Blog 6: A Brief History of Exiern: Dark Reflections (Part 3) (Patreon)

It was while I was putting together the other two blog posts that I looked through the sites  where we're hosting various versions of Dark Reflections and realised there's some things that might interest people which I left out. 

So this post is a miscellaneous round up of sorts. It's also a chance to say where it might be going next (but as history has shown, plans are always subject to unexpected change!). I thought it might be easiest to break it up into sections based on the archive of the first of the sites where Dark Reflections pages were reposted back in 2015.

Exiern: Dark Reflections pages were first reposted here at extra.exiern.com.

I've set the links to the archive pages as currently we're posting daily the original pages of Exiern as both written and illustrated by Drowemos, the creator of Exiern.

Hosted here are the cover and first 44 pages of Dark Reflections (cover plus pages 1-10 by Dazzler and then 11-44 by Master Krakken - these date around 2007 and possibly 2008 while page 45 was made much later by A+A in 2015).

Now what I did find out much later when I got access to the Google Drive is that these were modified pages to be friendlier for work (if you look really closely, there's some sideboob that got missed in one frame in the background there) and those unmodified pages (well kind of) have been published over on Dark Reflections: Zen and Dark Reflections: Chaos.

The other thing worth noting with those 'unmodified' pages is that the art is unmodified. The text was proofread and then thanks to Sean Harrington of Spying With Lana, we hopefully managed to fix all the spelling and grammar mistakes (I noted the changes that needed to be made, much more importantly, Sean fixed them - any failings are mine!). At the very least, they're mostly fixed we hope!

Now, the page numbers from this reposting were from counting them one after the other (hence 1-44) but this didn't account for the filler pages in between from the original publication. That's why what was listed as Page 45 on the site was listed as Page 53 on Patreon.

So to correct that numbering mismatch, as you may have seen, Sean was requested to make a transformation sequence to fill the gap. There was the Exiern version for the Exiern Promo (as you can see on this Patreon under that tag or over at TG Comics) and the effectively mirrored Dark Reflections version (tinted two different colours for their respective Zen and Chaos versions). This was actually done well before the proofreading corrections to the original pages.

As for those filler pages, those were mostly published in the Gallery section of extra.exiern.com between Christmas 2020 and New Year's Day 2021. There's also one I found later for May Day this year. I think I got most of them but more to be published at the appropriate times as I find them.

Another large part of the Gallery are a lot of images by Brett Neufeld of the webcomic Marble Gate Dungeon who was often allowed to let his imagination run riot in the Dark Reflections universe and many of his ideas have been used already in the Chaos version of the story with more definitely on the way!

The other times when we had something more specific in mind still have Brett's distinct ideas in how he brought them to life and that's where we didn't want to wait till we got there  and at least hint at some future developments and/or flesh out some backstory. Some of Brett's work also acts as the title pages for the two Dark Reflections titles Chaos and Zen.

Then there was from the original Dark Reflections pages a brief mention of Tiffany suppressing the Wayfair revolt. So I thought that would be something worth showing and bringing in another of our regular artists to make, in this case Luis XIII (formerly Antipus).

Narratively, it's been presented two different ways, obviously on the site here because it was made so many years after the original pages, it was presented as an interlude with a flashback revealing the name of where the revolt was at the end and of significance to readers from the beginning where it was first mentioned.

We did try something different over on TG Comics where it opens the story as the prologue  and the pages are historical order. Both versions have their narrative merits in my opinion. it also paid for Luis's new computer as his previous one (where a lot of his work on Exiern has been made) was reaching the end of its practical lifespan.

Finally to round out what makes up the bonus Dark Reflections material over on extra.exiern.com includes the Valentine's Day Sex Drive images (many of which hinted to all but flat out said that Dark Reflections Tiffany is in many ways a polar opposite to her Prime universe counterpart), that the relationship between her and Peonie might head in a slightly more antagonist direction and one of my personal favourites, where we actually get to see some of that bath she said she was going to take.

As an additional note, extra.exiern.com has the at least relatively safer for work material and is the site where we have the bonus material. 

http://exiernextras.thecomicseries.com/ (which in fine Exiern tradition of things not quite lining up is not actually called Exiern Extras - that's the site above) is where among the Top Webcomics archive is where the uncut versions of Dark Reflections bonus material is.

There's probably even more that I've invariably missed which if it's substantial enough an omission, I'll get back to with yet another follow up post but hopefully that won't be necessary.

There will be a follow up post in the future somewhere neatly outlining where all the different sections of Exiern material can be found including the Dark Reflections material and finally for this post, there will be an explanation as to why Dark Reflections: Zen will stop publishing weekly soon but that warrants its own separate post which will be soon.

But we hope for now that the above was interesting about our Exiern spin-off universe and the slightly less than direct path it took to get where it is today - and the fact that like the main title, it is also still here today as well!