Sadly, I must report that Oracle won’t be updating for the forseeable future.  Let me begin with an apology to readers who had come to enjoy the story; you are the reason this was a difficult decision, and very much appreciated the support, the comments, and the interest in this work.

At the moment, I can’t say for sure what the future of Oracle will be.  I love this story too much to leave it forever, but right now it is officially out of my work schedule.  There are a whole lot of reasons for this, some personal, some professional, but I’ll share the creative reason here.  Oracle is written for a different medium than webcomics.  Specifically, its written to be a graphic novel, with a span of seconds between pages.  I like the pace, the atmosphere, and the worldbuilding, but I’ve come to see that it doesn’t work with a week between pages.  When I became convinced of this, I realized I could either re-tool the entire story, or shelve it.  Since I am still partial to the pages as they stand, I opted for the later.  It will stay right here for people to read, but there won’t be any new updates.

For those of you who like the work, I can tell you a few things for certain.  One, I will be pitching a print comic in 2010, which, if successful, will be an ongoing project.  Also, I will have a new webcomic out in early 2010 (first three pages are already roughed out, along with reams of concept work), and it will be available to read, free and in its entirety, as soon as I am able to get it running.  Just keep your eye on adammasterman.com for details and announcements, and, as always, thanks for reading.

Adam

So, this one’s a little more ambitious than the others.  Not exactly pixar quality, but its a fun experiment, and I’m trying to keep the file size low enough that it doesn’t take forever to load.  Let me know what you think.

In the future, cities will be built in the most inconvenient places possible.  I think.

Actually,  the lush but impractical design of Queticotala is a plot point, but that comes later.

I dragged out drawing this page for weeks.  I knew what I wanted, basically, but I’m terrible about background/scenery.  I built the basic shapes in 3D, but detailing takes me forever.  Finally forced myself to sit down and finish, and now I’m pretty happy with it.  The toning was actually quick and fun; been using PS a lot lately and its making me quicker.

And thus begins chapter 2.  This one is set far in the future, which opens up the whole question of what that might/should look like.  While I’m more concerned with story in this chapter, I have some definite ideas on depicting “the future”, which hopefully will come across well here.

A new chapter!  As you may have gleaned from the image, this chapter takes place earlier in Lydia’s life.  The unresolved ending to chapter 1 will stay that way, for a while at least (not forvever, I promise).  This chapter will also be ink drawings instead of pencils; its gotten to the point where I was just inking with a pencil, so I’ve just replaced it with some inking tools.  Hopefully it will look better, without being a jarring transition.

The finish line, at last!  This page is an experiment, of course, and only time will tell whether I stay with this idea or not.  I’ve remarked elsewhere that so called “motion comics” are not, in fact, “comics”.  They are animations (and often poor ones, at that).  A comic is sequential images, not simply moving images in a comic-booky style.  This line of thought, plus playing around with the photoshop animator, gave me the idea that you could have the motion without losing the comics part.  Here, the motion is just an enhancement of the image; the sequence remains, to be “read” in the way that comics are read.

Whether this is a fruitful path of exploration remains to be seen, and its hampered by my lack of any real animation skills.  I’m liking it for the moment, if only because its an effect unique to webcomics.

For the record, panels one and two were drawn and toned separately (though they share the same structure under-drawing).  I like this method of showing time elapsing, but I don’t like the cut and paste effect.  The differences here are slight, but I think it helps it to read as two separate moments.  That, and I feel guilty about cut and paste when I only update once a week.  ; )

One more page to go!

Possibly the goriest page yet; my fiance was very disturbed that the horses were shot as well as the bandits.  I had in mind some of Robert Jordan’s battle scenes, where horses are often casualties by design.  Here, of course, I just thought it emphasized the brutal nature of Lydia’s wrath; be assured that no animals were harmed in the filming of this webcomic.

I hope the second panel doesn’t give people a headache (its starting to give me one).  Maybe I could chalk it up to verisimilitude.  I think this is the most panels I’ve crammed onto a page yet; a tight squeeze, but I’m happy with how it came out.

Not much to say here, except that this was originally how the chapter was supposed to end.  Obviously, that means it doesn’t end here; it took another twist that ended up surprising me.  Four more pages, then its on to chapter 2!