Born in the Grave is Done

I completed Magnus Black: Born in the Grave yesterday. At 26 pages, it’s much shorter than my other story, although it was never meant to be.

The last page also sees the return (at least as a cameo) of one of the favorite characters from Alexander the Prince, Lefty Lucy. I originally had planned for Black to give the baby away to an orphanage or perhaps just a friend that owed him a favor. A few days before starting page 25, however, I thought of using Lucy instead. I’m happy about this idea, because it links the two stories together, albeit tenuously.

As I think I already mentioned, I’m going to take a break from working on my comics and turn my attention to my role-playing game based on the Imperium universe. I don’t know how long this hiatus will last, but it should be at least a couple of months. I may not actually wait until I finish the game before starting the next story; we’ll have to see. Either way, I’ll continue to use this blog to say how the game is coming along, in case anyone is interested.

Climax

Perhaps it’s ironic that we saw Children of Man over the weekend, because page 24 (which I published Sunday) involves a baby as well. This is essentially the climax of my story, because Magnus is faced with the dilemma of whether he should go ahead with his mission (which would involve killing the child) or turning his back on the life he had trained for. The image of the baby and his dead mother is meant to hark back to Black’s own beginning when his mother gave birth to him in the open grave. This realization will turn Magnus away from being an assassin (at least one that works for the Imperium), and force him to go underground. This is a new beginning for him, and it will dictate the rest of his life.

Here's a panel from the current page I'm working on (page 25). It's of Black looking at the baby, almost in terror:

A Very Bad Man

After a week long Christmas break, I completed and published page 23. It shows Magnus killing the wife of the main target, Robert Groen. As Black says himself, “I’m a hitman, not a hero.” In another two pages, however, he will have an opportunity to redeem himself, at least to some extent. He’s still not a very nice man in any event, but I wanted to show that he’s not completely dead inside.

There’s a small mistake this page, although it’s intentional: in the first frame you can see that the windows in the bedroom have blinds (shades), but in the third frame, they do not. I wanted to show the cityscape better, but the blinds were blocking too much of the view. Instead of trying to redo the shot from the previous page (which shows the blinds only slightly), I decided to just remove the blinds and not worry about it. ;-)