A farewell to Divine Leap

For those of you not in the know, Divine Leap was my attempt at doing a webcomic. I have been working on it and posting it on DrunkDuck for about 2 years now (I think) but I've decided to stop working on it. I've decided to post a message on DrunkDuck shortly outlining my decision and below is the first draft. I figured some of you may be interested in it as well. But the message I post on there won't have these pesky other images inserted. For the curious amongst you, before I finally decided not to continue with Chapter 2 I had begun working on some pages. None of the pages are finished, some are fairly close to being done while others need some fairly major correcting. But I figured what the heck, why not post them.

I had come up with the idea for the story to Divine Leap a long time ago and let it brew in my head for quite some time and even sketched out some character designs and a page or two. But for the longest time it never went beyond that. It wasn't until talking to my good bud Dave at the local comic shop about his webcomic that I decided to try my luck at actually putting Divine Leap on paper (or in this case, the web). So about two years ago my journey began.

Over the past two years I have become to appreciate even more the work that goes into every aspect of creating a comic book. From original concepts, to generating the story, to writing, to drawing, inking, lettering, etc, etc. I had to admit, it was much more work than I expected. And looking back at the beginning of this chapter I can really see how little I knew. Looking at the ending of the chapter, I see just how much I still need to learn.

So you might be wondering why I'm ending it here instead of continuing on. Well, it boils down to seeing it as a failure on my part. I'm currently looking at 6 users who have favourited it (at least one of which was a friend I kinda pressured into it), only 2 or 3 users who routinely comment on it, and a relatively small number of pageviews. So if I haven't generated more interest by the end of Chapter 1 I have to re-examine what I'm doing. While doing some of that re-examination I look at the weak artwork, the not-so-engaging storyline and dialogue, and the general amateurishness of the book. So instead of tredging on I think it might be best for me to put Divine Leap aside and move on to something else. Improve my skills in another way. Maybe one day I'll want to re-visit the life of Anthony and his quest to find Beatrice but not until I feel I can do it justice.

So in conclusion I'd like to thank all of you who have dropped by to read the book especially for those of you have left comments or votes, those were greatly appreciated. I'd also like to really thank those who took the time to give me critiques on the book either in the comments or in the forums. Feedback from people like mykill (not even sure he's still around) really gave me a sense of where I needed to improve. I'd like to think that I put at least some of their comments to good use. And the support from my friends who actually took the time to read the book like Carl, Jason, and Dave helped me get at least this far. I'm sure there are more to thank so basically if you're reading this, thank you.

So that's it for me for now. Hopefully I'll see you all again soon with something a bit more worthy of reading. Until then, take care of yourself.

Sincerely,

Darrell

PS. Oh yeah, in case anyone cares; No, that's not Beatrice in the bathtub.