A slow start:

Behold a project that took me far too much time to begin, but once I did it was non-stop until I finished. I sat on the prompts that were provided to me for several years, never finding the time (or so I told myself) to get around to slapping this thing together, but in September of 2020, I forced these crooked fingers of mine to be productive for a change. Thus, The Masked Stranger was born.

Art and paneling:

The story isn't particularly remarkable, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to embelish it with some unconventional paneling. Abandoned was the idea of standard rectangles in favor of something that felt a bit more organic. This was one of the most difficult aspects of the project; a war was waged between creative layouts and readability. Some battles may have been lost on either side along the way...

As far as planning went, I had not gone full-moron and mustered enough wisdom to plot out the story via thumbnails instead of immediately jumping in, a bad (but maybe sometimes not so bad) tendency. The characters on the other hand, ah, I'd figure those out as I went along.

The cover & logo:

I actually created the illustration for the cover nearly a year after completing the comic, in August of 2021. It was mostly a way for me to try illustrating the character using some techniques I had developed after creating some of my first Card Alters. I simultaneously created a cleaned-up logo, y'know, to feign some sort of profesionalism. I'm not a bum.

The end result:

This was easily the largest artistic project I had worked on at that point. It's strange how difficult it was to begin but how easy it was to proceed once that first step had been taken. Although I may wince at some (most) of the art in this now (not that I've necessarily improved much since then), I am very proud of how this turned out.

The following 3-word prompts for Character, Setting, and Conflict were suggested to me by my friends.

Note: Unfortunately, in the time between receiving the prompts and my actually creating this, I had lost any record of which of my friends was responsible for which of the following prompts. A lesson learned, as I now keep this sort of information in multiple places moving foward.

Character: "The Masked Stranger"

Setting: "Haunted Corn Maze"

Conflict: "Ghosts Stole Juice"