Garanos came about as part of a group project that I had with some friends in high school. Each of us had a unique character and they were part of an intertwined story. The comic obviously never got off the ground, but Garanos was still one of my favorite characters, so when I was in my last year of high school, I wrote her story as a short story assignment in my composition class. Feverishly, I recorded all the random thoughts I'd had about her, and at the end, I had a ream of 37 pages. (My "short" story was the longest in the entire class.) I always wanted to make a comic about this character, so that short story is really the birth of Garanos.

In January 2005, I attended Ohayocon in Columbus, OH; I was (and still am) conveniently going to school at Ohio State University. I sat in on a panel by Dave Merrill on how to self-publish one's own comics on a small budget, and was quite amazed at how easy it could be, so over the next couple weeks, I feverishly drew until I'd captured Garanos again on 160 pages of drawings. Some roommate trouble left me without access to a decent computer for awhile, so after that initial excitement, I didn't touch the pages again until that summer. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get enough of it colored over the summer, and I doubt I would've been able to meet my goal of finishing it entirely by the holidays, so the project once again went dormant.

That fall, I took the first course in what would become my BFA concentration, Art & Technology. It was an introductory Photoshop class, and for my final project, I did three color spreads of the original pages, and entered them into OSU's quarterly Art & Technology show. I'd been working with black and white previously, and seeing those six pages in color made me really want to do the whole thing in color, when I had the time.

In July of 2006, my former comic, Jigworthy, slowly slid into hiatus, and to busy my hands I started thinking about Garanos again. This time around, the story has been completely redrawn in a larger, full-page format, and colored with the techniques I developed during my run with Jigworthy. I finished the entire short-story piece in August 2007, with plans already in the making for a sequel. I call the short-story part Volume I, and now Volume II is in progress!

I hope you'll enjoy Garanos; she means a lot to me. Cheers.

Like I said, I'm attending Ohio State University, I'm a 4th year Bachelor of Fine Art student, and I'm hoping to graduate in late 2008. Like everyone and their mother, I've been drawing all my life, but I started on the anime bandwagon in 1998, and have been developing my style ever since. Recently I've been branching out a bit and looking more broadly at drawing styles throughout the history of comics, which is why you'll notice that Volume I is more stylized than the pages I'm producing now.

I can be contacted here: alexheberling[at]gmail.com