How It All Started
Hi and welcome to Dances in Exile. This comic is a real passion project. I’ve been working on the stories and these characters for close to twenty years off and on. T’Orianna started off as a D&D character. I wanted to do something different than your elf, human or half orc. So I created a female warrior from another plane/world and set her down in a harsh world where her people come to train and sharpen their survival skills. As we played week after week her backstory started to fill out and I quickly noticed that I had a whole galaxy of material to work with. The more I thought about her and the eL’nathians the more and more stories started to come until I had a dozen or more spiral note book full of stories. For years I did page layouts and rewrote dialogue and add characters and worlds and races and… you get the idea.
But this comic isn’t a one man show. I had a lot of help from friends and family along the way (some, if not most, I tricked into listening to my rants). But there was a plethora of people that brain stormed with me and inspired me. Far too many to name here.
I finally, I met Jake and Sean Baggs at a comic-con we were attending and we got talking and they decided that they were interested in working with me on this project. I can’t thank them enough. Jake’s pencils are strong and bold. Sean’s coloring is striking and delightful.
I hope you enjoy the comic as much as we did making it. I am proud of the results.
Jan 7, 2020
~Delfino~
The Story
Dances in Exile is a science fiction story that takes place in a far of quadrant of our galaxy where alien races and faster than light travel is common place. The main characters are T’Orianna, aZ’ariah, and oR’thargurys.
The stories follow T’Orianna, a female, of the warrior sect of eL’nath, as she is unceasingly chased through several star systems, nebulas, planets and space stations, by her ex-fiancé, oR’thargurys. Besides the many bounty hunters, oR’thargurys also sends his right hand man and lieutenant of his personal guard, aZ’ariah, to chase her down. Unknown to oR’thargurys, years before aZ’ariah was T’Orianna’s academy trainer and one time lover. Now aZ’ariah must choose between honor and duty, and the love he still feels for T’Orianna.
Dances in Exile is an adult comic book with very hard language, sexual content, and graphic violence.
T’Orianna’s Background
T’Orianna was about to get married to a noble of a powerful eL’nathian House. The marriage was arranged by their parents in hope to strengthen power and influence. Unfortunately T’Orianna was a very arrogant woman. Up until now she had been undefeated by any opponent. On the day upon meeting her future husband she boasted and bragged of her fighting skills, and declared that she could take on any male even her husband-to-be’s men. In jest he said that she would have to fight him to reach his men. With that she challenged him to a duel. He did not take the challenge very seriously and they started to tussle. By the time he realized that T’Orianna was not joking he was face down and unconscious. When he woke up he was livid with rage and wanted to kill her for making a fool of him in front of his men, but T’Orianna was gone. Her father spirited her away and put her on a ship in an unknown direction.
Her parents had agreed that the less people knew the better, so they made arrangements to marry him to T’Orianna’s younger sister and to hide T’Orianna from him. But oR’thargurys’es pride would not let the matter rest and he vowed to hunt her down and make her pay for his humiliation.
Click the following button to see the full digital comic!
Creators
I am a life long lover of all things Geek-dom, but Sci-fi and Fantasy are at the top of my list. I have been drawing and writing stories since the age of 4, when I met my childhood friend Vincent Amoroso, who showed me my first comic book. As a child Lost in Space and Land of the Lost had a profound effect on me. These were my gateway drugs and cemented the foundation for my love of the genre. Then in 1973 my dad took me to my first movie in the theaters. That movie was The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and from then on, I was enraptured more deeply than Narcissus was with his reflection. I fell deeper into the rabbit hole in 1977 when my friend Kevin Tomasello introduced me to The Hobbit. And of course, that was the same year that Star Wars came out. ’Nuff Said!
I’d like to thank:
Daniel R. Horne – for being a mentor but mostly a friend.
Tony Williams – for his technical knowledge
Brenda (my wife) Valkyrie, Alexandria, & Galadriel (my daughters) – for listening to my endless rants and prattling.
Amerigo Falciani – for many a brainstorming sessions (basically listening to me go on and on about my stories).
Kevin Tomasello – for introducing me to The Hobbit.
Vincent Amoroso – For lighting the spark and introducing me to comic books.
Jake Baggs – for his pencils on “The Tech Wizard”.
Sean Baggs – for his coloring on “The Tech Wizard”.
Jake Baggs and Sean Baggs:
A brother duo hailing from Burlington, Vermont.
Pencilist / Inker – Jake Baggs
Colorist – Sean Baggs
Additional works and information can be found at www.baggsbrothersart.com
Yannick Oliveira:
An artist located in Cape Verde.
Pencilist for the “Balls The Size of Jovian Moons” story
Daniel R. Horne:
Pencilist for the “The Bazaar” story
Translators:
Elio De Filippo – Italian
Irian Mishonkova – Russian
Jennifer Guay – French
3-D modeler:
Alexandria Falciani
Web-Meister:
Rick Meale