Welcome to the brand-new the-stronghold.net. Abandoning the page-a-day format of the blog, we now offer entire issues as complete PDF downloads or flash interactive books so you can peruse in style. Special thanks to Jon Christoffersen for his hard and generous work on making this happen.

In other news…

Well, it’s been a long time coming. I know it’s been a good wait, and we don’t have much of an excuse beyond being generally busy. Five months late busy. But after all my waffling and kvetching, after endless worry and tears, it’s finally arrived. I refer, of course, to Stronghold #6.

This is our most polished issue yet. We have, in the past, tended to rush the last phases of these things, often missing glaring errors or awkward dialogue that needed to be corrected, which we simply didn’t notice until publishing. Those final steps are often excruciatingly dull, and when an issue is finished, we’re often pretty gung-ho about just getting it online already. So we, and by we I mean I, the writer and editor, tend to once-over it and give the go-ahead.

I did not do that this time.

The end result is an issue that should be clear and well-constructed, and moreso than usual. The story, too, I hope to be engaging and evocative, with a distinct personality from the ones that came before it. I try to make each issue its own beast, with a new voice and a new mood to suit both the events and the narrator. I found quickly that I couldn’t rely on voiceover; it’s a bit of a crutch and lets me write prose when I’m trying to write a comic. So I have tried to limit that sort of internal monologuing to Ruth’s issues, and the others get their own forms of self-commentary. Ruth monologues; Marc, being in large part the anti-Ruth, does not; Emily explores her psyche in vivid hallucination; finally, Greg is an artist, and makes his own comics.

On 24 May, 2010, the fifth issue of this fine publication, Stronghold: Hope is Not Yet Lost, posted it’s final page. Due to the nature of our book, we can’t really produce a page a day, and have opted to keep with the issue format. This does, however, Guarantee fairly long down-times between issues, so we’re going to be gone a bit while we work on issue six, tentatively scheduled for July 2010. In between then and now, we’re going to try to put together a ten-page minibook with a guest illustrator while Kevin draws our main product.

While you’re waiting, I invite you to check out our forms and post some junk in there about this weird little book we’re putting out. I hope to hear from you guys. We’re making this book for you, so your thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks,

Brian M. Visaggio