The Kickstarter campaign for Sîan: Thief of Khor-Shavarah #1 went live today.

Sîan #1 is a deluxe 48-page, saddle-stitched comic book written and drawn by Craig A. Taillefer. It will be printed on satin paper which shows off the crisp Black & white interior art and comes wrapped in glossy full-colour 100 point card stock covers.

A double comic, Sîan #1 features 2 stories of Sîan’s adventures: a 28 page lead story and a 20 page co-lead story, both full-length stand-alone tales of Sword & Sorcery adventure!

Sîan: A Tale of Two Thieves

A northern outlander comes to the lower underbelly of Khor-Shavarah seeking to slake his hunger after long days on the road, as well as opportunities to ply his trade. A chance encounter in a thieves-guild tavern with Sîan, professional thief for hire, leads him to try to horn in on her latest caper. Is he after a share of her treasure or has Sîan herself caught his lustful eye? He finds more than he bargained for in joining Sîan in raiding an exotic temple guarded by a slumbering danger!

Sîan: The Eye of Jar-Jargathar

After completion of a successful second-story heist, professional thief Sîan is cheated of her payment by an unscrupulous fence. Narrowly avoiding further humiliation at the hands of the fence’s bodyguard, and frustrated and humiliated over her gender once too often, Sîan accepts a wizard’s offer of transformation in return for a risky job. A tale of double crossing, low dealing, and high adventure in a far away Sword & Sorcery era.

The campaign is only 3 weeks, ending on February 12th, so do check it out soon!

I’m aiming to launch the Kickstarter for Sîan #1 on Tuesday January 21.

In the meantime, do check out the Pre-Launch page!

I really need to update this site more often! 🙂

One other thing I’ve needed to do for months is add the new comic Thrilling Tales of Vistas Unknown to the store. I’ve had a number of people ask how to buy it now that the Kickstarter is over and fulfilled. I’ve been either too distracted or working on other things. Soon!

Anyway.

Prior to going on vacation in October I drew a Variant cover for a friends comic series, coming to Kickstarter soon (but I don’t know when)! I’ll show it as soon as the Kickstarter launches.

I’ve also been working on getting the Kickstarter page built for the upcoming Sîan campaign, coming in January! I’ve been saying that it would launch this fall, but fall is almost over and I didn’t quite get things done in time, and I’m not quite done yet!

One thing that slowed me down is that I wanted a subtitle for the logo: like Conan “the Barbarian” or Xena “warrior princess”, or, you get the idea.

The first thing that popped into my head was Sîan: Queen of Thieves… but, there is a semi-current fantasy comic by someone I know with the same subtitle so that gave me pause. Also, at this point in time in her career, Sîan is a young woman who grew up on the streets in an organized pack of child pickpockets and beggars, and as she aged out, she graduated to more mature forms of thieving and is in the beginnings of her career as a cat burglar and thief for hire. So “Queen of Thieves” doesn’t feel right, and I can’t say that thief will always be her vocation as her adventures continue.

I figured “Thief of… (enter city/country name here)” and that is where I got stuck. I made up a random name I liked, added it to the logo, made cover mockups and put them on the Kickstarter page, then my wife came home and told me she absolutely hated the name, and there I got stuck. We left on vacation shortly after, but even once we got home I was completely paralyzed.

Monday I got semi-unstuck and came up with a few options, and while my wife didn’t love the one I’ve picked, she hated it less than the others! LOL!

This is such an inconsequential detail, so it’s ridiculous that it has taken up so much of my thought and time. It’s not like I can’t change the subtitle every story arc.

Anyhoo…

Here’s the three covers with the current trade dress. Let me know what you think!

It took a ridiculously long time in between other projects, but I finished the inks to the new Sîan story this week.

All I need is to draw a cover and this story is ready for release.

Work is progressing on the Sîan story. It’s going a little slower than I’d like, but as I’ve said before, I haven’t done a full comic from scratch in a long time.

But, I’ve taken the thumbnails and fleshed them out onto the “full size” art “pages” and done a first pass of the pencils. Some pages are pretty rough, but the final pages are starting to take shape including a first pass of the lettering, which includes fleshing out the dialogue as my script was borderline “Marvel Method” with limited dialogue written out. I also ended up expanding a few pages that were feeling a little cramped. I think I wasn’t thinking as visually as I needed to when writing an action script instead of my usual talking heads stuff. In the end I expanded from 24 pages to a 28 page story. At a later date I will possibly do a post showing that transformation.

I also had a bit of a crisis of confidence last week, feeling the work was sub par. I think part of the problem is that I’m doing something (a Sword & Sorcery story) where I’m comparing myself to other artists of the genre. As an example, I’m not influenced by anything in particular when drawing something like Wahoo Morris or comparing myself to other “slice of life” artists, so there isn’t as much of a “this doesn’t measure up to” feeling with it. Drawing a S&S action story, I have John Buscema inked by Alfredo Alcala in my head and it’s hard not to feel like I’m coming up short!

But, after a few days of procrastination I sat down Monday morning and started working on doing tight pencils of the first page… and it’s starting to look okay. Of all of my talk of mental blocks over the last few years, taking rough pencils and turning them into finished pages is the stage I know I can do!

More soon!