When I was in college, I was enamored with comics and graphic novels. The medium has always been ripe for potential, and perfectly suited my desire to both write and illustrate a story of my own crafting. After fantasizing about it for years, I finally began putting it to the digital pen in my senior year, and displayed the first twelve pages at my graduation showcase alongside my fellow visual art students. After graduating, however, I found myself unable to continue. Where would I post my story? How would I continue creating it?
After taking a couple years off to get my life in order and begin my career, I eventually returned to this webcomic. I designed and built my own website to host it on (that first version was bad, please do not wayback this site, you will regret it), and began writing and illustrating new pages to upload every week. I kept at this for a year, and managed to get through the rest of the prologue and the first chapter.
After that year, I finally collapsed from burnout. It had been a hard year, and I could no longer keep up with the ambition of weekly uploads. Even though I had learned a lot from this experience, I found the quality of artwork I was creating to be lacking. I was impatient with myself, and the time I was taking every week to illustrate new pages was time I was taking away from the rest of my life.
Will I ever continue the story of FantaSoul? I think I would like to, some day. Knife and Maria still have such special places in my heart, never mind all the other characters and stories that I never got far enough to include. If I do ever pick this story back up, it will probably be in a different format. Maybe an illustrated novel, with sections of story interspersed with illustrations of important scenes.
Until then, please enjoy the first eighty or so pages of a story near and dear to me.