THE CINDER ROAD - A Fantasy Webcomic

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~ Chapter One: The Last Dragon ~ now complete! ~

Page 4 • Wednesday, September 22, 1999
the last page of Chapter One

THE CINDER ROAD #4, Wednesday 9/22/99. Panel 1: The old dragon's huge gray-green head comes out of its cave, smoke curling from its nostrils, and looks down with weary eyes at tiny Maren on the ash below. DRAGON: Another knight. How tiresome. Panel 2: Maren walks forward bravely with her helmet under her arm. MAREN: I'm not a knight. Not yet. I just need one scale. Panel 3: The dragon scratches its neck with one claw, like a dog, and a big loose scale falls toward Maren. DRAGON: Take it. I'm shedding anyway. Panel 4: Corvus perches on Maren's helmet while she stares at the scale in her hands, which is bigger than a dinner plate. CORVUS: Well. That was easy. MAREN: ...This feels like cheating. CAPTION: End of Chapter One.

Want to see the pencil strokes? Here's the big version (640 x 673, 105K).

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CHAPTER ONE: THE LAST DRAGON
Page 1 (Sept. 1) • Page 2 (Sept. 8) • Page 3 (Sept. 15) • Page 4 (Sept. 22, right up there)
Chapter Two begins Wednesday, October 6.

~ About Page 4 ~

That's it! That's the end of Chapter One! I've been grinning about it at work all day, and I think my boss thinks I'm up to something.

I've known how this page would go since before I drew page 1. In every dragon story I read when I was little, the knight climbs the mountain and there's a big fight, and I always felt a little sorry for the dragon. He was just sitting there. So my dragon is very old, and very tired, and a lot of knights have come up that mountain before Maren, and when she finally gets there, he's shedding. He doesn't care about the scale at all. To him it's like a hair on the couch.

Panel 3 is my favorite panel I've ever drawn. I wanted him to scratch the way an old dog does, slow, with his eyes half shut, and I spent a whole lunch break on the back step of the shop watching my boss's dog do it so I'd get the face right. The scale is mostly gray pencils with a lot of white on top, because I wanted it to shine like a pewter plate. I used up about half a white pencil on it this week.

And then there's Maren's last line. She got exactly what the knights asked for, and she didn't have to fight anybody for it. So does it count? Corvus thinks it counts. Maren isn't sure. Chapter Two is about what the knights think. (I know what they think. I have it written down. You'll have to wait till October like everybody else.)

-- Wendy

~ News from the Road ~

Wednesday, September 22, 1999
Page 4 is up, and Chapter One is finished! Four pages, four Wednesdays, and I didn't miss one. Chapter Two starts in October. There's no new page next Wednesday, the 29th: I'm taking that week to thumbnail every page of Chapter Two before I draw any of them, which my professors told me to do for four straight years and I'm only now listening. Page 5, the first page of Chapter Two, goes up Wednesday, October 6.
Somebody wrote to ask if there's a map of the valley. There is! It's just too big for the copy shop's scanner. See below.

Saturday, September 18, 1999
Thank you, thank you to everyone who wrote this week about page 3. Most of you said some version of "you can't stop THERE." I can, and I did, and I'm sorry, and it's only till Wednesday.

Wednesday, September 15, 1999
Page 3 is up, and the dragon is home. Panel 3 is almost all black, and black in colored pencil takes forever: I layered black over dark brown over indigo until the paper wouldn't take any more wax, then I did it again. My hand was sore all Sunday. Worth it for the eyes.

Wednesday, September 8, 1999
Page 2 is up. And I got my very first e-mail from someone I don't know, a reader in New Mexico who wants to know if Corvus is ever going to be nice. I asked him. He said no.

Wednesday, September 1, 1999
Welcome to THE CINDER ROAD! This is my first webcomic ever, and page 1 is up. There will be a new page here every Wednesday. I'm so nervous I've reloaded the counter about forty times today. It says 11. I'm pretty sure six of those are me.

~ About Me and the Comic ~

Hi! I'm Wendy Hennig. I'm 22, I finished my illustration degree in May, and right now I work at a frame shop in Portland, Oregon, cutting mats and fitting other people's art into frames all day. In the evenings I draw my own.

