Any spare minute where we were not in, you know, Australia or something, Gabriel has been drawing Daughters of the Eyrewood: The Tithe. I don't think it looks like he drew it. Obviously, that's not my department. I don't have a robust methodology for determining things like that. But looking at it, with the organs I use for that purpose, it clearly represents a change either in him or in his style.
I don't remember how many pages it is exactly, other than to say that it is the right amount. This fills out the middle part of the Lookouts as a setting, with Thornwatch being the third. They're each about different things, and any one of them could be a life's work, but for some reason we have arranged them so that they teeter in a stack and inform each other.
There were announcements of various kinds at PAX that almost certainly require a boost in signal:
- As we have said on many, many occasions, the ultimate victory scenario is to make things, and then push them off the dock to have their own adventures. The Trenches just wrapped up its third season, which brings the archive there to over two hundred comics, each of which includes various gruesome True Tales of industry life. I really, really like it. This is what we have accomplished with Scott Kurtz, and when time got tight for him we brought on Mary C from Kiwi Blitz to handle the art. Time has tightened for him again, fairly significantly, with the success of Table Titans to the point where it's not something we can do together anymore. Plus, Mary C is heading to Japan, which necessitated a stratagem. You might have noticed an art change in the last couple strips; those are the exquisite lines of Monica Ray, from Strip Search but also, you know, from Earth. That was Phase One of the Trenches Longevity Initiative (TLI). The second was to bring on Ty Halley, also of Strip Search fame, to write the shit out of it. This is an interesting juncture, for us and for Trenches, and I'd be curious where else this model could work.
- Because you can sit next to a person for a very long time, more than a decade, and still not know them, I found out something interesting this weekend: Gabriel apparently wants me to write a Lookouts book. It would never occur to me to take something we had made together, and then run away with it somewhere. That's not in my makeup. But apparently I've been given a kind of permission? Before I had completed all four chapters of Precipice, I might not have thought myself capable of it. This juncture is interesting, also.
(CW)TB out.
