About the comic

Shifters was born in early 1998 when I decided I wanted to try to do a comic. Being a long time comic and cartoon fan, I'd always wanted to do one. I wasn't a particularly good storyteller or author, but I wanted to do a story about stuff I liked and was passionate about, namely werewolves, vampires, cyberpunk, magic, and some other stuff thrown into the mix. I felt that through doing a comic I could improve my art and my storytelling skills. At the time I created it, I was a student at college and didn't exactly have a lot of money to have it published traditionally. But I had a website, a fairly active one, and a scanner. I was websavvy enough to make a site for it and put it up to share with my friends who also enjoyed the same subjects could see what I had done. This was quite a bit prior to the 'webcomic boom' we have now, so Shifters, all told, is fairly old.

I didn't really get 'serious' about it until I moved to keenspace in 2001, where the comic would update automatically. I also got a writer at the time and commited to update several times a week. As the years have passed I have improved vastly both in terms of art and storytelling. The first two issues were my lame ducks, but the third issue, " Tears of Blood" was the debut of my writer, James Strocel. James wrote up to "Wolf's Clothing" under my creative direction and is largely responsible for the early feel of Shifters. While I had input and directed the story, he still ultimately wrote it. This allowed me to focus on the art without the story overhanging my head. However, James and I did share some creative differences which caused a certain degree of tension and he was also a very busy guy. Eventually it turned out he was too busy to really continue and I wasn't very happy with where things were going. They were getting to far away from my original vision, so we amicably parted ways.

When James Strocel left I took over the writing chores once again. I try to put out as much as I can, but it seems life is always getting harder and not easier and my time dwindles more than I would like. Shifters is not an infinate story. It will end one day. I have other stories to tell in the same world, " The Beast Within " being only one of them. I will hopefully be able to finish this story, and hopefully you, the reader, will still be with me at the end.

Some people have pointed out that the story has elements of White Wolf's Werewolf the Apocalypse in it. However, Shifters is NOT, I repeat, NOT based on WW:tA. It is in fact based on Cyberpunk 2020's Alternate Reality Sourcebook:Night's Edge. There is use of traditional werewolf mythos, of which White wolf also uses heavily, thus there are some commonalities, however, they are coincidental from the same mythology sources. Yes, both have vampires, yes both have werewolves and other werecreatures, yes, both worlds have fantasyish beings, mages, and humans in a modernish setting. However, if you actually look at the two, beyond that, that is where the similarities end. I have not actually read any whitewolf source in detail and am only passingly familiar with it.