Magnificent Creatures | The Every Thursday Free Online Comic

Another Dead Moth in the Water was our first Magnificent Creature. After lots of talk about web comics, Mulele Jarvis and I had come up with this extremely convoluted idea for an art comic. It was going to be an exquisite corpse project in practice. We had no idea about genre or tone or any other aspect of what we were going to create except that we wanted it to be about the process and about reaching into something from art history, something that had never touched the comic book world. We were going to plan as little about the stories as possible - he did not know what I was going to write week to week and I did not know what he was going to draw - we only had the previous weeks’ work.

Mulele and I had put the site together - I’d bought the domain, took care of the hosting; he got the ComicPress installed, took care of the original graphic design. The name Magnificent Creatures came from my abstracting the words Exquisite Corpse and we were both in love with the title - especially when we found the domain available. Within a short period of time, we got the first panels up and we were kinda chugging along.

Another Dead Moth in the Water by Mulele and dale wilson

Immediately in the first panel, we found the project too loose, it needed more constraints. So we discussed having a kind of outline. It would not be too constricting, it would just give us some really basic direction. But this also meant that any focus we had on the story we started would have to be scrapped. Now that I think about it, we did not even have a title for those first few panels, they were just images and text. The title actually came from something Astra once said when she was cleaning out our dog, Griffin’s bowl - I found it beautiful and poetic and thought it might make for a nice title to a story that was for all intense and purposes dead. The digital download version of Another Dead Moth in the Water can be found at DriveThruComics.com.

So now, 3 years later, Magnificent Creatures is about to get another face-lift and start in a new direction. At least for the foreseeable future. It’s going to be the blog for the comic book production/publishing side of DWAP Productions and the weekly will comics will slow down as of the end of The Second. I am immensely proud of having kept up with a new panel a week - roughly - for 3 years. It was a lot of work but also tons of fun working with new artists all the time, getting to see some of them really take hold of the Exquisite Corpse aspect of things and others just draw my silly scripts into reality. But it’s time to run along and work on other projects - more to come on these exciting ventures in future blogs. thank you.

Never enough said.
-dale

After Another Dead Moth in the Water, Mulele and I had a bunch of the kinks out of the way and Butterfly Industrial became the second Magnificent Creature that Mulele and I would create together. We’d done a lot of talking about making something arty and fun and inventive and I think we had a good feel for each other’s interests. For whatever reason, I knew he was going to draw a female lead and so I began formulating internal dialogue that I hoped would be considered counter-intuitive for the character - I wanted her to be a stand-out female character. As things developed, I also began to create a kind of dialect for the world we were developing.

Because my dialogue was a single person’s internal thoughts, I had to write a lot about what was going on in her head, what she was experiencing - it was fun. This gave me a great opportunity to really flush out the world, the character of I/O and the people she encountered. In many ways, this was a fantastic way to generate a huge world of potential. I often think about how much fun it would be to expand on this post-apocalyptic cyber-punk world that we imagined for Butterfly Industrial. Mulele’s art was of course phenomenal and I finished the project with a universe of clans and post-cyberage ideas for stories.
We were both so happy with Butterfly Industrial that we were forced to create a 2.0 version that would go to print and see digital download. The new version had a cover and some other goodies that cannot be found with the original version at MagnificentCreatures.com. Often, when I’m selling the book at conventions and shows, I refer to it as our book where “chicks kick ass.” I take particular pride in I/O being a non-traditional character that does exactly what she pleases and often beats down other people’s expectations. Hopefully, one day we’ll get to do it all again in some longer form stories.

The independent graphic novel series Carpe Chaos has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a concept art book. The team of writers and artists behind the project have amassed thousands of concepts when fleshing out their huge universe, and they are hoping for the chance to share that artwork with fans. The book will include at least 150 pages of imaginative alien creatures along with their environments, technology, and spaceships, many of which haven’t yet been shown to the public. Whether you’re an artist looking for inspiration or simply a concept art aficionado, this book won’t disappoint! Be sure to check out the campaign’s video to see many of the concepts that will be included in the book.