Castle of Cards is the brainchild of Ashley, also known as her pen name; Sparky. I am Sparky. Hello! n.n
I've gotten some questions about the story since the site went live and I feel now it's about time I answered some of them.
FIRST of all! Although this comic deals with quite a few religious themes, I am not myself religious and I am not vain enough to think that if there is a Heaven/Hell/Puragorty, that my story accurately portrays them. This is just a story and nothing more! Castle doesn't meld perfectly to Christian or any other religion; the mythology I've used for it is a hodge-podge from multiple religions, Dante's Inferno, and my own personal beliefs about how I think things might be if there is an afterlife in any way. I grew up going to a very religious school (the sort of place where chapel every day was manditory) and I can't say I was very impressed by the Christian ideals that were shoved very hap-hazardly down my throat. When I questioned some of the things that were preached about, I was never really given an answer that didn't infuriate me to no end. Argh. Makes me frustrated just thinking about it. Either way, I suppose thats where you could say Castle got it's start. Me trying to make sense of some of these things that just didn't click right with me. I took multiple classes on the world's religions and in the end I settled on taking all of it with a huge grain of salt.
I had started writing the story in, well, story format during college. I had this idea in my head but I wasn't really sure what to do with it; basically it was a pile of miss-matched stories about morality that had vague religious themes and nothing to do with one another except a few characters that kept reappearing. After some time I settled on a solid plot with a solid beginning, middle, and end and I began doing some serious cleanup to make my story into a comic.
I dont think I ever really planned to seriously make the comic... it was more like an idea I thought would be fun. I started making it into an acctual comic after having some real bad shit hit the fan all at once. Really, all I wanted was something to distract me from my own thoughts and doing a comic in such an OCD style seemed like just the ticket and there you have it!
As for the stories themselves, I dont just pull them out of my ass (usually XD.) I have them written out and they have been changed a lot since I originally wrote them. Much time is spent bouncing ideas off of other people and reworking things. n.n I have very patient friends in this respect, and I'm insanely thankful for them putting up with me as I hound them with "What do you think about this!?" questions.
