Happy Birthday (to me?)!

Five years ago, on the year of 2002, I finished ten colored pages and uploaded them to my Keenspace account, which had been active for several months as I tested the code and designed my site.

Five years ago, Derrexi Tzelan arrived at the South gate of Beldatz and got into a whole heap of trouble.

Five years ago I was drawing Nahast on sheets of paper, inking with markers. I drew each frame independently, hoping that I could unify it all in my trusty copy of Photoshop 6. I had a LPT scanner that shared port space with my printer, and I was coloring everything by mouse. The pages were all of different sizes and the coloring was, frankly, of dubious quality, as was my style.

Today, I draw Nahast on a single sheet of Bristol board, inking by a combination of brush and cartography pens, using dipping in a mix of Pelikan school-grade ink with Staedtler engineering-grade ink. I cut the board on a rubber mat so it will fit exactly the scanning surface of my UBS scanner, opening on Photoshop 6 for coloring with a Wacom Graphire tablet, and compositing the lettering on Fireworks, which I also use to export for web display.

Nahast's original fan base was around 500 hits per month, now it's nearing the 20,000 (still a pittance compared to other more popular comics, but, hey :) ). My art style has progressed and my life has seen a series of extreme highs and lows, during which the only constants in my life have been Nahast and the moral support of my girlfriend AngelChyld.

I celebrated Nahast's first anniversary with a fanart contest, with the winners taking a deluxe edition of Big Eyes, Small Mouth d20 (which I contributed material to). The second wasn't as successful, and I didn't quite bother to to do anything special save a special art piece.

So, what to do for Nahast's five years? Expand it!! Today I inaugurate Nahast: Chronicles of the Fifth Age, a new blogsite where I will publish stories set in the world of Nahast, which I will update concurrently with the comic, and hopefully a little more consistently as pure text is easier to produce than a full-color comic page.

So, visit! Bookmark it! Tell your friends and spread the word! Nahast is 5 years old and still going!