Roninspoon Theater

Shnickey! It’s a web comic. Well, it’s most of a webcomic. We have the hosting, a title, some snappy easy to install content management and a pleasant presentation. We even have this here blarg post. What you may notice is conspicuously absent, is the actual comic.

There’s a whole bunch of them written. Honestly. The Fillbachs tell me they’ll have the first few pages delivered tonight sometime. That will give me nearly 3 whole days to put off posting them for our projected launch date of 31 October. That’s Halloween by the way.

To commemorate that most spooky of days, we’ll be starting off with a Halloween story, one that I wrote in 2006 for Calamity Jon’s Boo! Halloween Stories project. Sadly, I couldn’t find anyone to illustrate the story in time to meet Jon’s deadline, or, indeed, for the next two years.

I’m a bit of a procrastinator. Can’t be helped really. Fortunately, I’ve got myself some partners now, the Fillbach Brothers. Wielding pens and pencils like Crom engorged barbarians on the side of a van they deftly, and with T-800 like precision, etch their drawrings into the very essence of space and time. Or, on 8.5×11 copy paper, whichever is handier.

And… we’re live. Hell, we’re even early! I know there’s no dialogue yet, but it’s only the first page in a six page story.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “what’s with the goofy name? Roninspoon Theater sounds stupid!” There’s a simple reason for that. I’m just not very clever. Also, I already had the domain name registered.

Fortunately, the fellas I’ve wrangled into doing the art, more than make up for my own lack of cleverness. The Fillbach Brothers are mad talented. They got more skills than Hitler’s got haters. You may recognize their work from the graphic novel Maxwell Strangewell, or from Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, all available from Dark Horse.

Three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday (according to the most holy schedule of webcomic publishing) we’ll be featuring a new comic. Because it’s an anthology, every few weeks we’ll be featuring a different story. Most of the stories will be written by me, and all of them will be illustrated by the Fillbachs. This is because they can tell a story, while my art work progresses at a pace best measured by geologists.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “How did this loser get two hot professional artists to illustrate his stories?” The truth is, I keep them locked up in my basement and feed them a steady diet of cheap lager, country music and pirated BBC comedies.

This first story is one I’ve been waiting to debut for nearly two years. The Darkness of Light was originally written for ’s semiannual Boo! Halloween Stories. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get an artist on the job to make the deadline. Now that I have two redneck artists with ADD chained up in my basement though, getting the story illustrated didn’t turn out to be that tough.