Welcome, and Thank You!

Welcome to all my new Starcaster patrons! We are officially in "break even" territory on the first two pages each month, and on our way to an extra page! So thank you, I'm excited to get back into The Starcaster Chronicles with you!

To celebrate, and as a token of gratitude, I wanted to share with you some details on the OTHER Starcaster project I'm working on: a collection book for issues 1-5.

Now whenever I put out a book, I like to try and add some extra stuff; if I'm going to ask people to purchase a copy of material they can read online for free, I want to include some additional content to make it special.

So first and foremost, the first Starcaster book will include the first five issues of the series. BUT, I've gone through and tweaked the entire thing to make sure this will be the definitive version of those first five issues.

In most cases, this was just a matter of creating a consistent style guide for the way I do the word balloons in The Starcaster; making sure that the style is the same when someone is talking through a radio, how ship names are formatted in dialogue, and stuff like that. In the earlier comics I did word balloons differently than I do now, so I wanted to create consistency.

In other cases, I went through and corrected little errors with the art. Sometimes a little something a colorist missed, other times correcting my own screw-ups regarding proportion, or things that were bugging me. This was most prevalent with the first and second issues of The Starcaster Chronicles. You can see an example of what I mean in this image, showing both the original panel, and the updated panel as it will appear in the book: https://cad-comic.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/starcasterbook-1.gif

In the original, Cort's head is way out of proportion to his body. Additionally, the colorist left a gap in Cort's bangs that I filled in to match his hair style in later issues. They're small tweaks, but tweaks that I feel improve the book as much as possible before going to print.

The book will also include a bunch of lore, like the Race Profile above, providing additional information about things in the Starcaster universe.

I'll include concept sketches and wallpapers I've done as well.

And finally, there's a big section in the back of the book where I identify each page of the first five issues that had a choice attached to it, what those choices were, and then I discuss what would have happened had the alternatives been chosen. I talk about the immediate and long term ramifications of a choice (apart from spoiling future issues), and how it would have affected other events, so you'll be able to get a sense of how our choices changed things for our heroes.

So, that book is almost finished, and hopefully I'll get it up on a Kickstarter later this year and we'll see if we can get it printed!