One of the things about working in the creative world is that you have a lot of projects working at different paces — there are the ones you spend most of your time on, and there are the slower-boil ones you develop for a long time before releasing. Which brings me to Sword & Sarcasm, the new medieval fantasy webcomic by Chuck Fiala and yours truly, kicking off today.
Chuck (in period dress, there at right) and I have known each other for a long time — first at Comics Buyer's Guide Picnic-Cons, though I knew his work from Fandom Confidential and the Comics Reader long before that. We'd collaborated some with him illustrating my Longbox Manifesto columns for CBG, but we always wanted to do something that recalled the humor comics we grew up on. Anyway, what seems eons ago, we worked out something that would bring together some of the screwball elements we liked into a reader-friendly story with a broader continuity — and with Chuck doing the heavy lifting in the art department, he built up enough advance work to make a webstrip a go.
The strip follows two main characters in our first story arc: The protagonist, Duke Benedict, is a hateful popinjay; in our first episode, his long-suffering wisely subjects throw him out on his ear. That doesn't stop him from trying to change the equation, of course — which he does by hiring a traveling mercenary to help him reclaim his power. But Herbert the minotaur (or cow — there’s something fishy in his family tree) is more than the simple warrior he seems — and, well, it’s not exactly a match made in heaven for either of them!
I haven't done strip writing in a long time, but I've done it off and on for years — and it's fun seeing what Chuck's come up with. At least at the beginning, Chuck is planning on two strips a week — Monday and Thursday — and we have a pretty good head-start to make that happen. Bookmark SwordandSarcasm.com and check in with our pilgrims' progress!
