En Garde! is an original historical adventure project combining seventeenth-century swashbuckling, pulp adventure, supernatural mythology, and speculative history.
The project follows musketeers Edmond Delacroix and Darius Dontez through a world of political intrigue, secret societies, pirates, monsters, lost artifacts, and impossible adventures. Developed through several incarnations, from my graduate thesis and early comic pages to webcomic experiments and its current graphic-novel development, the project has become a long-running laboratory for my approach to sequential storytelling.
The current version returns to the project’s central appeal: character-driven adventure told through action, humor, mystery, and cinematic visual storytelling
Finding the Story
En Garde! has evolved substantially through years of development. Characters, relationships, settings, and major ideas have survived while the structure surrounding them has repeatedly changed.
Earlier versions opened with Edmond and Darius escaping the Paris catacombs after stealing the head of John the Baptist. The current story begins with the pair escaping Mariotte’s castle with a mysterious box containing the Iron Mask while pursued by the Stitched Together Man.
The circumstances are different, but the storytelling goal remains the same: introduce the characters in motion, establish their relationship through action, and immediately promise a world larger and stranger than conventional historical adventure.
Revisiting the project has become an exercise in identifying which ideas are fundamental to the story and which can be discarded, combined, or rebuilt.
Old Outline Excerpt:
En Garde!: Quest For The Crown
The story begins in and around the year 600AD with the backstory of three Grail Knights–Sir Percival, Sir Galahad, and Sir Bors de Ganis returned to Camelot with gained possession of the Holy Grail, the Crown of Thorns and the Spear of Destiny after a battle with Judas the vampire who had appointed himself as the artifacts guardian as a means of penitence for his betrayal of Christ (note: vampires have an aversion to silver as punishment for Judas’ betrayal for 30 silver pieces).
Because the Knights were away from England for so long, the wife of Sir Percival (Lady Balance fleur) has fallen in love with another man. Before she can confess to her husband, Percival asks his beloved to drink from the Holy Grail, thinking that if they both drink from it, their love will last through eternity. However, because Lady Blanche fleur still has her unconfessed sin, when she drinks from the Holy Grail she falls victim to vampirism. Unable to kill her, she escapes blaming him, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table for her curse, seeking to destroy Camelot by spreading the vampire curse.
After an epic battle, where Sir Bors dies and is resurrected by the Crown of Thorns, and Sir Galahad realizes the downside of wielding the Spear of Destiny that gives the bearer the power to see and control spirits, demons and angels, the three Knights decide that the three artifacts of Christ can not be kept together.
A Story Across Iterations
The project began as part of my graduate thesis and has since existed as comic pages, webcomic experiments, story treatments, character designs, and visual-development studies.
Each iteration has tested a different balance between history, fantasy, humor, horror, and pulp adventure. Rather than treating those earlier versions as discarded work, I use them as evidence of the development process, examining what still works, what no longer serves the story, and what deserves to be rebuilt with the skills and storytelling priorities I have developed since the project’s beginning.
Continuing Development
The current incarnation of En Garde! brings together many of the subjects that have remained central to my work: character-driven sequential storytelling, historical adventure, creature design, action staging, worldbuilding, and the collision of researched environments with fantastic ideas.
Current development includes rewriting the story, redesigning the principal cast, revisiting creatures and supporting characters, and developing new sequences from the ground up. The goal is not simply to redraw the earlier version, but to build the version of En Garde! that the project has been moving toward all along.
