Frostbound – Advanced Unlettered Preview

So, as you may have gathered if you talked with me in the past year about anything Guild-Wars-related, I really like Icebrood Saga. It was not without blemishes or a bit of "what the hell were you thinking" in some places, but when all was said and done, I was left with a very tight, very emotionally driven and very character-strong narrative that I could not help but love even without considering it was predominantly about charr. Which is quite something coming from me, since I had been openly dreading the idea of charr civil war since its announcement. But the result was, even to this point (and only in my humble opinion) the best story Guild Wars has on their roster. So of course I had to make a comic about it. Hell, I wrote several.

And they all crystallized in Frostbound, which is my loveletter to each and every episode of the Saga. Its current storyboard has 17 pages and there's a chapter for each of the main stories from Grothmar Valley to the fallout of Dragonstorm.

The more I thought about it, the more it felt right to deviate from my usual formula of "lets make a missing scene about a beloved NPC" and write something from the point of view of the nameless common charr trying to make sense of the political turmoil and upheaval driven by Bangar's madness and lust for power. It was the perfect stage to show how different life experiences in otherwise agreeable people can gradually leave you with gaps in ideals that seem way too wide to bridge.

So I latched onto that story. I wrote, I storyboarded, I created new characters and weaved in some very minor existing ones, until I had the story of an Ash scout and a Blood warband, loyalties versus ideals, comfort of tradition versus the potential harm of tearing away from it. And most importantly, about how you can have your life torn away from you by someone using you as canonfodder in their mad power grab.

And then, a very real shithead powerhungry maniac decided to unleash hell on a sovereign nation. And over the past two months, it slowly crept up on me that as things are right now, I will have to let this story go.

I already got some iffy comments about the Brightblaze painting, and that was nowhere near the levels of what I'd get into if I publish a story where its core narrative is "war is shit and there's good and bad people on both sides of it" when there's a real life conflict literally almost on my front porch where one side commits the shittiest atrocities known to man since WW2 AND brazenly tries to blame them on the victims. Yet at the same time, I cannot simply rewrite it. I can't gloss over the game's canon when it comes to stuff like Smodur's mass executions and treatment of formerly-Dominion soldiers by the "good guys" when that's one of the main narrative beats.

Frostbound was and still is a very personal project of mine, because this is the first time (and probably only time) where I write dominantly about charr you do not know from the game.

I mean, writing all the lore snippets and missing scenes about existing NPCs is tons of fun, don't get me wrong. And I'm certainly not planning to stop. But Frostbound mutated into something way more personal, way closer to stuff like SF or the pirate story. It is by far the most daunting and most expansive charr project I made, and whenever I make something this personal, I am mentally and physically unable to not give it my all (which is how I spend dozens of extra hours nitpicking it, which is how everything takes forever... and no, I do not consider that a good thing, I'm just very bad at stopping it).

In brief, I chose to go all-in on a project close to my heart and ended up being forced by outside influence to shelve it half-done. So, you know. The usual.

Unlike Shattered Legacy, which I honestly would have just killed off if it wasn't for my then-main patron deciding he would like to see it done, I want to work on Frostbound. I want to get it done, I want to share it with you all. But this... this is not the time and place for it.

So Frostbound, against my wishes and hopes, gets set aside. For now, temporarily. And since I went all-in on it, I'm not sure when my next charr comic will happen, because the only one that's far enough in production to have a rough time estimate on is the Howl one (which will probably get scheduled for around the 10th anniversary of the vanilla game). So my charr content will be just sketches and paintings for a few weeks before I dust off some of my other storyboards (probably Orphaned Legion, so I should get used to drawing Brightblaze a lot...)

In the meantime, I'll focus on SF and pirates. Which are long overdue, anyways.

I also slowly started to go back to streaming, so if you follow me on Picarto or are in the Discord server, you can catch me there. I will be around in the coming days with some more charr. Just of the non-sequential variety for a bit.

That said, if you're here predominantly for charr comics, I understand why you feel like this is the course you do not wish to support. If I may have a last request on you if you do; please, be on the lookout for content creators and artists from Ukraine. If you can spare the coin and support and like their stuff, please, do so. They sure as hell need it right now.

Thank you and stay safe.