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I dunno about the rest of you, but I usually dream in anime catgirl-esque ways.  … Okay, that’s a lie, but whatever ;3

I’m sick.  So, if you’ve been wondering why I haven’t replied to things… that’s why.  Nasty cold thing… spent a couple of days thinking my throat would spontaneously combust… now it just itches and I’m coughing so much and ugh.  Regardless, I’m so glad I don’t have a lot of folklore to chat about or something because I do not have the patience for it right now.  Now… I’m gonna go take some more cold meds and go to bed.

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IF I can get it done on time, next week’s update will be on Halloween; how cool is that? (Okay, not that cool, but I’m a dweeb like that.)  However, things are really freaking busy, since I have a coupled of parties/get-togethers and a wedding to go to all in the next week, on top of work.  So, I’m gonna have to cut things short and ramble another day.

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Okay, so, this isn’t likely what you’re used to.  Aaaand it’s ugly.  It’d be cooler if I had the time to really render this well, but, well… it’s not supposed to be pretty.  I’ll post the preproduction art for it later.

When I was first jotting down ideas for this sequence, I just had to apply an old concept that fit the situation… you see, if you’ve been around me a looooong time, odds are you may remember this piece: http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=rageful+grahll#/d543m6  This was done freaking eight years ago.  Now, in the past eight years, I’ve had time to rethink that concept, and exaggerate it.  Basically, I’m using this form of uncontrolled, angered change as an excuse to have movie monster werewolves, as opposed to my usual anthropomorphics. 

The primary draws of inspiration for this came from An American Werewolf in London (The naked face), Dog Soldiers (the naked body with fluffy legwarmers XD), and Underworld (the sparse body hair seen on William), with a hint of Ginger Snaps for flavor ;3.   However, I picked Faith’s traits for several reasons… for one, the paws and face are likely to get the most messy in a battle.  You don’t want fur soaked in coagulated blood making your fingers stick together, or getting in your eyes (not to mention getting ikky if the blood starts to rot, as unlikely as that would be).  So, like a vulture, these parts of her body are bare.  However, she retains fur that’s just as thick or even thicker than normal around her neck, her ankles, and forearms to protect the very vulnerable veins there, working like a lion’s mane. Likewise, the fur on her back protects her should she be clawed at from behind, where she can’t defend herself with her claws as well.  The bareness elsewhere… well, frankly, I did it because I liked it, and it mirrors the bad-guys here, but I could say it’s also because fur is insulating, and losing some helps keep her from overheating in a battle situation.

And while that’s all I have to say about Faith’s design here, I’m not done yet.  I’d like to also take a moment to discuss Fauvism. Some of you may not know much about it, and that’s okay, neither do I; I imagine Faith knows more of it than I do.  However, Fauvism was a brief art movement that is probably best known for its bright colors, and while it was impressionistic, it often retained a sense of realism.  However, it’s the brushwork that really is the icing on the cake.  Truth be told, I’m not normally a stickler for paint texture and such.  But with fauvism, the brushwork is oftentimes energetic, sometimes downright rough… like the artist used the brush to claw paint onto the canvas.  Funny thing about that… Fauvism is, after all, the style of “Les Fauves,” which means, “the wild beasts.”  Truth is, for a long time, I’ve had a soft spot for Fauvism (though not as much as I do for Art Noveau, particularly the work of Mucha), and when looked at in the context of the derivation of the movement’s name… it seems ever so slightly lycanthropic XD

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I was having the hardest time with this page.  Like… I had to start over at one point.  It was that god-awful. And it’s still not great… but it is presentable.  Amusingly enough, I only really managed to get it rolling after the Equinox, because I spent that evening out and about (and even around a huge bonfire to boot), and it got the creative juices rolling.  So long as it doesn’t become a crutch, I do think that sometimes the best way to get artwork done is to get out of the studio, away from the computer, and do something else, though hopefully, something related. 

I’m heading into a busy season… with Fall started and Halloween activities up and running, I have a very few weekends to do a lot of things.  But it’s so gonna be worth it.  One of my flightier friends just asked me to go to a haunt with her.  I’m gonna have to peel her off of the ceiling and it’s gonna be aaawwweeeesome.

