Obsession Du Jour

And while we're on the subject of Abúi's Travels, there's a new page up. This is one of the biggest-looking pages I've ever come up with, due to the detailed backgrounds and the shading and highlights provided by Rona. It's also got a ton of cameos from other webcomics. Backgrounds and crowds make for a lot of extra work, but in this case, it was worth it.

Rona's been updating her own science-fiction comic Hekatomb on a weekly basis for almost a year now. Lately, after a catastrophic CMS update, she's also been re-uploading her vampire horror comic American Gothic Daily in a revised version. What she does is she takes each old page and draws/paints digitally over them, expands the canvas size and adds new materials. While reconstructing the site, she posts the old versions of each page as an addendum to the new ones, so you can see how much progress she has made since she started the comic in 2006. It's a very fast, efficient process with staggering results. Go see it.

I have a week off right now, so I've been working on Feral some. I've been inking penciled pages from 2008-2010 and adding color flats to them, which I give to Rona to add shades and highlights to. Yesterday, I gave her the revised version of the page for April 11, 2010 and she sent me back this:

Silly version of page 97 of Feral

Donna Barr's interpretation of the character Abúi, drawn on her iPad.

The other day I did independent comics veteran Donna Barr a small favor, and as a thank-you gift, she made this drawing of Abúi from the webcomics Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and Abúi's Travels for me (both comics not safe for workplaces or other small-minded environments).

Abúi's Travels is a bit of an oddity in my range of webcomics. At present, there are two stories in the website's archives. One of them is Incognito, which I originally created as a short guest series for the naturist webcomic The Bare-Pit in 2006. I featured one character from Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan who had been doing some webcomics universe tourism and let her crash into the world of The Bare-Pit. The author of that webcomic continued her adventures, so suddenly there was a solid bit of continuity featuring Abúi. When I wanted to join the Halloween Cameo Caper 2012, I did not want to include another big crossover event into the main Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan continuity, so I decided to create a separate site from which one of my characters could go on crashing into other webcomic universes, and picked the one that had already done a bit of that. So there we have it: Abúi's Travels is the adventures of a faerie from one fantasy webcomics universe, who travels through time and space and has light-hearted adventures. Just the sort of thing I needed to do while my schedule is too full to work on RoCR on any regular basis.
Well, maybe. I managed to draw 16 new pages as of April 26, 2015. The Halloween 2012 event is well into the past and I'm still writing and drawing material for it. Arguably, if I'd spent the time on RoCR, that comic would be ....16 pages further into the present storyline than it is now? But it would still have updated haltingly and with variable art quality. Probably for the best that I don't work on my main comic right now, and besides, I'm having a lot of fun with this project, precisely because it is so unimportant and there's a lot of freedom for me to work with, that I wouldn't have while working on RoCR.

The present story, which interacts with the Halloween Cameo Caper 2012, is called Death Comes to Tyrion, in which Tyrion is a place not a person - nothing to do with Game of Thrones. I'm having a lot of fun with it and I hope people reading it are too. I would like to do more stories, including ones where instead of crashing into existing webcomics, Abúi collides with larger genres or subgenres embodied in newly created fictional settings.

Donna Barr is the creator of The Desert Peach, Stinz and the new webcomic on ComicFury Rental Goddess.