The Adventures of Echo Callaway

Getting very excited to release Echo's first adventure here; little more than a month. That story is called "Echo Callaway and the Mists of Pelleon", and it follows our erstwhile hero's as they attempt to help some big creatures solve a big problem:

This piece (or pieces) is collected from a different story; one I'm realizing will never see publication (here's the long story of why, feel free to skip it if you aren't interested). I started it way back in 2010, and it was formatted to be a print comic, basically a bound graphic novel that I could release in individual issues. I started right in with Echo's "origin story"; how she and her friends met, and how they came to be able to do some of the extraordinary things they can do. It's still a story very close to my heart, and I *will* be telling it, but not like this.

See, Echo's story is all wrong for print comics. Its all-ages, a very difficult genre to sell floppies in. Its long, and I'm a one-man band, meaning it would come out at a painfully slow rate. Full time, I could do an issue in about 2-3 months; far too slow to either hold an audience's attention, or make enough money to be able to actually work on it full time. Part-time, it would come out dreadfully slow; too slow, really, to tell an effective story. If it were me, and even if I liked it, I would simply wait for the trade paperback; a goal that, as the author, looked to be a good decade down the road.

Meanwhile, I got offered a publishing contract for the work with a digital-only company. I jumped on it, of course, but came to realize that it was just taking too long to make. The company then folded , and I was back to square one. I had a story I wanted to tell, but no clear idea of how to make it work in a practical sense.

As I puttered along, I ended up taking a job for Clown Commandos: . This was another company (just two writers with a lot of passion, really) who also were making digital only content, but they were doing it in a much smarter way. The work was formatted specifically with digital in mind; phones, primarily, though it looks great on tablets as well. Screens instead of pages, and some simple but effective techniques that take advantage of how digital works. I finished that job with the realization that they had given me the answer for how to tell Echo's story well.

Since I had the first chapter of Echo's "origin story" totally done, I decided to jump forward and write a side-quest type of story; at this point, they have established their abilities and are exploring the possibilities of the new world that has opened up for them. It was sparked by a little ink sketch: and quickly developed a life of its own. I took my time plotting, writing and boarding the first part, and eventually developed enough momentum to feel like I was just holding on for the ride. Even now, before I've even released the first part, I'm convinced that this is the format that Echo is going to live in, and its been gratifying as heck to really dig in and do some serious visual storytelling.

So this stuff, while I still like it a lot, has become redundant. When I go back and start Echo's origin tale, I'll be doing it as a digital comic, and the process is different enough that I won't be using any of this art directly (and there are some big story edits I have in mind as well). So I grabbed some panels that I thought came out well to make this little collage; highlights from a comic that never was. Enjoy, and stick around for Echo's big August debut; I'm literally holding my breath.

Adam