Baglands. Episode 24.

Thus ends the Baglands saga.

Its been a fun journey, for me, my kids, their fictional counterparts, and hopefully all five of you who read through my increasingly sporadic posting schedule to reach the end.

I discovered some surprising things about my children's senses of humor and their still maturing understanding and awareness of standard storytelling tropes. This final installment, for example, totally perplexed them. My son wanted to know how they got back home in their beds. Even after I explained it, he seemed dubious.

I didn't have any particular goal in mind in terms of story length or depth, other than I wanted to be sure to wrap it up before the semester was over. I figured it would go on for maybe a month, but that was before discovering that the story bags took a little more of my attention, causing me to occasionally take a break when I wasn't feeling up to it. I started with a very rough idea of the basic classic framework of heroes enter the unknown land, receive counsel from a wise sage, endure three trials on their journey, and finally reach home once again.

Given my lack of intent, I was pleasantly surprised to discover I had apparently developed an innate sense of comic-story pacing over the years. You see, the story ended up at 24 episodes (essentially 24 pages). This is significant because that is the length of the standard, traditional US comic book is 24 pages (or was, prior to some budget stretching issues at DC a few years ago). The few other times I have written a comic story (24-hour comic day), I've used this convention. Discovering I instinctually pace comic stories out to 24 pages--even when plotting them out a handful of pages at a time, staggering over several months--just kind of made me happy. Even moreso because for the first time in three years, I failed to take part in 24 -hour comic day this year. And each bag, once I figure in time for plotting and writing probably took a bit under an hour. Which means I more or less did my 24-hour comic this year. I just stretched it out over a few months.