Xanny’s Curse Blog

So how did you all like the new page? I hope you guys enjoy how we’re still keeping the tension of the situation even though we haven’t updated the comic in a while.

In any case, we wanted to talk about continuity in Xanny’s Curse, the character designs, and story plans. Don’t worry — we won’t be revealing spoilers in this post. We just wanted to give you guys an idea of where Xanny’s Curse is at in this point in time and to give you all an idea of what you may or may not see.

Since we’ve transitioned the comic to a new artist, we talked about how Xandy needed to be redrawn and restyled in order to fit the new artist’s style. What we didn’t talk about is how we needed to do that for every single character that has or has not appeared in the current comic at all.

Thanks to our outline (yes, your English teachers told you that outlines help right?), we managed to find the situations where we would introduce certain characters into the story and have the ability to add new characters. While adding characters sounds like a ton of fun, we were aware of the fact that people didn’t like it when there were huge casts of characters that existed throughout the story. People became easily alienated by new characters coming in and having to be forced to go back to older pages in order to determine who they are. In our artist’s design, we wanted to exemplify their personality in every single look that they have - so you can really tell who they are just by looking at them.

A great example is Xandy, which is arguably one of the more difficult characters to design since she has a “distinct” personality. Xandy, deep inside, has a male soul trapped for who knows how long. We had to figure out what approach would be best if we were to redesign her. From the onset, it was clear what needed to have happen: Xandy needed to look extremely feminine but dress up in normal, boyish type clothing. The decision was made early on to make Xandy your typical voluptuous blonde haired, blue eyed well-endowed beauty. The catch was, that Xanny would try to avoid accentuating these features by wearing more manly clothing.

With this decision made, we found that we needed to have some liberties as to how Xandy is drawn in the newer pages. With these guidelines clear, continuity had to suffer in order to provide a much clearer, visual picture (no pun intended) of who Xandy is and where she’s coming from.

So how are we solving continuity issues?

Continuity is a problem that’s caused only by the previous pages and we’ve already planned on rectifying that throughout the series. We are planning to go back and re-drawing some of the key pages of Xanny’s Curse in order to maintain a level of consistency throughout the story. Don’t worry though - not much will be changing in the pages and you won’t miss any important “new” parts to it. In other words… we’re not going to “George Lucas” the thing and make Greedo shoot first.

Since our artist is working on finalizing the character designs for the people in the first Act, we might take a little longer than two weeks to display the next comic. I understand that we have placed a timeline of two weeks for each comic, but we wanted to make sure that everyone knew this by going to this blog. I would highly recommend checking this blog to see new character designs and scheduled updates to the comic as we feel that this is a great vehicle to tell you guys when the new page is going to be up.

I wanted to give you guys a great opportunity to get something really cool from us here at Xanny’s Curse to celebrate our webcomic’s return… desktop wallpapers! To download the appropriate size, just click on the image with the appropriate size label beside it and it should take you directly to the image itself. Or, you can just right-click and select “Save As…” and download it to any folder on your computer!

Finally, if you can email me at xandy[at]xannyscurse.com and show me your desktops with this wallpaper, we’d highly appreciate it. We like seeing other people’s desktops and, in this case, it’d be real cool if our artist can visually see that people are downloading the wallpaper that they’ve worked real hard on.

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Thanks for welcoming back Xanny’s Curse and we’ll see you with an update soon!