The Phoenix Requiem

When it came to picking just one webcomic about which to write I had great difficulty narrowing it down. Initially I had planned to write about Hanna is Not a Boy's Name, but when I glanced at the course resources page I saw that someone had already recommended that. So I went with one of my two second choices, The Phoenix Requiem. It was a toss up between this and The Meek, and both have great merit, but I already sort of talked about The Meek in terms of the authors refusal the reveal their gender when we had our discussion over women in the comics industry and art in general. So I picked The Phoenix Requiem, coincidentally written by a woman, an Australian woman named Sarah Ellerton.

When Sarah began The Phoenix Requiem she already had a large following from her previous comic Inverloch, which ran from June 2004 to mid 2007. Almost immediately upon it's completion she began work on The Phoenix Requiem which she had had in development for a good while whilst Inverloch was wrapping up. The lack of down time between projects meant she didn't lose too many readers in changing projects. In fact she's become even more popular with The Phoenix Requiem than she ever was with Inverloch.

Sarah's main job is not being a webomics artist though, she is actually an IT worker in Queensland and so is able to support herself with a steady job as well as her comics. She doesn't sell too much merchandise, just occasional prints of chapters from the story and limited runs of statues of a few of the characters, so she doesn't make enough off of that to live off. Unlike say Penny Arcade or Questionable Content her story doesn't generate the kinds of jokes and visuals that make a good t-shirt so she simply doesn't make any.

As far as the story of the comic goes, Ellerton traditionally works in an actual plot, not just a daily or weekly gag-strip. There is an overarching story in the traditional sense, the characters are thrust into a situation and the plot carries them through a development of themselves and their environment. Webcomics with plots don't have as much longevity as strip comics because they have a definite stopping point whereas strips go as long as the creator wants to keep drawing them. PvP has been running every weekday since 1998 for Pete's sake. That's a long time in terms of the internet, over a decade.

This blog entry really ended up being more about webcomics in general as opposed to The Phoenix Requiem specifically, and for that I apologize. So I'll leave you with the synopsis as Miss Ellerton herself puts it.

“The Phoenix Requiem is a Victorian-inspired supernatural fantasy story about faith, love, death, and the things we believe in.
On a cold December night, a gentleman stumbles into the town of Esk, gunshot wounds leaving a trail of blood in the snow behind him. Despite making a full recovery at the hands of an inexperienced nurse - and deciding to make a new life for himself in the town - he is unable to escape the supernatural beings, both good and bad, that seem to follow him like shadows.
As they try to discover why, the nurse must question her beliefs and risk her own life in order to protect her family, her friends, and those that she loves.”
-Sarah Ellerton, The Phoenix Requiem, requiem.seraph-inn.com