Introduction, Setting, and Detailed Plot Outline

Welcome to my development diary for Crazy Uncle Jasper (working title)! This blog will serve as a depository for line art, fully colored panels, style guides, and commentary from anyone wishing to critique my progress. There isn't too much here now, but tomorrow I will be picking up my new scanner from the post office, at which point the first style guide, containing all of the major characters from the first part of the book, will be posted.

Crazy Uncle Jasper uses a composite style of artwork, which is to say that the background art and the characters are drawn independently of each other, with the character art inserted onto the background art using a scanner and Paint Shop Pro. The current plan is to color the book and add the dialog using Paint Shop Pro, but currently my primary focus is finishing the inking and adding the characters onto the backdrops. Note that this isn't a "sprite" style of artwork; even though the backgrounds may be consistent between panels (which adds a uniform style from page to page) each character is redrawn for each panel... after all, everyday people don't look exactly the same from moment to moment when they are engaged in conversation, so why take the lazy way out and draw in such a manner?

The bulk of the book takes place in a fictional land which evokes notions of medieval Europe, early 20th century Venetian city life, and the more positive elements of antebellum Southern culture along the Mississippi River. The basic plot of Crazy Uncle Jasper is as follows: the titular character is an eccentric old man who makes a living going from town to town peddling his highly temperamental household appliances. At the start of the novel, he is on the run from a mob of angry villagers whose money he has obtained through commerce of dubious legality. He takes refuge in an old abandoned citadel that is eerily preserved and maintained. In this building, he encounters two children who are being attacked by a trio of adorable brain-eating goblins known as the Growlies. After quickly dispatching the creatures, Crazy Uncle Jasper learns that the children, Pandora and Simon, are from our own world: on a class trip to a natural history museum, they got lost and wandered into a secret room, containing a strange suit of armor and an enormous dragon skeleton. Next to the suit of armor is a sword with some very strange properties; upon being picked up, the sword flooded the room with blue light, and the forms of a mysterious knight, wearing the aforementioned suit of armor and wielding the sword, fighting the very-much alive dragon, begin to take shape. After the blue light ceased, the sword opens up a portal to Crazy Uncle Jasper's world, which the children go through, and they emerge in the citadel, only to be attacked by the Growlies. As the children try to defend themselves from the creatures, the ancient and fragile sword shatters, leaving Pandora with the hilt and lower third of the sword. Crazy Uncle Jasper dispatches the Growlies, and they flee into the portal into our world, the door closing after them. With the sword broken, the children cannot open another portal, leaving them trapped in the fantasy world.

At this point, the angry mob bursts through the front door, and Crazy Uncle Jasper frantically searches for an escape route. He is successful, and opens up a trap door under the children's feet, who he follows after. The trap door is of course magical, and deposits our protagonists far away on another part of the world (Uncle Jasper realizes how far away they are due to it being night when he entered the house and the middle of the day wherever the trap door sent them). Using his ambulatory compass/piggy bank, Crazy Uncle Jasper and the children find a way to the nearest town, where Jasper negotiates passage on a riverboat ferry captained by the honorable Sir Moses Weatherby, an old man who is fond of jam, which Crazy Uncle Jasper of course has in abundance.

However, Crazy Uncle Jasper and the children are not the only passengers on the riverboat. Weatherby is also transporting a mysterious Kestrel, a race of giants who ordinarily prefer to remain silent, as they speak in a language of lyrical wishes, and reality reshapes itself in response to their spoken melodies. Upon a quick visit onto the riverbank to explore, Weatherby, Crazy Uncle Jasper, and the children are all captured by the sinister Torment Spider, a creature of pure malice who takes pleasure in the pain of others, and the Kestrel must find and save them with the help of the ambulatory compass/piggy bank, which since its introduction has developed sentience and the will to live.

Meanwhile, far away but closer than one suspects, a shadowy woman known only as Hydra has broken into the cathedral of the Order of the Unbroken Circle, making off with an ancient relic which bears a striking similarity to the broken sword which Pandora is still carrying. Pursued by two winged beings named Yana and Ignatius, she is charged with bringing the amulet to the one man crazy and brilliant enough to decipher its true nature: Crazy Uncle Jasper.

This brings us to the end of chapter four. The background art is done for the prologue and chapter one, and the dialog is written for the prologue up to the end of chapter two. To reveal any more plot than this would spoil the surprise...