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This page brought to you by the song All the Myths are True by Abney Park.  Go listen to it.  You’ll see why I like it. Seriously.  It helped keep me going through this page XD

Man, it’s been a good week.  I hope you all have had good weeks too!  I bet they’re gong better than Faith’s right now!    Anyway, I’m off to go look at Mars Rover stuff and work on the next page!

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I hope you all have a nice full moon this Wednesday!

Well, it’s been a rough couple of days here, and it shows in the page.  Sorry guys. Thankfully, I’d already done the Krampus figure so one panel was easy.

So, I’m sure some of you are wondering where Thanksgiving went.  I’d actually scripted some material about Thanksgiving, but it seemed clunky since nothing particularly interesting happens between Halloween and Christmas Break.  It was mostly some jokes and silliness at Dr. Karen’s house, and it didn’t mix with the rest of the chapter well.  My one real ‘problem’ with this is I usually have to cut sequences that I would like to have, either for pacing or for my sanity.  Thankfully, nothing was highlighted for being important later on, so when I had to cut it, it was no big deal.

That aside… oh my gosh guys, who’s excited about the rover, ‘Curiosity’ landing on Mars in a few days?  Oh, I hope it all works!

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Man, sometimes the weeks really seem to roll into one another.  All of a sudden,, my deadline for this page was on top of me O.o  I probably have an error or teo in this… Anyway, here’s yet another ‘snapshot’ page,  letting me finally touch back on Faith’s workplace.  And I get back to Jay who is… less than sympathetic.  Alas, this is the last we’ll be seeing of him in a while.  Poor, poor underdeveloped background characters.  They never get enough love. 

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Oh Dylan.  Dumber?  Really?  Apparently he’s not an English major ;p

Yet another week of squeaking by on time.  I’ve been up since 5:30.  I’d say something intelligent… but God I’m tired.  Maybe later.

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I dunno if it’s clear that Todd’s sizing up Maggie’s chest. Not that I drew it well or anything…

Gah. Busy as heck week… in addition, it’s been storming a lot, and I don’t risk the computer by being online when it’s thunderstorming (Yes, I do have a surge protector). Thus, less time to color. If I’d known so much time would be wasted waiting for the lightning to stop, I would have spent more time sketching in pencil. And next week will be even busier. I’ll be out of town over the weekend again, (another con, one I wasn’t sure I was going to go to, but was asked to help out with) which means, I’ll be missing a lot of time to work. Gah. Maybe instead of posting a comic page, I’ll just post a shirtless picture of Dylan.

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Egads, I have five minutes to type out something to say O.o  Truth is, after what Todd just did, I’m kinda speechless myself.  I’ll probably come up with something clever to say later.

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If you’re one of the many who recognized the <I>Into the woods</I> reference last week, yaaaay!

So… here’s the thing about Robin Hood: He was an outlaw.  Today, his story is heavily romanticized, just like vampires and werewolves are.  However, while it may seen silly, or perhaps a mistake on Todd’s part, in the Eldritch version of the world, yeah, Robin Hood was a werewolf.  “Why?” you might ask… well, the reason is simple: Back in the day, outlaws were sometimes called Wolves, or Wolf-Headed.  This basically meant that these outlaws were to be treated as wolves... as dangerous animals that needed to be killed, all human rights forfeit. 

This practice may have lead to some of our werewolf legends, such as one from Innsbruck, in which a werewolf corners a woman and demands her diamonds. At the end of the story, however, her diamonds are safe… but only because she traded her loving husband to the werewolf instead.  It makes one wonder whom the real monster in the story was?  Regardless, werewolves in Austria-Hungary and Spain were said to have a particular attraction to valuable precious stones, such as diamonds and rubies.  One could suppose that some of these alleged werewolves were only rogues and outlaws pretending 

to be monsters, in hopes of scaring people out of their valuables.  After all, Loup Garou and Wargus in some cases also meant outlaw. Or, perhaps, werewolves are as easily distracted by shiny things as we humans are. ;3

I suppose that a diamond is a werewolf’s best friend…

Please also see:

The Beast Within --Adam Douglas

The Book of Werewolves --Sabine Baring-Gould

Werewolves (Around the world) --Elliot O’Donnell

Were-wolf And Vampire in Romania – Harry A. Senn (Good luck finding this one. :C)

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*Puffs a breath* Urg… well, I got the page done in spite of loosing three days working time to the convention (It went pretty well, thanks for asking).  Truth is, I should have started on this sooner… I guess we all make mistakes.

