I just added the first ever completed chapter of Heroine Rises. If you look closely - you'll notice that there is no Madeline Harbour! Why is that?

When I started with the idea for Heroine Rises, the protaganist I had in mind was this young fiery police officer called Maxine Rubin - arrogant, reckless, hardy, but wholly sworn to work for 'Justice and the Greater Good'.

This chapter was meant to be the first of many for this Maxine lead Heroine Rises but at some point, I decided to change gears and place Madeline Harbour as the main protagonist. While Maxine would be an interesting persona to follow as she confronts the many obstacles that come with being a woman in a male-dominated police department in a city full of rampant corruption and organized crime... Madeline was a bit better tuned for the story I wanted to tell.

I want Heroine Rises to 'grow' in a sense. I want to expand the scope of the story with each chapter. I want the dangers of the city to reveal themselves to the characters - and in turn the readers - at the same time.

I felt that while Maxine's story is an excellent premise - Madeline's quest to find her father and become a strong 'Heroine' (despite her physical weakness and naivite) would provide a more grounded and optimistic look at the city of Northern Serenity.

That's not to say that I scrapped everything to do with Maxine's story and relegated her to nothing more than a side character - not at all! Notice how I called the story Heroine Rises and not Madeline Rises - the story will center around Madeline yes, but Maxine and other 'Heroines' will get their time in the spotlight soon enough! We just need to get through Madeline's story first.

This chapter will be remastered once we get to it in Madeline's story.

Now moving on to the creation commentary...

The art in this is pretty poor because it was the first full length chapter I went for. Once I finished it and looked back on it to find ways to improve my comic drawing - I noticed that the character's faces lack consistency and my little experiment with cross hatching in replacement for shading didn't work out how I wanted. As a result, I changed my style to focus more on weighted lines than cross hatches which is what is prominent now in Heroine Rises. I also drew up some character references so I wouldn't subconsciously change a character's face here and there. There are also issues with speech bubbles and the flow of the pages but I'll save that for another day.

Note that this chapter (only 8 pages) took me over THREE WEEKS to finish. Comics are no jokes. Massive respect for those artists who churn out quality pages on a schedule.

The amount of time it took to finish this convinced me that I would never finish any comic series in a reasonable time frame so I temporarily shelved the idea of Heroine Rises. But I came back and nowadays I'm still pretty slow (Anywhere between 4-6 pages a week) but I can confidently say that I am getting faster and that the art is of higher quality. The current goal is a page a day - pencils and ink - but we're still not quite that fast yet.