One year, one month, 127 pages and a near nervous breakdown later I'M DONE!!

May 6th of last year I started penciling and inking the first page to Sherlock Holmes: The Painful Predicament of Alice Faulkner after several false starts. At about 2:30pm, I finished cleaning up the pages, fixing the lettering, flattening all 127 pages and burned them to a disc ready to be published.

And I have to say, this was probably my most difficult project to complete to date. It's also the longest book I've put out to date. The previous longest was Diary of the Black Widow which ended up padding out to around 88 pages.

But with this project there was a lot more planning and reworking the original script. Even while I was working on the pages I was making changes to the script.

William Gillette wrote a really great play. Well, actually expanded a play which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had initially wrote. It's somewhat an omnibus of all the great Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He borrowed elements from The Sign of Four, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Final Problem just to name a few.

What that does is introduce people to Sherlock Holmes who had never been exposed to the character as well as introduce them to some of the classic stories by weaving the elements of those stories into a brand new tale. And hopefully they'll enjoy their experience enough to want to look into those stories which the play was based on.

One of the things when I was approaching adapting the play into a graphic novel was the fact that I had to approach it like I was making a movie. With a play, you do not have the luxery of cutting to different scenes. You have to pack all the action into one scene (or Act).

So, you couldn't have Holmes and Watson at Baker Street and then sudden cut to Alice Faulkner being held prisoner at Edelweiss Lodge. Alice Faulker would have to be one entire act while Holmes and Watson would have to be another act.

When I started adapting the play I wrote it out straight as each act originally appeared. But the play itself is a bit too wordy and besides the fact Sherlock Holmes doesn't really come in until about halfway through the first act.

So, my first step was to condense the scene and pick up the pace. And that meant omitting both characters and dialogue that I felt really didn't move the story along and just was really there for filler material.

Like I said, this is something you have to do with a play because you're trying to pack a lot of action to stretch out a scene.

The result I feel gave the story a bit more a mysterious edge and it made you wonder where some of the incidental characters fell into the scene.

But now it's done!! Needless to say, a lot has happened between May 5th of last year and now. Some good and some heartbreaking. But I've always found that some of the best work out there comes out of some of the most trying times.

Take Paul McCartney's Band on the Run. Not that I'm arrogant (or stupid) enough to ever compare myself to the accomplishments of Sir Paul. But that album is a prime example of how something really fantastic came out of a really trying time in his life.

In the end, I hoped that the changes I made to the play still remained true to the spirit of both William Gillette's play and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character.

Thank you again Rori for your marvelous graytones and cover coloring! And thank you Jared for proofreading and going over my lettering and punctuation :-)