Anyway!  So, yeah… Todd is dressed as Robin Hood… This was very deliberate, but why I did it is something that I will address in more detail next week.  However, whomever knows what he’s referencing there gets ten experience points.

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It seems the feline overlords have retreated from DA.  That means Faith can be a werewolf again!

Well, folks, I can’t ramble on for long… I have a convention this weekend and have been up since five-thirty, so, life’s been busy.  But anyway… yeah, that stuff about a werewolf being executed on Halloween?  It really happened.  It pops up in these books, should you wanna look:

The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves and Other Monsters --Rosemary Guiley

The Werewolf in Lore and Legend --Montague Summers

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Werewolves --Nathan Brown

Werewolves: The Occult Truth -- Konstantinos

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So, in short… Seamus doesn’t age.  And he can jump through time… but only forward.  Oh, and he doesn’t pick when, but at least he can feel it coming on.  That kind of sucks. 

Time travel is tricky, and it’s way too easy to abuse it.  If he had absolute control over time, he could go back in time and ‘save’ faith from being bitten… but that would create a time paradox.  By forcing Seamus to only go forward, it allows me to play with time travel, but not in a way that can alter the consistency of the story.  It also makes him somewhat of a tragic character.  In this way, he’s a bit different from the initial incarnation I had of him.

When I first started coming up with Seamus as a character back around 2006, he was simply what I called the style of writing I used when writing my italicized descriptions for several of my pieces.  Unlike in Eldritch, he had no real family, because his main love was books. I playfully said he was from Neverwhen… that is, he resides in no time or place in particular, and can pop up anywhere and anywhen.  Well, for the aforementioned reasons, that wasn’t going to work for Eldritch.  It’d make it way too easy to make him a power character, and frankly, I know I’m not talented enough to handle a super-complex time travel story with a character that isn’t even the main one.

However, where it counts… Seamus is pretty much the same.  He loves science and myth and magic… he loves researching and of course… talking to others about it.  A Lot.  Besides, you can’t blame a guy for cramming as much information as he can into a conversation, since he never knows if he might accidentally leave or not.

Anyway… on to the next page.  Woo~

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Psst.  You guys are getting it half an hour earlier than Deviantart. XD

So, it’s the full moon!  Hooray!

So… while January may be called Wolf-month and have the Wolf Moon, February is particularly good for lycanthropy.  Apparently, lycanthropy is particularly troublesome to men (and women, I presume) during the month of February.  You can find mention of this in A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture by Charlotte Otten, The Werewolf in Lore and Legend by Montague Summers, and The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould… and probably a couple of others. 

Forgive me, I’d write more… but life is super busy, and well, it’s the full moon.  I have stuff to do. ;p

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Happy Year of the Dragon!

Happy Year of the Dragon everyone!Buuut, back to the comic… Nope, they’re not zombies! But they used to be vampiiiires!

So… the origin of this is.. well, kind of dumb.  While, for this particular bit I wish I could point to some folklore (aside from Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death, p. 197.  Where it's stated that vampires need blood to sustain their body’s exixtance.) The truth is, this has little to do with the initial idea.  You see, when I was a wee little thing, my dad had an Intellivision.  We had a few games, like Shark-Shark, Utopia, and Frogger.  But, one of the games we had was Dracula.  In the game, some of the people you bit turned different colors and, according to my dad, became ghouls.  Now, I knew a little about vampires at that time… that if you were bitten by a vampire then you became one.  Ghouls were a new concept for me, so, in my tiny little girl brain, I just kind of figured they were kind of like baby vampires and would be real vampires if they ate someone.

