Shards of Krino
The most recent of my Smack Jeeves escapades, Shards of Krino began its life as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure fantasy comic, inspired by the likes of similar projects online. Popularized by young adult novels that would have multiple paths to read a story by having the reader jump around to pages depending on their personal decisions in "controlling" the character, the CYOA approach for ongoing webcomics was often a bit more interesting due to the very direct, permanent effect that the entire group of readers would be capable of having on the story. It could go poorly depending on the readers, or depending on how an author interpreted commands, but essentially this methodology turned a comic into a sort of public D&D game, where the readers were the players and the author was the DM.
Shards of Krino was a story about three main protagonists: inexperienced human guardswoman Lucy Hale, nervous escaped lizard slave Zijol, and cocky gay demon magician Yaldabaoth. With Lucy embracing kindness to help Zijol, and a magical mishap forcibly binding Lucy and Yalda together and ultimately dragging him along for the ride, the three of them were to go on a journey. What kind of journey? Well, they went into a forest, but beyond that it never got into the fully revealed plot, so... just like most D&D campaigns, really.
Shards of Krino began on June 23rd, 2015, and lasted up until July 11th, 2016, until I wound up cancelleing it after 80 pages. It wasn't that it was bad, but I mostly had lost track of the plot by that point, and I felt dissatisfied with how things were going. Because of the CYOA nature of the comic, things felt slow, and my methodology for making pages didn't feel like it was meeting the quality I would want to see. There were concepts I liked in Krino, but the way it was put together felt off to me, so ultimately I put the comic on hiatus.
This led me to eventually decide to try rebooting the comic, this time just as a regular old story with no CYOA elements. This endeavor was done in January 2018, and lasted a grand total of 9 pages before I had given up. I was unprepared to tackle a more complex, fully-drawn story at that point, and so I decided it was better worth my time to continue working with Leo the Magician instead. This proved to be the right call, especially given how many aspects of Krino's characters and world I was able to adapt into the Leo world and story, due to them both being fantasy stories with flexible nature.
Regardless, though, here you can find all 89 pages of both versions of Krino, for your viewing pleasure. Plus, a bit of bonus content and things related to the comic, such as concept art for both 2015 and 2018 versions. Some of the characters may even be recognizable for those who currently follow me, depending on what they remember seeing me draw 6 years back. Will Krino ever return? Not likely, most of what I liked about Krino has since been reappropriated into my plans for Leo and other characters/stories, so it'd just be a bit redundant to do anything with anymore.
Unlike some of the other comics I've reuploaded to this section, Shards of Krino won't be constantly annotated by my current-day self. Mostly because, since it's my own original creation from the get-go, as well as a more recent work in general, it does a better job at speaking for itself. All you really need to know is that all of the people mentioned on pages were users from Smack Jeeves.