Mages of Mystralia: Our fabulous adventure in the world of Comics

In June 2016, Mages of Mystralia was announced at PAX East in April. It was important to find a way to make the lore of Mages of Mystralia known to the public before the full release of the game in 2017. So why not deepen this universe that we had the chance to create in collaboration with Ed Greenwood, great creator of Dungeons and Dragons universes such as The Forgotten Realms.

Our marketing team, had the best idea in the world, producing a comic. This is how we knew George Rohac, President and Strategy Master at Bread Pig, a company that promotes the emergence of artists by allowing them to remain independent. He allowed us to get in touch with some artists from the comics world. After some suggestions and phone calls, we chose the best possible people for our project, Brian Clevinger (writer) (Atomic Robo, 8-Bit Theater) and Carey Piestch (artist) (Lumberjanes, Adventure Times).

We were already aware of Brian’s work and we knew we would be satisfied. Then when we saw Carey’s drawings. We immediately fell in love with her style! It was a perfect fit with the artistic direction of our game. We couldn’t really find a better way to represent the universe of Mystralia, and we weren’t disappointed, working with them was just fun from start to finish! We also met Tess Stone (Not Drunk Enough) who took care of the lettering of our comic. He was referred to us by Brian since he already did lettering for Atomic Robo. We really had the best team and we would love to do another comic with them.

For the production, our calendar was pretty tight. But everything went very well without any delay. We had to have the first 8 pages ready to put online on Hiveworks‘ website for August 29, 2016, and we also wanted to print the pages in a booklet to give to the players present at our booth during PAX West. It was precisely during this event that our adventure with Dark Horse began. Dark Horse is one of the few if not the only comic book publisher who also specializes in video games. They have franchises like Zelda, Tomb Raider and many others. It’s therefore not surprising that they have a booth at a video game event such as PAX. Cassie Nantais, our former Community Manager, brought to Dark Horse some copies of the first 8 pages.

At that moment, Cassie met Dark Horse Sales Manager and began to discuss the comic, explaining the context and mentioning the people involved. That’s how about a month later we wrote to the Sales Manager and she put us in touch with the Vice-President of Licenses. Our communications with Dark Horse were officially started! 

Subsequently, it took a lot of time since we had to finish the comic first. Our goal was to add two pages per week on Hiveworks until March 2017. What we accomplished well! We had an average of 5,000 people who followed our comic online and we were delighted about it. 

Now it’s available in a trade paperback issue through Dark Horse since January 17, 2018. We are really proud of the path we’ve traveled and our adventure in the world of comics. Hoping that this is only the beginning!