"March of Death!" 4/4 Finale

Well, 14 strips later and here we are... a full year's worth of little comic strips. I utilized last week's "March of Death" banner because I thought it worked really well, and embellished the title card to reflect the pulp adventure serials I was loosely trying to emulate. Everything is wrapped up in this one, and I think it's a great way to end of the series, since I myself will be graduating in a month. I brought in the array of heroes from one of my very first mock ups of the team I did for Tony back in 2008 -- ending as we began, in a way.

Next steps will include publishing the collected strips (either doing it semi-professionally, or just printing them off myself and stapling them, zine style) along with some sketches and additional material. It'd also be great to have students next year take up the mantle of The Marauders to keep them going for future generations of McMaster students to explore further. But, even if it ends here, it was incredibly rewarding for me to work on my first published comic this year. The perfect diversion from school work (too often, at times), I think it will ironically represent more about my future as a body of portfolio work than my history degree, demonstrating my ability to (somewhat hastily) get things in on a weekly basis. At least that's more than I could say about research papers.

I hope anybody who actually read it enjoyed it, I know I did. Now it's on to other projects! I've got a few ideas in the works, so stay tuned...

"March of Death!" 3/4 Special Edition

Full page o' glory! The newspaper printed a special music edition magazine in the paper last week which absorbed most of the content. As a result, we got a space three times as big as we usually do for the Marauders strip. It came at the perfect time in the story as well, right when the action is the most... action-packed. This was so much fun to do, and also so much work. I had to seriously rush a few of the panels as a result of basically doing three weeks worth of drawing in one week, and it was challenging to figure out the new layout. I think the serious hand crampage payed off though... it's certainly a nice highlight piece to the whole series, and a great opportunity to work on a larger scale.

I loved the way Divinus' teleportation scene worked out, as well as the final panel. They are some of my favorites from the whole series. I also enjoyed how reflective this was as a metaphor for my coinciding school life. March truly is a time of death, and I felt just like our heroes, unable to keep up with the horde of assignments pressing in on me from all sides. Will I get them all done? We'll just have to wait and see if our heroes survive...