I’ve been away a long time, a reintroduction is in order.
This comic was the labor of my heart for a number of years, stretching between 2006 to 2014. There were a number of factors that led me to cease work on it, but from a storytelling perspective, the primary reason was that the plot was being sidetracked. I had a goal for the story that required certain things to happen, but I was not succeeding in getting these rendered and the work I needed to do so seemed daunting, and so I engaged instead in a certain amount of creative worldbuilding. This was fun but was not advancing the story where it needed to go. At a certain point, I felt I had written myself into a corner and was blocked on how best to continue, and once I stopped updating regularly my feelings of guilt and shame conspired to keep me from returning to it.
To give it the best chance of restarting successfully, I have rewound the story a bit while I consider the best path to take next. After almost ten years, it is a task akin to sifting through an archaeological site; when I stopped work on it I laid my tools down haphazardly and wandered off, and it is not always clear to my time-fogged brain what I intended to do with them. I still have all of the working files and notes I made, but they are a skeleton of what was going on in my mind at the time, and I need to do some work to reconstruct the flesh upon these bones.
I am also no longer the person I was ten years ago. I wish I had the ability to speak to him directly, not to tell him that everything would be all right (true in some ways but not others), but perhaps to give him some better way to face what he was going through, and help him to appreciate what he had while it still enriched his life.
For better or ill, I now take up his torch again. He had a power that I hope once more to make my own.
Botaram is returning.
