Here I am, keeping you up-to-date on recent Phantasia-based happenings!
The break has proven to be a blessing, leading to some stuff I would’ve have written otherwise – mainly a chapter or two dedicated to Princess Titania in the form of some flashbacks, which will help clear up any confusion over why Awyr seems to have two/three names (among other things)!
I really should post something about the original plan, just so you can see how much things have changed… There was a time when this whole ‘Adonis’ thing was a single chapter in length! And it was chapter 27.
Tentative date for series start-up is September 9th. 4th if you’re really lucky.
Meanwhile here’s another preview image, from the flashbacks, featuring Princes Freyr and Dionysus:
Lots of art coming up over the next few chapters, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. Yeah, I know I have a thousand and one other things to do for the site too >_>
Well, good luck with that. I’m just glad we got a whole lot more than 27 chapters by now
I always feel sympathy for Eiichiro Oda – he planned for One Piece to last 5 years. It’s been running for 13. And it’s only now halfway through the story…
That One Piece is the most popular manga in the world, and is also an over-complex web of characters, histories and plots, has helped me to ignore those who complain about such things XD
See, that’s why I prefer stories like Fullmetal Alchemist. The very nature of the storyline meant there HAD to be an ending, and they couldn’t postpone it for too long. FMA ended beautifully, and I’m glad it did. Sure, the characters will undoubtedly have more adventures, and there are more stories to tell there, but that wasn’t the point of the FMA story.
Mind you, having written some stories myself I know it’s hard to leave established characters alone… but there’s a difference between continuing one series forever just for the sake of continuing it, and just writing new, separate stories, with the same main characters.
I must admit though, in free media like webcomics it bothers me less. but even there, not many keep running for years and years without becoming repetitive or ‘jumping the shark’.
Although FMA itself ran for 9 years! It was fortunate in that the primary antagonists didn’t have much need for development or backstories, which is one of the things that’s padded OP out so much (to the point where Oda’s been barred from doing too many flashbacks, which are instead passed on to the anime director to pad that out).
And until recently OP was very much structured as a series of separate adventure stories tied together by a MacGuffin quest – it’s only been in the past couple of years where it’s exploded into something far more grand (the author’s even said new readers can jump into the series at the 50th volume and not worry too much about the previous story)
Bleach is possibly the worst culprit of pacing EVER, though.
I agree on Bleach. It’s at the point where I don’t bother reading it for like half a year simply because not much happens in that half a year. Annoyingly, I could probably read
almost any given volume of Bleach in like 15 minutes.
15 minutes? I think that’s about as much in-world time has actually passed since last summer?!
My best friend ends up hating Bleach and claiming he’ll never read it again every other week lol. I like Airgear and the .hack series is ever encompassing but the one series I think needs to make a serious comeback and get revamped for the modern era is…yes, Sailor Moon. What? It’s awesome. That’s one of those series that could go on forever and a day.
You know what? Sailor Moon was actually quite an influence on this here thing! The original 2000/2001 outline (not sure when exactly I came up with it) only featured a generic faerie kingdom and its rebellious princess. When I started redeveloping the idea, I brought in the sentai elements of SM, with some very basic analogies between the characters (Faye = Mercury, Titania = Venus). In those earliest drafts, faeries would have their own personal familiars too, who would have filled the Luna/Artemis role (and a faerie ‘killing’ their familiar would have been what made them a demon, when demons were merely evil faeries).
Strange how stories develop like that, I think writers always have a fear of publishing a story that takes a lot of influence from another’s concept, so they postpone it and see what else they can do, a few years later and much more pottering about its a new epic in the making
Its hard to get onto the writing scene because ‘everything’ has already been done, I think balancing the right combination of ideas is the only way to go, something you do beautifully.