Requiem: An online graphic novel by James Roden. "Nothing's ever easy."

For the first time in the history of the comic, we are doing a calendar for sale for 2010.

I’ve been keeping this under wraps for the last couple weeks while I got it done, and now I feel comfortable with spilling the beans.  12 pieces of artwork were cooked up just for this little project, a few things you may have seen before, others I know you haven’t seen yet, but will.

At any rate, Deviant Art has it at http://www.deviantart.com/print/9239000/?itemtypeids=10#

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

We had a little trouble with our comment submission button being hung up by a paypal donate button on the left sidebar.  Since I’m not in the mood to troubleshoot the error, I’m ditching that side button for now.  I just tested the comment system, and everything is working good again.

Thank you Void Hamlet for letting me know

If anything else screwed up, shows up….email me at requiemcomic at gmail dot com

Thanks all!

Jessica Tindal has been out of commission since Day 10 of Second Harvest.  She’s been hospitalized for a little over two months now.

Thorongil Caladharas has been out of the picture for about three months now.

His mind can reach far….

And sometime in the next couple of weeks real time, some of you are going to be really pissed off at me.

That’s all.

There’s been some conversation going on in the comments section of one of the previous comics that’s talked about the mesh of different elements from different time periods that have made appearances in the comic so far, and it got me thinking about things.  So tonight, I’m gonna ramble for a while, and hopefully, you’ll enjoy the ride

One of the things that made the most impression on me as a kid was a movie called “Streets of Fire.”  It was criminally ignored back during it’s release in 1984, but to a 10 year old kid, it planted the seeds for a lot of things.  Streets of Fire was a stylistic mix of 50’s cars, and 60’s Motown, and 50’s style with present day elements buried in the background.  And it has this architecture style that was 40’s/50’s with a worn look to it that suggested to me that the movie was set farther in the future (early 21st century, maybe).  It was rainy streets, and neon reflecting in puddles, and mist and steam at night.  And it had this dystopian air to everything that called to mind a lot of the scifi that I was coming to love as well.

It was advertised as a rock and roll fable at the time of it’s release, and to this day there’s hasn’t been anything like it since.

“Another place, another time.”

One of the things that I loved about was the mixture of styles.  I loved the fact that you didn’t quite know what world it was set in.  You didn’t know where it really was from.  It was the world next door, maybe.  A world where the A-Bomb hadn’t been invented, and WW2 had finally ended a couple of decades after it did here.   The ambiguity was what appealed to me the most, though.  Because when you think about it, it could be set any where, or any when you wanted it to be.

Back when a 10 year old kid saw this in the Scottsdale Mall movie theater in South Bend, Indiana (a theater, and a mall that doesn’t even exist anymore) it blew his tiny little mind   The idea of it, this mixture of different elements has been what drove Requiem from almost the beginning.  It’s as much about the uncertainty of what world you’re really on as much as it is about the answers to the mysteries.   It’s fabulation, or at least what a ten year old kid thought of fabulation as.

One of our characters; Jonathan Delrain said something once comic-wise that I’ve said many times over the years “Nothing without purpose”.  There’s a reason for everything.  From the dream symbolism floating through the current section of the comic, to the crystalline reflection that permeates many of the things you see here, even to the use of dark glasses among the people who have been changed by the Sentience Virus (and it’s not just to hide the fact that their iris’s have shifted color)  But while there is a reason for everything, the feel comes from the eyes of a ten year old child.  A ten year old child who realized that what he wanted to do more than anything else in his life was to build worlds.

For the first time in the five years that this comic has been running , I’m doing a donation drive.

Let me explain, right now I am in desperate need of a computer hardware upgrade.  For the last few years, I have been doing Requiem on a Gateway laptop, which is in urgent need of an upgrade.  Because of it’s age, I am still stuck on a 160gb hard drive, and because of the age of the tech, there is no way to even upgrade it, and because of the files needed to do these comics, pulling anything off is not an option.  Heck, right now, after pulling off everything I can, I can barely even defrag the thing.

What my plan is, is to get a good bare bones system for the comic, and with your help, get into this century.  I will be doing artwork and wallpapers for anyone who donates, and I will try to put together some special stuff for you as well.

So, I’m hoping for your help.  I’m putting together cash for this on my end as well….and between myself, and all of you readers out there, I hope to make it happen.

Thanks!!!!