Projects: Warlord – The Adventures of Keziah Firehair

ABOUT
It seems like ages ago, now, but I think it was about two years ago I was out at Planet Comicon in Kansas City and had a chat with a fellow artist and friend of mine, Dan Scott. We were talking a bit about creating artwork for card games and that I was looking for some additional work doing card art. One of the games he suggested was Warlord. He had recently been contacted by the gentleman who owns/runs Warlord, Arne Reuter, and was too busy to take on any cards. He was kind enough to hook me up with his contact info.

I got in touch with Arne and we got to talking and it turns out he was interested in doing a webcomic to go along with the card game. Now, I love comics, particularly webcomics, so I was pretty interested. But, as we all know, I'm a bit slow at drawing pages. I felt that if there was any hope of this project being consistent and moving forward at a regular rate, I would need to bring in somebody to handle the actual drawing. Enter my good friend and fellow artist Jeff Wamester. I talked to Jeff a bit to see if he would be interested in something like this and once I got his okay, I showed his work to Arne, who quickly approved.

It was agreed that I would design the characters (based on characters already created for the game), do layouts, and color the comic. Jeff would handle pencils and inks. Arne would handle the final lettering. We got right to work.

CHARACTERS

The characters were pretty fun to design, draw, and color. I spent quite a bit of time on them trying to make each unique as well as researching clothing and armor to make sure everything looked and functioned accurately. It's pretty important to me, at least with my art and design, that clothing, weapons, armor all appear real, believable, and functional. I think these, for the most part, appear that way.

LAYOUTS

I have to say - this is one of the hardest things about comics for me. Getting the flow of the story down, keeping a balance between long, middle, and close-up shots, and leaving space for word balloons is tough. But, I like the challenge (maybe a little more than the actual drawing, though less than the finished product, heh). I have to say, one of the funnest parts of this whole project was seeing Jeff make finished artwork from my layouts.

FINAL PAGES
(Pencils and inks by Jeff Wamester. Colors by me.)

These, in my opinion, are still some of the strongest color work I've done to date. I believe part of that has to do with Jeff's amazing linework, but, with this project something just clicked and throughout, I was pretty thrilled with how my color work turned out.

CURRENTLY
This was (is?) a fun project to work on. It moved along kind of slowly and it was never posted in full. I do hope that we'll actually finish this up at some point - I think Jeff actually has one or two pages left to finish, but I'm not sure if we'll ever get back to actually finishing it. Communication with Arne sort of dwindled off toward the end and he never actually posted several of the finished pages I sent him (which you can see here without lettering). So, we're sort of in limbo - but I hope that we get a chance to come back to this and wrap it up. I think given enough time, promotion, and effort, it could have been one of the better fantasy webcomics on the web.

Jer

About Jeremy

Jeremy grew up on a farm in Topeka, Kansas. He attended the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art and earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004. He has been featured in ImagineFX fantasy art magazine and he was juried into Spectrum 15 in 2007.