Devil's Wake Part II: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

In this post I hope to follow up on the progress of Devil's Wake and answer some of the questions regarding changes to the story after the monthly contest.

An often-asked question from people who read the original December entry titled Aeon of the Dead is, why the name change? In fact, that was not the first name change the story went through. I had originally submitted the story under the title Blades of the Damned, a rather obvious title but for whatever reason I thought it had a good ring to it. However when I was accepted into the contest, I was informed by Zuda that the name had been taken as the name of an item in World of Warcraft. Darn those clever video game designers! In order to get the story into the December contest I only had a couple of days to decide on a new title, and I ended up with Aeon of the Dead, which I liked because it added a futuristic sci-fi feel to the zombie genre. Although I was a little reluctant to use the "...of the Dead" cliché, I decided that it may help to have an genre-specific title to gather votes from fans of the genre, plus the relief that it passed the Zuda legal department was enough for me to forge ahead with that title.

After the comic won the contest in December, I thought the name-change saga was behind me, but I was wrong. Under closer scrutiny of the legal department it was decided that the title was too similar to Aeon Flux, so it was deemed necessary for me to change the title once again. Actually this time around I was somewhat glad to change the title, as I had already developed the story into something rather unique (or so I hope) and I wanted a name that stood more on its own rather than being simply a twist on a familiar convention. I had several days to come up with the new title, so I racked my brain and made a very long list, out of which Devil's Wake came up as the clear winner for myself as well as passing the legal department's standards.

As I mentioned before, as my title was going through more name changes than Prince, I had also been developing the story. This resulted in numerous rewrites and changes in story direction. I had originally intended for the story to follow a movie screenplay story arc, focusing on the main character's journey. However, this simply did not work very well with the format and I was unable to tell the first arc in a satisfying manner in sixty pages, and the slow buildup required for movie writing didn't seem to fit the pace necessary for this type of delivery. After scrapping over a hundred pages of thumbnail layouts, I eventually settled on an ensemble style cast and a focus on quicker-paced episodic adventures. The unfortunate result of this is that the synopsis on Zuda is now out of date, but a new synopsis has been submitted and should be on the site soon.

I tend to believe that everything happens for a reason, so even though the journey is never easy, and in fact feels something close to walking through Mordor barefoot, I always try to keep myself on the sunny side of the street and hope that the final destination will be worth it in the end.