What is Char Grilled?

Char Grilled is an epic fantasy story that follows the adventures of a young man named Cameron, who has magical fire powers, and a mysterious young elvaan woman named Laeana. There will be six volumes of the main series, with the story dividing nicely into two trilogies.

I have tried to start Char Grilled many times and in various different forms, but it is now going to be a novel. A webcomic version which only got as far as eight pages can be viewed in the gallery.

Wait… who are you, anyway?

I am Richard Hallett, a Computer Science student, artist and writer 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, writing, drawing, programming, watching films, playing computer games and reading webcomics. I have a deviantART page.

My favourite webcomics are The Zombie Hunters, The Phoenix Requiem and Gunnerkrigg Court.

How did this start?

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 of primary school, although the only real survivors from that stage are the character Gorph and the theme of phoenixes. 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, and was not very well thought out so also died an early death. However, many of the themes and characters in Phoenix 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 possible characters and magical powers, as we tend 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 project, but over the 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.

When I realised I needed a name for it, preferably referencing phoenixes or fire, somehow Char Grilled just stuck.