@Lego thanks so much for the feedback and queries, it keeps me on my toes that I know what's going on as well.
Again to answer your questions I'll reveal a fair amount of spoilers since I wont be writing any more of the story.
Yup gotta have a physical book, that's the ultimate thing once you've done a bunch of work. You've got enough content in your own works to print a couple of books yourself methinks :P
I'll do a tutorial on how to produce a printed book from scratch as I'll be making a few more copies for the fun of it, so I'll explain the binding and all sorts in that.
I would casually put the price at £8-10/$10-13 since that seems to be a general price for a new book. I'd feel bad charging more than that, especially for my current quality of work.
Each story took roughly 120 hours of work, so I'd need to sell around 150-200 copies at RRP to make even for the time spent, at a half decent wage. Which, isn't so unimaginable to be honest, like it sounds like a reasonable target.
Chapter 4:
Some backstory on Judas Shoren - he's actually from the military but realised the potential of raising mages from young (with the intention of use in the military, to defend the country) He suggested the state funded school to get mages from any background, especially poor people who would otherwise go missed. But to his chagrin he was assigned as headmaster of the new academy. His general character was based off Roy Mustang from FMA
I was going to throw a war into the middle of the story but it was only a casual thought as it would quite heavily derail the normal story.
Chapter 5:
Thanks I love the chapter titles too. Adds a nice bit of flair and feels very professional :P
The borders are just a black page with a semicircle and square cut out to make the empty arch, and then swirls drawn one one side and reflected. The title pages here were based off the ones from xxxHolic, I was going for a mystical dark vibe, but generally the theme of the images was just scenic stuff.
Since this is set in general medieval times, the school system is not really properly established yet, and this is really the first school of its kinda that resembles modern education, so it has many flaws in it, that's deliberate, but not clearly explained in the sleightest.
My magic system (unexplained in the story) is as follows:
"Mana" is the remaining energy from the creation of the universe, comprised of the combined souls of the 3 beginning gods (partically explained in the first chapter intro)
Mana has a personality and voice, primarily formed of the remaining whisps of personality from the gods, and mixed with emotions and souls of the dead.
"Runes" are the "language of the gods", but bastardised into a nearly unrecognisable form due to oversimplification from when magic was discovered.
Therefore "magic" is using runes to bind the mana into submission to perform a task ("ordering" as opposed to "asking") This is why Serenity can perform a higher level magic such as repairing the broken bowl without runes (one half of the explanation)
The seeking witch backstory:
The seeking witch discovered the true form of magic to her peril in a magical experiment that went wrong when she was younger, and her soul was detached from her body for a period of time and she became "one with the mana". On finally returning she understood the true nature of magic and the true nature of runes, that of incredibly complex symbols (like flowers, as serenity remembers)
Her personality being absorbed into the mana for so long made her sound crazy when she tried to explain it to others, and they disregarded her rambling as crazy speech, and she eventually went wandering around the world for many years.
But having a now damaged "fractured" soul, the seeking witch is unable to keep her soul properly tethered to her body, and is basically losing her grip on reality. Being powerful and knowledgeable she is eventually able to resist/repair the decay to her soul and finally manages to live a relatively normal life. But unknown to her, her children also inherited a fractured soul and generally had short lifespans (serenity's mother died in childbirth). When serenity copies her magic the seeking witch realises Serenity's potential to use magic without runes, and wants to train her to control it and to also prevent serenity's soul from also decaying over time. But the seeking witch is already near the end of her lifespan, and she doesn't know how long her soul can remain attached to her body.
They are both able to use magic without runes because half of their soul is basically connected to the mana directly and they don't need a written form of magic (runes) to do magic.
Unfortunately the seeking witch did not have enough time and started to die. Determined to help serenity she enchanted part of her soul into her ring, which she had always promised to give to serenity when she was older. The ring helps to connect serenity to the mana in the early part of the story and performs the heavy lifting of the spells, but alas it is just a fragment of the seeking witch's soul and is more chaotic than she had intended.
The backgrounds are probably the best in this book of my 4 stories, I think I had more of a solid idea of what each building or room looked like, so I was able to add more detail.
You are 100% correct I don't think I've every drawn an old lady before (I had one in Omega World in the first chapter tho, but that was a filler character)
Yes, since runes are literal characters you have to understand their form to be able to create the runes when doing magic. Although you dont have to form the runes 100% accurately, the accuracy affects the spells strength.
You are also true, I fitted in a lot of thoughts on Kanji into my descriptions of runes, it helped to explain them when I imagined them as kanji :P
Chapter 6:
Modern magic or futuristic magic is definitely a cool concept, and already somewhere in my massive agenda to try out. Would love to see a techomagic combination. Or as you say, just really really advanced technology.
Gradeism totally exists, and probably in real life just as much, although a person can be bullied for pretty much any imaginable reason.
