More work involved.

I’m going to start off today’s blog with an announcement.  There’s going to be an extra week of Races of the Millennium Federation.  The cover of Issue 9 will post next Friday, March 20th as opposed to this Friday.  It’s not a ground-breaking announcement, nor a terribly shocking one, but it’s an announcement nonetheless.  And we haven’t done a three-week break since the Star Powered Kickstarter, so we feel we’ve been pretty good at being on-schedule these last few months.

The reason for this unexpected delay is simple: Issue 9 is a crazy one and Garth needs the extra time to nail it.  If there’s anyone to blame for that, it’s not him.  It’s me.

As the writer of Star Power, my job is considerably easier.  There are aspects of a script that take me all of ten seconds to write, but take Garth much longer to execute.  “And then there was an epic space battle.”  There.  I wrote that in five seconds.  When Garth sees that in a script, he has a lot of work to do.  He has to consider the panel and page layout; placement of ships, laser blasts, explosions, and sound effects; the design of said spaceships engaged in said space battle.  He has to put that scene down in a thumbnail, pencil it out, ink it, and then color it in that amazing way he colors everything.  It’s taken me more time to write what Garth has to do to draw an epic space battle than it took me to write “and then there was an epic space battle.”

I did that to Garth in Issue 9.  A lot.  Issue 9 doesn’t have an epic space battle, but there are elements that are more time consuming than the rest of this storyline’s Issues have contained.  Spoiler alert: the crap hits the fan in Issue 9, and with so many volatile elements coming together (Danica, Grex, Bill, the Supernova Dragon Lords, the last surviving Void Angels) there’s a lot of work resembling everything I mentioned above.  We had two choices: we either keep to our original schedule and make Garth cut corners to stay on-time as possible, or we add just one more week of Races so Garth can have the time to make the best looking Issue he can.  And he always does.

It’s going to be worth the wait.  We’re both really excited about Issue 9.  I know I am.  I’ve seen the script.