Hello, for those of you visiting my blog for the first time, I'm Keith "Nar" Kappel, co-founder and one of the main writers at http://www.fandomcomics.com where we create Star Wars fan comics and Star Wars D20 Fan RPG material.

We recently added a new member to our core team in Dawn Gallagher, an old friend of both myself and Ryan "Tron" Brooks (the other co-founder). We have known Dawn for something nearing a decade now, and she is the first person we have brought on in a somewhat administrative capacity. Her official title is Head of Public Relations and Promotions, which basically means that she is in charge of getting more of you fans to become regular readers and visitors at our site. The best thing about her appointment is that it means that I no longer have the burden of promotions resting soley on my own shoulders. This should give me more time to write.

Now, Dawn has a lot of experience in this field, and as she was checking our site out on Google and seeing how we popped up in various critical search strings to see where we needed work, she noticed that my blog had a tendency to pop up more frequently than my actual site. Because of this, Dawn advised that I post on my blog a bit more often, hence, this current entry. With that prologue out of the way, lets get down to brass tacks.

Fandom Comics has been around for almost two full years now, and Id like to think we have come a very long way since our opening mere days before the theatrical release of E3. As of today, 23 original comic pages and two covers are posted on the site. The comics have not gone up as quickly as we have hoped, though 23 pages and 2 covers for the 23 months we have been open is still a pretty good ratio.

The site also contains a rediculous amount of RPG material. Well over 275 Original NPCs (Some with multiple stattings), another 193 characters covered in sidebar, 22 alien species, 20 Prestige Classes, and 76 weapons have been statted and written up to cover our Clone Wars D20 Fan Sourcebook and the smaller sourcebooks supporting our Cracken's Crew web comic. We have also had our crack team of artists produce 33 original pin-ups depicting characters for our Clone Wars D20 Fan Sourcebook.

Id like to stress how massive an amount of material this is. Many sites that have dozens of contributors dont accumulate this vast a library of stats over half a decade, and we have done it largely in the past year with only two writers, myself and tron.

As great a success as the past two years have been, we don't intend to rest on our laurels for our third year of operation. One of our first goals is to increase our annual comic page count from 12 to 24 in our third year. We also hope to hit a major milestone in completing our first full issue of Cracken's Crew, our flagship title following the adventure of a group of Rebel Alliance Intelligence Operatives.

Also on the comic front, we have literally half a dozen comic projects in various states that we hope to kick off in our third year. Tron has his comic, A Slicer's Story, which we may have just found a new artist for. We have high hopes to get this exciting story rolling this year. Tron also has another story he wants to tell that I am extremely excited about, but that I can't currently reveal any details on until more is finalized. I also have several stories in various states that are being worked on. I have a young Luke Skywalker story plotted, a third of which is scripted. I have a very special/secret project I am collaborating with www.trashcompactorchronicles.co.uk on that is plotted but not yet scripted. That should definately come out on the site this year. I also have an Ander (one of the Cracken's Crew team members) mini comic which has recently found an artist and that we should see pages from early this year. Beyond that, I have 2-3 other story ideas that I would like to develop and flesh out more fully as some of these other projects get cleared away.

In the RPG department, we will definately be continuing with our Clone Wars D20 Fan Sourcebook. We are hoping to complete the first entire draft of the document before the end of our third year of operation. There are several more sections left to be done for this book, including the Republic Military NPCs, Clones NPCs, Fringe NPCs, Vehicles, Droids, Starships, Equipment, Creatures, Planets, along with several non-stat chapters that focus on the organizational make-up of the Republic and CIS, and an original Mega-campaign that takes a party through the entire 3 years of the Clone Wars, from Geonosis to Order 66. We would also like to do RPG supplements for the Tales of the Chu'unthor comic series similar to what we did with the Cracken's Crew RPG supplements. Further, Tron and myself have made a deal to produce Star Wars D20 Fan material for another star wars fan site on a smaller scale. More on that project when the deadlines start coming up and we hopefully hit them.

One of the aspects of the site noticably absent in our second year was fan fiction. The first third of a fan-novella detailing the origin of some of the Cracken's Crew characters, the Battle of Heg, hasn't had a chapter added in quite some time. It is a personal goal to try and get the middle third of the novella posted on the site during our third year.

Obviously, with the addition of Dawn to our staff to handle PR and Promotions, we are looking to raise our profile and visibility, as well as expand our readership for the site. Dawn is much more experienced at this sort of thing than I am, which means her involvement will hopefully produce two effects. First, it will make our promotional attempts more successful, and second, it will leave me more free time to write, time I often spend promoting instead.

In any case, there are a lot of hopes and goals set, as well as milestones to achieve this year on the site. Heres to a year to look forward to!

Keith "Nar" Kappel
http://www.fandomcomics.com