For Eldritch, however, I took that idea and inversed it. Because, well.. honestly, being a vampire would be far less appealing if you had to start out as a nasty ikky ghoul, right? Right. That and… I mean really, what would happen if a vampire didn’t feed? Becoming a rotting corpse/ghoul/zombie makes sense to me.

So… yeah. Blame the Intellivision for this one folks. More talk about the undead next week.

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Well, Faith, I don’t think this is a guy in a mask…  There’s a lot I wanna say, but I think It’d be best to leave it till next week’s update.

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Well, folks, I can’t exactly say I can take full credit for the erm… unique costume idea. It’s inspired by a friend of mine, and, well, let’s just say I’m glad that I’ve always worn a costume to her Halloween party.  As they say… write what you know.

Well, folks, in spite of the comic’s current theme, the Winter Holiday Season is in full swing here, and that’s keeping me quite busy. So flipping busy.  Put up the tree, been to a party, been to a Christmas wedding, wrapped all the gifts up, sent stuff off, watched Charlie Brown… and yet, I’ve been having a devil of a time getting into it though.  Maybe I should just consider it as Hogswatch, or, better yet, Snoggletog season.  I think I like that better.

Oh! Also, if you happen to have clear skies tonight, you may wanna pop outside and look at the geminids!

Gah… gotta get working on the next page.  Catch ya later!

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Aaaand, the chapter ends right where it started, geographically speaking.

Well guys! I cut it close this week (Crazy stuff happened, sorry about the derp!faces.) but somehow, we’ve all made it through a third chapter! Next week I will upload the cover to the new chapter, and two weeks from now, the storyline resumes! Thank you guys so much for sticking with me the past few years. I mean… while preproduction started long before the first page, Eldritch started in early 2009. Where did the time go, guys?

And since we made it this far, that means that it’s… actually time for me to start looking into getting this self-published somehow. Egads, that means I have even more research to do. *Collapses* Don’t worry though… I’ll still be keeping this stuff up here, if I get it self-published. Though… there will be some extra content that won’t appear here.

Well guys catch you all next week!

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I honestly don’t know who I feel more sorry for, Faith, or Jay.

You know, Jay is one of a few characters that took over the jobs of characters that never made it to final development. There were several characters that I wanted to include, but, well… Their roles could be handled just as well, or better by other characters. Jay was at one point going to have another worker back in the storage room named Colin… but, I found that paying more attention to one character rather than two worked better for development. So, the two got merged into one.

In fact, until very, very late in development, I’d planned on having a harpy named Bobby be a main character. I liked him a lot, but, much as I tried, he wasn’t going to work, especially when Maggie and Todd could perform the same roles he did. So, he got demoted. Maybe someday when I’m rich (Like that’ll ever happen) and don’t have to do things like worry about supporting myself, I’ll make a spin-off comic about him XD

Bah… I should go to bed soon. I have to be up to go to work in five and a half hours… and then after that, I need to hit the library again. Then after that, I'll check to see if I have my Pottermore letter yet and work on next week's comic. My life is so exciting 9.9

Also... today I’m gonna talk about the importance of sticking to your script.

I have a LOT of this all worked out, and ironed and ready to be comiced. Some of it I have highlighted, so I know what will be important later, and what I can cut. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff I’ve cut out; and a couple of pages have been mashed together. However, aside from those two things, I have one big rule: Stick to the script, and don't change it.

I totally broke that rule and got caught. I had a consistency error (OMGOSH). I altered the name of Jay’s and Ranger Dick’s dog, from Kristi to Spot because I thought it sounded like a human got attacked at first. But I didn’t change the name later in the script. Thankfully, folks (as always) were happy to tell me when I'm wrong and caught me on it pretty quickly. Oops.  I suppose I'm only human... if only I could get Gaoth to schnooker people into thinking I didn't make a mistake, like he did Jay's dad ;D

Lesson re-learned? Yes.

What can I say?  I suppose that if they can mention Tonks’ and Lupin’s baby in the HP movies when they never really show her preggers, I suppose I can mess up now and again.
Okay.  Running on three hours of sleep.  Gonna go collapse now.