…….Coming August 22nd 2025……
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Mercenary And The Crystal Eye!
A fully illustrated graphic novel of over *400* pages!! Book II Tales Of Orlen Series.
It’s been a very long road to completion for this book. It began when I, Jaron, was twelve years old and my brother Jade and I were given a Lego pirate ship and a set of goblins and orcs for our birthdays.
These were our favorite toys and eventually I became inspired to make a stop-motion movie combining my love of fantasy and pirates.
I became proficient in the medium of stop motion and I even got a bit of the story completely filmed by 2018. But the story I wanted to tell kept getting bigger and more elaborate and I could feel the restraints of my animation medium. It was around this time when my brother and founder of our studio, Jade, suggested that we instead pivot to graphic novels for my fantasy story.
We had already been exploring the potential of graphic novels with our other projects so it seemed foolish not to apply them to mine. So I started working in 2019 on the first book in the series, Long Live The Emperor, and completed it by 2020.
Then it was time to work on its sequel The Mercenary And The Crystal Eye, who’s rough story concept I had come up with in 2015. I first began illustration in the late summer of 2021 and continued through two moves and many ups and downs.
Through it all, work on The Mercenary And The Crystal Eye was a constant companion and comfort. Both my writing and illustration skills improved massively during this time period and I also hired my background artist Alice after illustrating over fifty pages by myself and realizing that, unless I wanted the book to take ten years to complete, I would need someone to finish and paint the backgrounds I was sketching. The publishing of this book is a major victory for our studio as we now have two titles available to our name with many more to come in the future. I can’t wait to share The Mercenary And The Crystal Eye with everyone on the 22nd of August. It’ll be a day to remember….
