DESIGNS AHOY: 20 years later, fantasy RPG couple bound for a new digital-art comic project! (Patreon)

So!

Believe it or not, folks, I am about to start writing and drawing a fantasy comic project to pave the way for a completely different—and far more ambitious—fantasy comic project! Lordy loo! However did this bizarre turn of creative events come about, might you ask?

Wellp, waaaaay back in 2002, I designed and drew up up a fantasy RPG adventuring party for an article in the videogame magazine PSM, as seen in the illo below wonderfully colored by my bud Ryan Kinnaird:

..featuring a lead pair of characters seen in this early design sketch:

(Note that the elven mage character wound up having her outfit and tattoos ported over to a different character in another project, but I'll get to that later.)

Anyhoo, a few years later, a generous friend of mine with an appreciation for "damsel in distress" imagery (of the sort that eventually spawned Empowered) commissioned me to work up a short comic featuring the faux RPG's lead couple engaged in some form of wacky "DiD" shenanigans.

So, I tried something a bit different, in the form of a  cringe-inducingly contrived scenario in which unnamed Hero Guy has to hastily truss up the Elven Mage to get past city guards Because Reasons, as this opening page hints at:

The rest of this old, goofy commissioned story fragment was made available to the $10 & $20 Patron tiers as an Exclusive Monthly Bonus Dealie (here's part one and part two),  but the point of this comic ends up being that the Elf is A) clearly more than a tad kinky and B) has found a plausibly deniable means of flirting outrageously with the seemingly oblivious Hero Dude. 

Anyhoo, after this single commission, the faux RPG couple laid dormant for the next 20-odd years, up until I reused parts of the elf's costume design for a human mage character in a 2019-ish Patreon project then titled Hushed Half-Elf:

This mage character and her titular half-elf girlfriend have since been ported over into a much more ambitious fantasy pitch I've dubbed The Last Party... 

...along with the Dwarf Barbarian and Half-Orc Healer from yet another 2020-era Patreon fantasy project, Party of Two: 

So, all four of these newer characters—human, half-elf, dwarf & half-orc (if you'll pardon the intermittent capitalization)—are set to debut in a single fantasy comic down the road, the aforementioned The Last Party. So far I've cranked out 50-odd pages of story notes and plenty of design sketches for the project, not to mention many, many Patreon art requests featuring the cast members.

That's all very nice, but guess what? At present, I don't yet have any means of actually drawing the g-d comic. 

I've drawn plenty of digital art in Clip Studio Paint for both the iPad and the PC (via Wacom Cintiq), but still haven't figured out a tool set of brushes that can produce finished comic artwork, nor have I even drawn a single entirely completed comics page yet. (Plenty of unfinished ones, though.)

Ah, but this is where the Elven Mage and Human Warrior from that 2002 PSM magazine piece and subsequent B&W comic commission reenter the scene! After a kind Patron happened to weigh in on the latter story a week or two ago, that comment got me thinking about the two characters once more—and lo, over the last week or so I've worked up story notes and designs for a new, easy-to-tackle  comic premise featuring that couple!

The idea here is that I'm planning to just jump right into digitally drawing a bunch of comic pages featuring these two, despite my complete lack of a finished-art tool set; basically, I'm looking to use these pages as a digital test bed for future comics production on The Last Party and, further on down the road, more Empowered stories.

Here's my six-paragraph pitch for this concept of an ongoing "romantic action-comedy fantasy series," interspersed among the new character designs:

She is a fetchingly impetuous Elven Mage who, in a desperate bid to access divine magic, volunteered to be afflicted with the legendary curse of “The Chained Goddess,” whose spellbinding aura of beauty and vulnerability drove both gods and men to apocalyptic madness in ages past.

Her hidden motives for shouldering the burden of divinely distressed damselhood, however, turn out to be somewhat less heroic and self-sacrificing than initially professed, especially regarding the Elf’s amorous intentions for her unsuspecting guardian and adventuring partner.

Can a feisty but flawed sorceress survive a neverending gantlet of menace long enough to unlock world-saving wizardry and overcome the inhibitions of the strapping warrior she’s grown to love, all without being “kink-shamed” for her innermost desires?

He is a doggedly tenacious Human Paladin who, in a last-ditch effort to earn heavenly redemption, volunteered to embody the archetypal role of “Champion of the Chained Goddess,” a heroic demigod condemned to perpetually rescue his divine mistress from an endless stream of beauty-crazed captors.

Even as he gamely blazes into action to liberate the repeatedly captured “Pointy-Eared Avatar of the Chained Goddess” from outlandish peril time after time, the Paladin frustrates the Elf’s long-term romantic plans thanks to his stubborn—though increasingly conflicted—clinging to a sacred vow of chastity.

Can a hard-working holy warrior atone for a direly shady past while keeping his intentions pure, his celibacy intact, and his hands off the divinely tempting damsel distressing his heart?

At present, I don't even have a title for this concept, other than possibly Truly Epic Levels of Unresolved Sexual Tension: The Comic. 

I suppose I could just call this comic Party of Two again, given that the original Party of Two couple—the Half-Orc Healer & Dwarf Barbarian—have been moved over to The Last Party. Problem is, having two different fantasy premises with Party in the title seems a tad excessive. Another possibility is something like The Champion and the Chained Goddess, but that title doesn't quite work for me, TBH.

UPDATE: In fact, the project does now have an official title: The Chaste and the Chained!

In any event, the title's not all that important, as the point of this effort is to get in some digital experience on a low-stakes, far less ambitious fantasy project that may never see much publication beyond Patreon. Then again, who knows? The work I've put into the story notes so far might well be threatening to spawn a so-called "real comic," much as happened on Empowered circa 2004; I'm already quite fond of these reworked characters and their goofy situation, gotta admit.

In any event, looks like Patrons can look forward to seeing my first bunch of comic-page tests with these two characters in February, as I need to plow through a bunch of other freelance work in the rest of January. Given that the stories are going to traffic in the cheesecake*-intensive "damsel in distress" imagery that so many of my freer-spending Patrons appreciate, most of the resulting pages are going to appear under the $5+ Patron tiers, though I'll show at least some of the comics to other tiers and the general public as well.

(*Ehh, we should see some degree of beefcake imagery, given that the Paladin is constantly having to bathe in the coldest available water on a regular basis for obvs reasons. His default outfit, though, definitely covers him up far more than the perpetually half-naked Dwarf Barbarian from The Last Party. ) 

Anyhoo, that's all for now, folks. Thanks for reading all the way through my longest Patreon post so far (I think)!

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: I'm not yet sure exactly what the content will be, but you should see something in next Monday's schedule slot, okay? (Probably a Life Drawing or Work Stages post, I suspect.)