So there we were… we had a concept, some sketches of the characters, and a few single page stories plotted out.

Creating is only half the battle.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned we were pretty new (and naieve) to the whole webcomics scene at the time.  We had some other site hosting us (one owned by a director Seth and I were both fans of), so we didn’t concern ourselves too much with things like navigation and archives and building traffic.  We probably should have done more promotion or more to make our comic more accessible, but we were focused on creating and having fun.

Conflict brings the eyeballs.

As we picked up momentum with our characters, we started throwing out some short story arcs that lasted 3-4 episodes, and response was good to them.  So we wanted to go into a much longer storyline… and that’s when I realized that my original antagonist, though mischievous, was really a “hero”, so I needed to find someone to really challenge these kids.  There are a number of villainous characters to work with in Norse mythology like the various jotun (the shape-shifting Thiazi, the nine-headed Thrivaldi, the fiery Surtr), the underrealm races (dwarves/dark elves), the offspring of Loki, and a number of others.

As I rolled all these characters around in my head, I decided to look back through our archives and as I skimmed over episode #5, I paused for a moment because I could swear the eye had a “you’re so gonna pay for this” look to it as it dropped into the well.  It made me think of an eye soaking up all that knowledge as it worked to gain its freedom from the depths of the well of wisdom.

And it just took off from there into our first lengthy storyline.  I thought it would be neat to reverse roles for this… to follow the origin story of the villain instead of the hero, so we ran with that.  It also gave us a chance to show off some other places in the nine realms of Norse mythology.  And the response was good to it, so he became our young godlings’ main adversary.  Someone to be able to prompt them into action.

And new story lines flooded our imaginations.  It’s funny how a good villain will do that.