What is Char Grilled?

Char Grilled is a fantasy webcomic. It primarily follows the adventures of Cameron Trueflower, a young man from Faelin province, and Laeana Uldar, an young elvaan woman. I have six volumes planned, each one roughly equivalent in story length to one novel or film.

When does it update?

I currently add a new page every Tuesday. I also try to change the vote incentive every Tuesday, and it’s usually concept art, either from the most recent page or of something that hasn’t appeared in the comic yet.

Wait… who are you, anyway?

I am Richard Hallett, a Computer Science student and artist living in Norfolk, England. I am currently 21 years old, although that is likely to change some time around October this year. I enjoy reading, watching films, drawing, playing computer games and reading webcomics. I have a deviantART account.

My favourite webcomics are The Zombie Hunters by Jenny Romanchuk, The Phoenix Requiem by Sarah Ellerton and Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell.

How did this start?

I have been drawing pictures and writing stories for pretty much as long as I can remember. My interest in the fantasy genre probably started when my father read me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien as a child. The furthest back I can trace Char Grilled’s ancestry is a story called Super-Powered Monsters I thought up in year five or six in primary school, although the only real survivors from that stage are the character Gorph and the theme of phoenixes (which haven’t been mentioned yet in the comic but will be). The next step was a story I worked on in high-school, simply called Phoenix. It was a strange hybrid of sci-fi and fantasy. It was not very well thought out so also died an early death, but many of the themes and characters in it would go on to inspire elements of Char Grilled.

What came to be Char Grilled eventually started when I was on a walk at Sandringham with my friend William Keeble. We were chatting about potential characters and magical powers, as we are prone to do, and we came up with the core ideas for the characters who would become Cameron, Brutus and Lukas. We decided to work on it as a collaborative webcomic, but over the intervening years I took the lead role in character and storyline development and it slowly but surely became my project, especially as more elements from Super Powered Monsters and Phoenix got integrated into it. Will is still the person I bounce ideas off and his comments and suggestions have always been really helpful.

At one point I realised I needed a name for the webcomic, preferably referencing phoenixes or fire, and somehow “Char Grilled” just stuck.