corneralley.comicgenesis.comHome | Corner Alley 13 - The life of an elven immigrant

A completed fantasy Web comic by Emily Ryan . START at Story 1: The Invasion of Pointy Ears OR at Story 2: Chthonic Tourism Archives Illustrations Links Comics drawn after Corner Alley 13: News 2011-05-25 The Story of the Bad Egg If you enjoyed Corner Alley 13 you may also like my latest project, The Story of the Bad Egg . Be warned: it is highly peculiar. 2011-04-03 SPX at Kulturhuset I will be at the 2011 Small Press Expo in Kulturhuset, Stockholm the 7 th - 8 th of May along with plenty of books to sell. I also hope to present my latest project at the expo: The Story of the Bad Egg. It is a mixture of a fairy tale and a disaster movie, presented in a half comic, half picture book style. Naturally, it will go on line too. 2010-11-07 Ok, you win. I’ve decided to use the old version of the scene for the book . I didn’t like the new scene much either. Neither is perfect, but I guess the old one is better. Thanks for the discussion! It’s been very interesting yo read your thoughts on this. Part of the comic is now in print, but I will not take the site down. It will be here for as long as Comicgenesis allows it to be. I forgot to mention this before, but I made a guest comic for John Allison’s Bad Machinery. If you haven’t read John’s work before you need to remedy that immediately. 2010-10-24 Re-drawn page Replaces pages 20100228 and 20100307 . Will fix in archive later. Update October 25 th : Ok, I haven’t changed the page in the archives yet, because like many others, I’m not quite happy with this page. The reason I wanted to change the pages linked above was because I felt they complicated Cole’s motives needlessly and there was too much conversation right after Drel had been hit by a fireball. Drel really shouldn’t be talking so much when his state will cause him to lose consciousness a few pages later. I don’t know how I feel about the new version. I don’t like it, but I can’t objectively say whether or not it is better than the first version. I’ll let it rest for a while before I make a final decision. Next weeks update will be the cover for the book. 2010-10-12 Last page So here it is: the last comic page. I’ll post one of my chapter end pictures next week and after that the cover for volume 2, but as far as comics go this is the last one. There is a story line after this, one about Dusty and the faeries, but at present I haven’t decided whether I should make this as a complete comic, an illustrated story or just plain text. I am very slow at drawing comics, so I don’t want to throw myself into another long plot line without feeling – at least initial – enthusiasm. Thank you for staying with the comic to the end. I know it got slow in parts and I plan to go back an edit some of that. I’ve learned a lot during the seven years of making this comic and I am quite pleased to find I don’t regret the effort. Effort seldom is a cause for regret except while you’re making it or when it’s ahead of you. Drawing comics has become an unbreakable habit, so there’ll be no change there for me. I will post my future projects on my personal website . I hope you will enjoy them too! 2010-08-22 Finally: a costume change! One of the things I like drawing are costumes: strange clothes, slovenly clothes, preppy clothes – clothes that send a message about the person wearing them. So I’ve been quite dismayed that Noelle, my frequent outfit changer, had to wear the same thing for almost a hundred pages. I got so tired of the Drow disguise and I am very, very happy that it is gone. Cole’s outfit, on the other hand, never seems to get old! 2010-08-19 White van, black van If you can’t see the shaded version of the page, please refresh your browser window. This is the end of the chapter. Now only an epilogue remains of this story arch. Stay tuned to find out who died and who survived. I am going to read through the previous chapter and re-write parts of it. Some pages were too wordy and complicated the character’s motivations needlessly. I have an idea of what I want to cut but first I want to let it settle a bit. I wrote the chapter in bursts and changed several things at the last minute, literally as I was drawing the page, so it might be interesting to see how it reads in one continuous sitting. To comment on a subject raised in the shoutbox: when outlining the story I assumed that shoe polish would be difficult to remove from skin – that it would withstand water and smearing. This isn’t something I really know to be so. My only source for this is a Jeeves & Wooster short story by P.G. Wodehouse. The story claimes that shoe polish can only be removed with butter. I don’t know if sir P.G. leant on facts of the actual world or whether he just wanted to create a situation where Wooster would be forced to break into a house at night to acquire the dairy product, get caught in the act and chased from the scene. In that story, the level of veracity wasn’t really important, because it was funny, but maybe I should have checked up on the shoe-polish question before writing the device into my own work. The properties of shoe-polish in connection with skin is not staple information, so probably I would have had to conduct experiments on myself, which, if the hypothesis were correct, might prove hard to reverse. But now the story is almost complete, and I can lean back in the knowledge that it is too late to do any research on the subject now. References: The photo of Ascha was mentioned by the politicians . 2010-07-19 BOOM! Gold star points to the people who recognize this strange place despite its changed appearance. For those of you who don’t, here is a reminder: the site of the Drow invasion . The cement truck has been left there after plugging the tunnels made by the drilling elevators. 2010-06-14 Sport gags The last panel was difficult to draw. The general pose is okay, but the panel lacks the energy and speed I wanted it to have. It is supposed to look like the Matriarch is returning the fireball as if it were a baseball and she a batsman (I say batsman because using the words batter and pitcher gives me culinary associations). I have tried visual sports references twice before ( Cole goes bowling , Ascha is a baseball bowler ) but the result is never any good. Visual gags are always difficult because they require actual drawing skill and sports are particularly difficult for me, along with battles, because it’s something I don’t draw normally. Despite this I repeatedly write scripts that force me to draw those things – which seems like Einstein’s famous definition of insanity, but hope springs eternal and next time I try it... it might actually work. The world football tournament is on. England played the USA but I was to nervous to watch the match. Now that I that I know the result I think I was right not to. Unrelated to the world of sports, I am still at a loss to why the monthly calendar is gone. 2010-06-06 Problem with website The server, Comicgenesis, is having problems and the site is not displaying correctly. This has been going on for some time but I haven’t been paying proper attention. At the time of writing the monthly navigation calendar is not showing up at all and the advertisement is displaced. In case you cannot se the latest pages, try refreshing your browser window or use the links below to navigate. I apologize for the incovenience, hopefully the problems will be solved soon. 2010-05-09: The tunnel to the Surface 2010-05-16: What is Cole’s problem? 2010-05-23: Admiration of the Matriarch 2010-05-30: Flashback to Cole’s childhood 2010-06-06: The Matriarch’s response 2010-05-14: References Four days late, but an update all the same. A quick memory primer – for those who can’t remember events that happened two years ago – to explain why the tunnel looks like this: Cole on the subject of tunnel construction , Cole on America’s defenses after the invasion , How the drilling machines work and for good measure Noelle should not have interrupted Drel ,...