Okay, back to work! No more cowering from the summer heat or running off to get married, time to start getting ramped up for the launch of book 2 soon. Here’s a page from the original comic, featuring Sam after a long, no good, terrible, horrible, very bad day. After you read Book 2, you’ll probably pick up on something else about this page, so  you might want to make a mental note to come back to it later.

One thing I wanted to mention is that I realize that many don’t want to have visuals of novel characters presented to them; they would prefer to let their own imaginations shape the characters. In general terms I agree with this (and I always think the cover paintings on fantasy novels don’t match what I imagine the characters to look like at all), but this is kind of an unusual case.

This series was a comic first, so pretending I don’t know what the characters look like would be a lie. That doesn’t mean you have to accept my versions, but I’m not going to pretend they don’t exist.

Next time, more art and maybe some talk about my current research for Book Two…I’ve really got to settle on a name for the damn thing already.

There was a sequence in the comic that TPWBM is based on where the characters basically went inside a Final Fantasy game, and this is Sam’s FF incarnation. Fans of the series will recognize that he’s dressed like Squall from FFVIII, a character he shares certain traits with.

A lot of these references only make sense to FF fans; for example, Dark Knight is a class of character that comes up in several games so Sam’s “Dark Matter Knight” is obviously a take on that. I decided to post it because it’s one of my few images of Sam in color, even though a lot of the text is probably irrelevant for most readers.