Behind the Scenes

This is where it all started. Many dozens of pages of tiny comic strips, hand-drawn and colored with crayons - and mostly unrecognizable by now. Well, times have changed and so have my methods. Getting a scanner I started to use the computer to colorize the drawings. Work went quicker and I focused more on the preproduction than the actual drawing itself. Today I'm still reluctant to buy an actual digital drawing board as I still fancy the oldschool way of drawing.

The original comic series pretty much revolves (very roughly) around the events of the Hedrecian Feud and the Dhilani Invasion of Bricera, with many characters present in some form or another, though not necessarily with their final names, looks and personalities. Me still being a youngster in my early teens, the comics were greatly influenced by pop culture themes that influenced kid-me at that time, the main themes being Disney's The Lion King(tm), Star Wars(tm) with other popular franchises like Alien, Jurassic Park or Independence day making an appearance of sorts. So, imagine a bunch of anthropomorphic Lions flying around in Star Destroyers and you get the general idea. On a side note, the original title of the series was simply LIONS with a number of Episodes:

(Titles translated from German)

1. LIONS: Battle of Kings
2. LIONS II: (no subtitle, I checked!)
3. LIONS III: Darkness returns or Shadow's Return (ambiguous translation)
4. LIONS IV: Dalor's Revenge
5. LIONS V: Shadows over Silumir (later renamed Shadows over Bricera)

Sounds grand, doesn't it? Well guess what, it isn't. It's what you get, when you give a late 90's teenager a computer to write stuff. Reviewing the old story with today's eyes, I can all but roll them. Still it laid the foundation for all of this.

Shadows over Bricera was the novelization of the fifth LIONS comic. After being tired of hand-drawing and coloring it time and again I decided to put it into written form which was much easier to edit. The early story draft of the first novel revolved around the events of the Dhilani invasion of Bricera, starting off with the arrival of the Dhilani Leviathan and closing on a happy end after the Battle for Bricera. Fin. Or was it?

Nope, a certain geek felt he had much more to tell so I kept on writing, starting off a second story and rewriting half of the original one to have a few more twists and, most of all, a cliffhanger to lead up to the next one. Boy am I glad nobody actually ever got to read that :o.

The second, so far unfinished book goes halfway through the Briceran Crusade up to the point where Dhalarona Prime is destroyed and Vince is arrested for speaking up against Jarris Vaylon. Everything past that moved on to be told through the XWA campaign and lateron the various battle threads.

This bit has been taken from a summary thread I posted over at the XWA Upgrade Forums: The list is still a work in progress: I still need to sort all the threads in order. While most of the threads leading up to The Battle of Remora III are somewhat random with regards to time and place, from there, the story from there did follow a rough continuity.

Also note that the name provided is the name of the thread, not necessarily giving any insight on the events themselves.