(final cover art may vary)
It is my enormous pleasure to announce the return of Linda Medley to active Castle Waiting duty, beginning in April, after a three-year hiatus.
Castle Waiting Volume Two was originally supposed to run for another few issues, comprising a series of additional and concluding scenes, but Linda was unable to complete that material at the time. Since the main story was finished, since it looked as if Castle Waiting was definitely over, and since there was huge demand for a follow-up to the original Castle Waiting graphic novel, we released the chapters that had been completed as the Castle Waiting Volume Two book.
To my surprise and delight, Linda recently wrote me to say that she wanted to go back in and finish the book the way she'd intended it. As I write this she is putting the finishing touches on that long-delayed 16th issue, with two more to come after that, to REALLY wrap up the story. And her work is as great as ever. Here is a sample:
(click images to enlarge)
You may notice that the lettering is quite different, and, we feel, hugely improved. While we thought the typeset lettering in most of Volume Two was fine, we have, in the intervening years, become so adept at creating fonts from cartoonists' lettering that we decided to try that for Linda, and the results are quite stunning. (Believe it or not, this is Linda's hand lettering that we've used, even though it's so neat it looks like typography.)
You may wonder, where does that leave the epilogue-less Volume 2 book collection? Our plan is to let it lapse for the next year (in fact, our distributors just ran out of copies, so it is out of print), and then reprint the book with the new chapters added, and the entire thing re-lettered with the lovely new font.
Since we realize this may be a bit frustrating to loyal Castle Waiting readers/buyers, we are doing a few things that should help. For one thing, we will be offering a subscription to the three $3.95 comics (completing the story) for a supercheap $8.00. (Not bad for 70 pages of great new Medley comics.) And we are trying to figure out a way to accommodate those readers who bought the original Volume 2 book and would prefer the new one but aren't totally thrilled about being asked to fork over money for a whole new book. We don't want to be like Peter Jackson (well, New Line) who makes fans buy new Lord of the Rings DVD's every two or three years!
So stay tuned… and in the meantime, enjoy the imminent return (next month) of one of the greatest and most beautifully drawn fantasy comic books of all time… Castle Waiting!