Glad you like all their names. I didn't add too much thought to them but they turned out cool enough.
Backstory on Warren: he's adopted and wants to help out his adoptive father's alchemy shop.
That was my favourite panel and probably still is, except for the really good city shots.
Chapter 7:
Mr Shoren got in trouble for being "lazy" and not making the defensive spell big enough. Yes he protected 98% of the school but now someone has to repair the gates and Mr Brinks is the one who'll have to organise it all so he's annoyed.
Serenity does have an affinity but it's never an issue for the above mentioned reasons. It's water incidentally.
Chapter 8:
I dont have a too decent map of the world to be honest, it's just distances between places in "days of travel" and not too many places to be honest. Neither do I have a map of the city except in "hours of travel" between locations.
Glad you got mad, I was going for quite an antagonistic vibe with the couple she stays with. I was honestly fuming while I drew it :P
Yup would definitely have an awesome character growth moment music playing in the background
Chapter 9:
You are correct, I accidentally used a dark grey instead of black for the lines. I didn't notice until just now, I must have been in full flow at the time.
Yeah the couple suddenly becoming nice was poorly handled by me, I had wanted it to be more gradual over time, but I wanted something to actually happen in this volume so I pushed it forward just to have more stuff happening.
That was one of my favourite panels with the creepy "let me help you up" pose and face combo. I was pretty proud of that shot.
Partly the elitist part keeps coming up because I want to show the struggle serenity has to face, and I wanted to her to deal with bullying but found it hard to plan each negative interaction with the bullies so I recycled quite a bit of speech between the bullying episodes. And also from a bully's point of view, there's nothing between about putting someone down to make yourself feel higher. Bullies are always insecure, that's spot on even nowadays.
You are correct with both predictions, although I never fitted it in, I did want her to get some attention for being related to the seeking witch and having people approaching her (even in the street as the word gets out)
Chapter 10:
Regarding the "good results", that's said by Anna, who is trying to prove her worth to her father despite the fact he wanted a son to carry on the lineage. That would have come up a lot in the next volume where Serenity and Anna become closer friends.
Yeah I deliberately made everyone give poor advice, although some I tried to phrase as helpful but not really helping. Also I snuck in that the teacher thinks there isnt any magic to clean clothes, despite the fact we have seen it used earlier by the seeing witch.
Yup the "determination and guts" was indeed recycled from the same "energetic idiot" personality trope as the other stories.
The seeking witch disappeared suddenly so she didn't have a chance to write a proper letter or explain the true form of magic to serenity. And the seeking witch has already tried to explain the true form of magic but she was ignored as explained above. The letter of introduction she wrote previously almost as part of a will, as she expected that she wouldn't make it and it was to be opened on her disappearance.
Thanks! Since the art quality is pretty low, the double page city spread only took 40 minutes from start to finish I think. I was really gunning it with the house generation speed. I didn't quite get the feel of scale that I wanted, and struggled on variety of houses and road structure for the most part. It looks pretty cool as a double page spread, but a little hard to see the inset panels though.
Yup the heart warmingness is great. Makes a change from the struggles.
Chapter 11:
Yes, objects can indeed be enchanted with healing magic, although it is quite a difficult spell. A more common form of healing magic is done using alchemy in my story, in which magic is used to increase or alter the performance of chemicals, so making typical medicine work more effectively is easier than trying to enchant healing magic directly.
Serenity is reading the explanation from a book in this case, so she doesn't directly grasp that on her own.
Yes she's developing quite slowly. that's mostly poor writing and planning to be honest, I didn't really have a good sense of how she learns magic (the wrong way), only to find out and start learning magic (the right way). Eventually she discovers the notebooks and journals written by the seeking witch, which have since been archived away because they thought she had gone mad. This helps her to find out the true form of magic.
Chapter 12:
Yup poor Rai gets a lot of trouble himself.
Affinity doesn't have too much of an affect on the type of magic you can learn (like the affinity in HunterxHunter), in most cases any advanced mage can use the same magic as anyone else, by using runes. Thats why the pressure is on to learn to use runes, and why Rai tells serenity she needs to do the same.
Yes he's been misjudged for almost his entire school life now, fortunately he's somewhat intorverted anyway, so he's not upset by it, but really wants to be more friends with everyone.
And yes she directly communicates with mana, as explained above as well.
Thanks, it's been a mad project from start to finish. And the longest project I have ever done as well. In fact it broke all sorts of records and stuff. Looking back if I knew what I know now, I wuld never have started it, but I'm so thankful I did. Learnt an absolute ton, which I'll be rambling about soon.
For some reason this manga went really well for the dialogue and characters, compared to the other 3. Not sure why, perhaps I was just more invested in it since I liked the story more, or some other reason I don't know.
many thanks again :P
Topic: Whispering Magic [Prototype] (Read 3265 times)
