After a slight gap, Graphic Policy’s spotlight on webcomics has returned. This is the feature where we take a look at one of the many comics available online every Monday: Webcomics Weekly (but don’t be fooled by the “weekly” part of the title; the feature may happen more or less frequently than that… as you may have noticed). We’re defining webcomics as any comics published online for free consumption by the general public that doesn’t require a  subscription service.

This week we’re taking a look at Impisha. The strip is created by Tobey Truestory, who was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about the webcomic below.

Graphic Policy: In a nutshell, can you tell us what the strip’s about?

Tobey Truestory: Impisha, once known by many great titles, turned her back on the kingdom she once served, but is thrown into a secret war to win back that very kingdom. Now, she has to be convinced by others to help in the fight against the profane arts that ate the kingdom from the inside out, turning it into something Impisha did not believe in. She’s not eager to help in this fight, but her would-be allies have mapped out a plan to fight as cleverly as the enemy. The end game is to gain the trust of a third party Impisha mistrusts even more, but is seen as a sort of mediator between kingdoms.

GP: How often do you update?

TT: It was slow at first, because I was still trying to figure things out in the beginning of the story. I put if off for a time, got involved with other projects, and was suddenly struct with all sorts of ideas. I picked it back up and tried to put our at least two or three pages a week, but then I got hired on to an Indie publisher, so I was forced to put it down again. After the first project for that publisher was finished, I knew I was gonna have another project to do for them, so I blazed through the pages, almost putting out a page a day. Now that I got the first chapter done in time to start on the next project for that publisher, I can let readers soak in what’s happened so far. I’m really eager to write the next chapter, so as soon as I finish this work for this publisher, I’ll try to go back to two or three pages a week.

GP: How long have you been producing the strip?

TT: If I count all the time I’ve actually worked on it minus the forced breaks, I would day….three months? I’m bad a keeping track of that. Eheh.

GP: Where did the idea for the strip come from?

TT: Several years back, I was playing around with random sketches, and I drew her head. It’s on a receipt that I still have somewhere. I kept stumbling into it whenever I would move things around. Ideas are always running around in my head, and her face would pop up. I thought she was a cool character concept. Small ideas would jump in and our of my mind, but then I started to think about whether or not there was a reason she looked the way she did. I decided there was….that she didn’t always look that way. So, I wondered why. What could have caused her to go…I don’t know, darker? Something bad. Not like a curse. That’s been done. I wanted it to be self inflicted. Ah, betrayal. In a sort of indirect revenge, she turns her strengths into something dark. What strengths? Well, I like chicks swinging katanas, so I started with that. A warrior. Who did she fight for. That group would betray her by becoming something contrary to what she had been fighting for this whole time.

I wanted the enemy to be able to trick her former comrades into embracing something evil. Since she was the best warrior, she didn’t succumb to this influence, but she was sort of outnumbered. After trying to fight something so ingrained in her allies, she turned her back on them.

Enter other characters who want to regain her kingdom. They only see it right that she be the one to fight with them

Why you should care: The art is a unique blend of pencils, inks and digitized imagery that works surprisingly well with the stripped down tale of a reluctant warrior being dragged back into conflict. Impisha frequently features silent pages that allow the action to flow pretty seamlessly. With the series still be relatively new, you can read the entire strip in a relatively short period of time (the silent pages help with that), and it’s worth a look. There’s an interesting idea here that’s depicted more through the art than dialogue exposition, and in all honesty I can’t quite lay my finger on just what it is (at least not enough that I’d write it here), but I’m enjoying the comic nonetheless. Certainly worth a read.

Below you’ll find a page that was originally posted to the site, on March 4th  2016.

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