similar and available more readily here: I like the quality of coloured pencil work very much and have a small example as my testpage thumbnail.

You achieved highlighted text link nirvana and failed to tell me how!

Here is how it is done (I am like the masked magician now, spoiling the magic of linking for everyone by showing the secrets!)
{url=http://www.drunkduck.com/community/?comic_id=31674}Harkovast Forum{/url}
Do that but with instead of { and } and you can spread the forumy goodness everywhere you go.

Where do you get the inspiration for your place, race and character names? They all have quite a ring to them and never sound rubbish.

Some of the names are based very loosely on real world names to give them the right feel.
For example, the Ano-Chee is based on the word Apache (since they are clearly modeled on American Indians).
The Tsung-Dao (that have been mentioned but not seen) have a far eastern style going on, so all their names have that sort of ring to it. I thought it would be fun to make all their names be two one sylible words, so look out for Tal-Wong, Chen-Chen and others in the future.
I also love that Ts spelling at the start, which leads me to the main thing I use when making names.
I try to make up sounds that sound interesting and different to other things in Harkovast.
Ano-Chee, Darsai, Nymus and Tsung-Dao all have really distinct sounds and spellings that jump out at me.
The same is true for some races that have not been mentioned yet that you can see on the map (Junlock and Zadakine are a couple of my favourites).
During everyday life, if I hear a sound or see a word that strikes me as interesting I will often start jumbling the letters around and seeing if I can make a new interesting sound or name out of it.

Some naming rules for Harkovast-
Nymus men all have one sylable names, example- Ki. Nymus women have much longer names.

All Tsung-Dao names (and place names) are two, roughly far eastern sounding one sylable words. (Example, Chen-Chen, Xao-Sen)

Ano-Chee are all named after things in nature, plants or animals (Scatterpod, Black-River).

A few fun rules there.

Did you base Tsung Dao on that beer?

There is a beer called Tsung-Dao?
I want some!
That is especially amusing to find out because it is sooo completley inappropriate to what the Tsung-Dao are like.

I love the names! Pure awsomeness!

Thanks Inu-yasha, it is always encouraging to know people are liking my whole world building exercise.
Also this is well timed, as I jsut introduced one of my favourite names on the incentives- Black River.
I just looked over this thread and it is sooo out dated now!
Referance to the Tsung-Dao as having not appeared yet? How old is that?

I just started reading your comic, in fact, just finished chapter 1, and I'm hooked. Very epic. The splash page titled Shogun's Promise should be a poster unless it already is. And as to the posts above: I agree, great names. It's like a talent or something because most of us make up terrible names.

Awww, thanks for your kind words, your enthusiasm is a tremendous boost to my comic writing enterprise!

Hey mr. Harkovast,just wanted to drop by to tell you what you already know,your comic is awsome and I can hardly wait to see more =)
Harkovast is the first comic I read when I discovered this site(I think it was in top 10 at that time) and it was mentioned A LOT in forums(I think mostly by you xD)
Also,I like the information on races and cultures.I love history,even made up fantasy kind so it's really fun to read

Thanks plague doctor.
Sadly, Harkovast has yet to get into the top ten, so I was probably in the “just updated” bit. (But we'll get there one day, damn it!)
Really glad you are enjoying the story, the mythos and setting behind it and that you are not overly irritated by my endless self promotion all over DD!

If you like fantasy background and history you have come to the right place, because there is a LOT still to be revealed!
We've barely covered a tenth of what is out there.

harkovast
If you like fantasy background and history you have come to the right place, because there is a LOT still to be revealed!
We've barely covered a tenth of what is out there.

I know,right?140 pages went so fast =)

I wish I could get the pages out there faster.
Buy more T-Shirts so I can get rich, quit my job and make pages full time!

hey, what do page ratings do? i know 5 is awesome and one is fail, still, if im already looking at the page, why do i need to see what people think of it?

Dwrean long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, ratings determined which comics went on the front page. This was fun as it gave power to the community, but encouraged “snipering”, where you could give someone a couple of 1's on random pages in their archive to knock them off the top spot (very important for comics fighting to get into the top ten.)
These days its all done on number of unique visitors a day, and the rankings are just or fun.
Basically everyone gives 5. Any less then that means you dont like it. Weird, but that's DD etiquette.

Also because this is a site where anyone can host a webcomic,and that means there are people with vastly different artistic ability,but their storytelling ability shouldn't be judged by art alone.
So,it's sort of encouraging to give everyone 5 =)

BTW-only time I saw 2,3 and 4s was in the sprite community,thye are very crtitical of eichother's pixels

I have yet to see a sprite comic that did not deserve a 1.

The bulk of sprite comics I ever see are based on Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon, but mostly Sonic. I've got no beef with sprite comics, but… ungh. x___X Sonic? Surely out of all the games done by Sega and Nintendo there could be other things to do. Trust me, I don't think anyone of ya wanna see the kinds of fan-characters that wind up on MySpace.

Back on topic though, this is a good comic so far! ^^ The artwork is simple; it's not glorified, like say, Charby the Vampirate, but it has it's charm. It's the devotion to it, and how deep it gets. Fond memories of Warriors/Redwall with some D&D in there. It's unique.

Compared to most of the ‘slice of life’ comics that appear on the front page now and then, this one stands out. I'm still reading and hoping more will come (unless the series ended? D:).

The series ended?
Not likely!
Let's squash those rumours right now!


As for sprite comics…I dunno. I have just never seen one that wasn't dreadful.
My experience is that people don't use sprites for any reason other then laziness.
They can't be bothered to draw the comic properly so just use sprites instead. Inevitably the same laziness bleeds through into the writing, plot and characters.
If anyone can show me a sprite comic that is worth reading I will take that judgement back, but so far every one I've come across fits that pattern perfectly.

I'd love to see a sprite-comic with some really well-tailored sprites. Not so much using a sprite-base and turning it into something completely original, but with some imagination into it. A good example of how deep I'd imagine it to be, like this one - the character here is from a Capcom game, but another company did it for their crossover game.



The detail of it all. =D

As far as sprite comics go, I quite like 8-bit theater. Evil mages! It's evil, a parody of Final Fantasy 1 (which I have not played), etc… but hilarious.

Here ya go!

http://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/02/episode-001-were-going-where/

Take a look, I like it.

8 bit theatre is almost certainly the best sprite comic around…but I still don't like it much. The humour just never got much of a chuckle out of me.

However, what itsjustaar is talking about sounds interesting. A sprite comic where the authors actually make an effort to make the thing look good or include animation? Isn't there some kind of law against that?
I assume so from the crap most sprite authors seem to put out.

Well, no. If it's a fan-fiction or a fan-art or fan-anything, it's under the fair use license agreement, I'm certain. I'm sure Square wouldn't mind the use of using sprites they haven't used since the 80's, especially if it's just silly good fun. I see no harm in it.

But yeah. A sprite comic would be epic if the sprites were built from the ground up without needing a reference; highly-detailed, and maybe animated, if possible. I reckon it wouldn't be too difficult to do animated comics - me and my pal Ivan made a manga using animated panels, voice recordings, and stuff like that. We had to stop due to more complications with the Flash program we used, but Ivan's still got some old material over here: http://itsjustkek.deviantart.com/gallery/

I think an animated comic could be really awesome, I'd like to see that.
Even using sprites, that could be something really interesting and unique.

i bet there are some semi-animated comics out there, might just have to google it.