And that’s the end of issue nine. It seem Pendragon has had enough and wants no part in anything further. A bit of a downer, I know, but when you’re at the bottom, the only way is up, right? Where will the team (what’s left) and the comic go from here? Find out on February 4th 2015, when issue ten launches!

Next week, we’ll be running a selection of choice cuts of webcomic ‘trailers’. These are comics I read and heartily recommend.

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Explaining VANGUARD

What’s this post about? Well, before the second arc of this story begins, I thought I’d spend a little bit of time explaining my working methodology/ideas behind what I’m trying to do here.

Design:
When I first came up with the concept of VANGUARD and started designing the characters who’d be part of the team, I was presented with some interesting design challenges. I presumed that, as the team would be simultaneously be public figures and special forces soldiers (or sorts), that alongside their ‘super suits’ they’d otherwise be dressed in combat gear. As I’m sure most Governments would do, they’d garb ‘their’ meta-humans so they basically looked like walking flags. This is not true of every Government meta-team in the book though (Eagle-5, for example).

Story:
With the story that’d i’d planned to tell, I made a decision early on that the reader would never really see what the antagonists were up to. Only in the first/last few pages of an issue would we get a glance of what they were up to. I stuck to this rule in hopes of showing that our protagonists were facing a huge, unseen threat, that never really identifies itself. We know that there is an evil plan of sorts that being played, yet have only glimpsed aspects of it. What is the ultimate goal of this plot and who is behind it? This will be a challenge that the characters in the upcoming comics will have to uncover and confront. I’ve planted many seeds within the nine issues that have already run. These will story threads will start bloom as we progress further into VANGUARD ‘arc two’.

Characters:
With telling such a fast paced story, where the characters are swept along in events that seem to unfold fast than they can deal with, characterization suffered a little. Not everybody ‘arcs’, something I’ve identified and will be addressing in the future.

Well, onwards and upwards! I’m constantly trying to improve the storytelling and my artwork. I’m also glad to see that readers are enjoying what we’re doing here and should you have any questions, about the comic/story, fire away!

Dan
MrHades

Edited by
Gary Cohen