A New Era. Again.
11:50 PM, Monday, 10th August, 2009 - by Asha

As you can see, the excellent first comic by new artist James Miller is now online. It's very different style to what has been seen previously, but I think he's captured the characters perfectly. A new banner should be going online sometime soon.

As you will most probably have also noticed, this is the beginning of a new storyline, and the first for a while to focus on the aliens. One of the bigger challenges for me when writing A Game of Fools has been balancing the main alien invasion myth-arc with other unrelated subplots, and it's a balance I'm still in the process of working out completely. After the original abduction storyline, which went on a fair bit longer than I was originally planning, I wanted to take a break from the aliens for a bit and just focus on some gag-a-day stuff and then a shorter, purely comedic storyline. This was partly to just spend a little while developing the characters (and introducing a few new ones) and their world, and partly to really reassess where I was going with the main plotline and spend some time developing a more concrete backstory and overall arc for the alien stuff. The stuff set in the alien spaceship in particular was some of the hardest stuff I had to write - it was the first time I really had to balance jokes with telling a coherent, reasonably action packed story - and I really wanted some time to work on getting that balance right for the storyline that's just begun.

That said, looking back I now feel I may have gone a bit too far in the other direction and that I probably shouldn't have done that much gag a day stuff - a few people have commented that it made this webcomic feel unfocussed and even that it perhaps was set in some sort of Planet Eris-esque world, where the alien abduction was just a one-off storyline and the next will see the characters going back in time or fighting vampires or something, which was not my intention whatsoever. Rather, the intial abduction storyline was meant to serve as a prologue of sorts to the main myth-arc involving the invasion, which I guess begins today.

I probably should also point out that there will still be a lot of gag a day stuff and unrelated subplots like the resturant storyline in the future - my aim is to try and create a more or less equal balance between storylines focussed on the aliens and storylines that arn't.