About
The Legend of Kir-Sia often, although not always, updates once a week on Monday (midnight GMT -6). The process is automated using the Comicpress theme for Wordpress. Lately it has been updating once a week “when it’s done.”
While we don’t want to reveal too much about the story, here’s the gist of it: some friends have to save the world from a bad guy. If you’ve ever played a JRPG, that should seem somewhat familiar, right? There’s castles and monsters and magic and swords. The similarity ends there, really. Drama, comedy, action, a plot we hope is twisty enough to satisfy.
About the creators
Riess — The Artist! Viennese. Been drawing for most of his life (after the requisite motor skills for holding a pencil came together). A suspicious person, according to Canadian border security. And Canadian bouncers.
SquidDNA — Author. Schemer. Learning a little about art from Riess and more about Wordpress and CSS than he would like. A Mississippi native feeling at home in Chicago, he is finishing his graduate work in Molecular Biology. He looks forward to teaching college students about microbiology.
A bit of history
The project that would later become Kir-Sia started in early 2003, when Riess put together a very loose framework for a fantasy parody story - just some sketches and a handful of characters at first. Over time, the world began to grow, and stories that were worth telling began to come together. All new ideas were added to a stream-of-consciousness journal at first.
Riess released the very first page of this comic (what would later become page 13) in the fall of 2005 or something and added pages now and then as he got feedback on it. He eventually got this website up using a wordpress theme of some kind but it was simply for the purposes of collection and display.
A lot of people were involved in this kind of early embryonic stage of the idea, and in late 2006 he got around to asking Squid for help with a scene. He knew what was supposed to happen, but was sort of at a loss as to how to fill it with words. So Squid filled it with words, and then that collaboration became a habit. With some help from deadguy, Riess redid the website while Squid sort of watched and learned, and as Riess fed him works in progress and he commented, he was better able to refine this whole idea of “writing for a comic” which was entirely new. Squid started inventing entire scenes and together they would turn them into something feasible.
By the autumn of 2007 they were both fairly frustrated with the fact that despite turning out pages they both really loved, they were only coming out about once a month. It made the story move so slowly, and they found ourselves trying to cut corners to hurry it up, or else it would never be done. That couldn’t go on, so Riess boiled down the style– at first removing the hand-lined shading which was destroying his tendons, and then somewhat stylizing the characters to ease rendering. They decided to take two months off and relaunch the entire thing with a new beginning and nine pages already done. Squid started writing pages that wouldn’t see pixels for months, Riess started using COLOR, then went back to ink in the interest of story progression. And here it is.