Broken Frontier

With 80+ pages of story on DC's Zuda webcomics site Road has proved a real hit with readers. As part of Broken Frontier's Inside Look series Road creators Eddie Sharam and Jamie Woodhead give BF a three-part "creator's commentary" on the strip this week, concluding today.

Read Part One. Read Part Two.

Series Premise

Felix is a 'Pilgrim of the Road'. In this world there is one road grander than all others and it runs possibly forever in length. No one knows if the Earth is no longer a sphere, or if it has just increased massively in size. All that is known is that there is a road with populated cities and settlements along it that you can travel down your whole life and it will never end or repeat. Once there was no road like this and the world was a nice manageable place.

The Pilgrims of the Road are a group devoted to finding the Source or Terminus of the Road, and they travel down the Road for their entire lives. When they die, each Pilgrim passes the task on to one of their sons or daughters and then they travel the Road. Chosen Pilgrim families have the knowledge of their ancestors stored in an AI implanted into their skulls. These are ancient artifacts passed through the generations, designed to accumulate knowledge of the Road and aid the current Pilgrim's progress by supplying information from past experiences.

We join Felix as he's readying to leave a city to join the Road again, but this time he's cutting all ties with the Pilgrims. He is one of the Chosen with an AI in his forehead. The Pilgrims are unlikely to let him leave freely without his obedience to their cause assured. Felix is on the run from his fellow Pilgrims and assorted city low-lives while trying to get out of the city and further down the Road.

Page 58

This page came together really easily which is always a good sign. Miah likewise bests the Orphan Elite with ease. The action flows nicely and I liked the idea of using a humble knife to strike down a powerful enemy, almost like an insult. A lot of time is spent planning how to tell a scene in the story. How best to make it effective. This page came together easily which is probably why I like it. It didn’t cause me pain, only the Orphan Elite!

Page 59

Is a rather important page in Road as it marks the final desperate fight of the Pilgrim’s Chapterhouse against the Orphan forces. The mobile headquarters of the Pilgrims for generations finally stops moving and the Pilgrim’s mission is seemingly brought to an early close. The fall of the Chapterhouse is a big moment in Road. None of the characters really expected it to occur, yet it did, and those Pilgrims left in the aftermath have to forge new destinies for themselves.

Page 71

Shows the first of Felix’s downloaded memory flashbacks. It introduces Galen for the first time and links him to Felix and the Elder. This all sows seeds for the future!

We did think hard about how to show these flashbacks and whether they should even be drawn in a different style. In the end we thought that would be too jarring a transition for the reader, especially for the longer flashbacks, so we went for the data borders whenever the flashbacks appear, borders that hark back to the image of when Felix first downloaded the memories.

The name for the character Galen came from a dim and distant memory of a history lesson. Galen being one of the most important people in the early history of medicine, his drive and determination to try and understand the human body even though most of his experiments and ideas caused outrage at the time seemed to fit our character perfectly.

Page 74

Here Jay shows her combat skills and we get to see her true hair! Not enough people in comics wear a wig these days (o;

She’s named after a guy I used to sit next to at work. He told me to name a character in Road after him, so sorry Jay, it had to be a girl! Her character is a good fit with Felix and Raoul though, as they make their way from Kaiden’s Rift and further down the Road.

Page 77

The reader hasn’t seen Michael, Felix’s cousin, since the Pilgrim Chapterhouse fell, and here he returns with a character only mentioned before, but never seen, the Surgeon General. These two will come into play later on. The ‘mutoad’ was an addition we both really liked, perhaps more than it deserved!

The future of Road

With 83 pages (at time of writing) of Road available to read up on Zuda.com and having completed 91 pages to date, we’re starting to near the 100 page milestone which will feel like a big achievement. There are 20 more pages after that until the end of Road Season 2. Do we know if there will be a season 3? No, which is why every page of Road until page 120 will be one that counts. Knowing there is a definite page count of 120 pages for this story arc presented a real storytelling challenge. There is so much Road story to tell that we have to plan and prune very carefully so that we don’t squash in events in an unnatural manner. Road has taken on a life of its own and the characters have become very real to us. I hope it continues as long as the Road….possibly forever. (o:

Check out Road at the Zuda website here.