Alex Heberling

Fall 2005

The final project for Digital Imaging I was our personal choice, so I decided to do color pages from the first version of Garanos.  I’d drawn the pages at the beginning of 2005, but had slacked off on actually getting anything done with them up until this point.  My coloring style had changed greatly by then into my distinctive lineless style, so once this was done I came to the conclusion that if I really wanted to bring Garanos to fruition, I needed to do it in color, and I needed to update the artwork.

I wouldn’t actually do so until the following summer, but this is where Garanos really began again and became what it is now.  I later put all of the pages from this original version online during my month of hiatus from the comic in September of 2007.

This is Garanos explaining to Styx why she is traveling, and corresponds to pages 47-49 of the new version.

Garanos by now has been possessed by the Harbinger, and Styx is desperately trying to figure out what to do. This corresponds to pages 112-114.

Here Garanos is engaged in the final showdown with the Harbinger, who she has at least purged from her body. I changed the final fight scene in the new version, so this doesn’t exactly happen anymore, but roughly translates to pages 157-162.

A few people have remarked upon how well Volume I of Garanos reads as a standalone story, and the reason for that is because the original short story of Garanos underwent massive amounts of peer review, revisions, and critiques after the original draft.  Further changes were made by me as I prepared to draw these pages in 2005, and even more were made during the two weeks I actually drew them.  The umpteenth revision occurred as I prepared to launch the webcomic, and the result was a very polished and well-paced graphic novel.  I only hope that the rest of the story, Volumes II and III, live up to it in terms of execution.

These pieces were framed together and displayed in the quarterly Art & Technology exhibition Digi-Feast.