THE CINDER ROAD is my first comic. I've been drawing Maren in the margins of my sketchbooks since my second year of school, and for a long time I told myself I'd start the comic when I was good enough. Then I graduated, and I realized that day was never going to come on its own. So here it is: a page every Wednesday, for as long as the story takes. I know how it ends. I just have a lot of road to draw first.

It's the story of Maren, a farm girl of sixteen who wants to be a knight. The knights at the castle told her they'd take her if she brought back a scale from the last dragon. I'm pretty sure they said it because they didn't think she'd go. She went: in borrowed armor that's much too big for her, with a wooden sword, down the Cinder Road and across the Valley of Ash. Corvus, a black crow who talks and is not nice about it, came along to watch her fail. And at the end of the road, in the Mountain That Breathes, lives the dragon. You can meet all three on the cast page.

About the world. I have a map of the valley and all the country around it, drawn on four feet of the brown paper we use to back frames at work. It's taped to the wall over my drawing table, and it's covered in pencil notes. I also have two spiral notebooks about the valley's history: who lived there, where the road goes, and what burned it. Most of that won't be in the comic for a long time, and some of it never will. But I love talking about it, so if you have a question about the valley, please write and ask. I answer every letter, unless the answer is a spoiler, and then I just say "Chapter Three" in a mysterious way. I'm drawing a smaller copy of the map that will fit on the scanner, and when it's done it'll go on the cast page.

~ How I Make a Page ~

Every page is drawn by hand in colored pencil. The computer only sees it at the very end.

1. Thumbnails. First I plan the page in tiny boxes in my sketchbook, about the size of a stamp, usually on my lunch break. This is where I figure out who's talking first, because the balloons have to read left to right.

2. Pencils. The real page is drawn on toned paper, a tan pastel paper that I use on its smoother side, about ten inches square. I rule the four panels and sketch everything in very lightly.

3. Inks. I go over all the outlines with a fine waterproof pen, then erase the pencil. Waterproof matters: the colored pencil goes right over the ink lines, and they don't smear.

4. Color. This is the long part. Colored pencil goes on in thin layers, light to dark, four or five layers for most things and as many as I can fit for the dark parts. The reason I draw on tan paper instead of white is the highlights. On tan, a white pencil actually shows up as light, so the shine on Maren's armor, the smoke, and the glint in the dragon's eyes are all white pencil on top. When the coloring's done I give it a light coat of fixative so the wax doesn't go cloudy.

5. Lettering. The speech balloons are white paper. I letter them in capitals with my smallest pen between ruled pencil lines, cut each one out, and glue it down with rubber cement. The good thing about this is that when I spell something wrong, I only have to redo one balloon. The caption boxes I letter right on the page.

6. Scanning. I don't have a scanner, so Tuesday night after work I take the page to the copy shop and rent one of their computers. Ten inches is too big for the scanner glass, so I scan the page in two halves and stitch them back together in Photoshop. Then I clean up the eraser crumbs, add the title bar across the top, shrink it down, and save two sizes: the one on this page, about 40K, and a big one, about 100K, for anyone who wants to see the pencil strokes. I save them as JPEGs, because as GIFs the colored pencil turned into blotches, like a paint-by-number. I carry them home on a floppy and put the new page up Wednesday morning before work.

About twelve hours a page, all told, and most of it is step 4. I don't mind. That's my favorite part.

~ Link to Me ~

If you'd like to put THE CINDER ROAD on your own page, I would be so happy. Here's a little button. Please save it to your own site as cinderroad.gif, so it doesn't load off mine, and then copy this HTML:

<a href="/Area51/Vault/4008/">
<img src="cinderroad.gif"
width="88" height="31" border="0"
alt="The Cinder Road"></a>

Then write and tell me where you put it, so I can come visit.

— • —

Travelers on the Cinder Road since September 1, 1999:

Write to me: [email protected]
Questions about the valley are my favorite kind of mail.

Last updated Wednesday, September 22, 1999
THE CINDER ROAD and all its characters © 1999 Wendy Hennig