Riddles, Mythology, and Workflows
Deciphering the Runic Cypher in Glow #8
Ahoy Mythopoieans!
Spring upon us and over here in Los Angeles we tend to celebrate with the official kick off to festival season: Coachella.
I have ambivalent feelings about the festival, as I’ve never had that great of a time personally attending in person, but I do enjoy catching the live stream on Youtube. My friend Alan holds an annual BBQ / Pot Luck called Couchella, and honestly, I enjoy that way more than I ever have the actual festival. That’s my plan later this afternoon, but for now I’m back at the coffee shop, timer ticking down, working on my craft, including this blog!
Glow #8 Progress
Work progresses steadily on Glow #8. In addition to the pencils and inks, this will be the first issue that Vinse assumes complete artists duties, including coloring! He’s working at a steady rate, getting the 40+ pages of the issue to the first color flat phase. Here’s a look at some of those color flats:
In case you missed it, we’re launching Glow #8 on Tuesday, May 19th on Kickstarter!
Designing the Runic Cypher
About a year ago I blogged about the design process for some of the mythology that is heavily featured in issue #8. Today I’d like to show you one of the ways we incorporate that mythology into the actual comic, through a key prop featured in Issue #8: The Runic Cypher.
One of the things I keep in mind while writing Glow is what could happen based on the personality / abilities of the characters, kind of like their character sheets if it were a TTRPG. Caszy is swift, agile, perceptive, and alert - the hunter of the group; Anders is empathetic, witty, and extroverted, while Koken is curious, analytical, and hyper-focused.
For Issue #8, since so much of the issue revolves around revealing some of the mysteries of Old Nym, I knew that I wanted to feature some sort of puzzle for Koken to solve that would show off his brains while revealing a little (or a lot) more of Nymeran for those curious enough to dig deeper.
Well, the problem is that although Koken may be very bright, I sometimes am not! Or rather, I’m a much more intuitive thinker whereas Koken possesses those math and crossword puzzle skills I’ve never quite polished myself. So how do you design a puzzle when you yourself are not good at it?
The answer is slowly, and in phases.
The Ring
It started first when Jamin showed Vince and me a concept of this Nymeran rune dial. That of course reminded us of one of our favorite sci-fi series of all time, Stargate, so we knew we had to incorporate it somehow. We took direct inspiration from Stargate here, incorporating the dial as the main interface - keyboard - for the cypher.
The Riddle
The hardest part was the riddle itself. This went through multiple iterations, but the key was to create a central riddle that would be solved from the various other writings on the wall. To facilitate this, I keyed in on a couple of key phrases: Eyes, Light, and Night. These would be the clues for the word to unlock the cypher.
We placed this riddle within the center of the Ring, at eye level for anyone who approaches to read:
The Poems
Above the Rune Dial and the Riddle sits the various Poems - various pieces of mythology from Ancient Nym. We had a couple of things, like the tale of Kaelun the Lightbringer and Chantress Eaya the Divine Feminine, and those certainly made it onto the wall (some as the actual clues to the riddle), but it’s a big wall that needs to be filled up…
So, that meant coming up with more mythology! Here are a couple of the quick hits:
The Workflow
Y’know what really complicates workflow? Inventing a fictional language, and incorporating it into various aspects of the comic, that’s what! So, the workflow for this cypher goes a little something like this:
Conceptualize Design → Write Poems / Phrases → Translate Poems/Phrases → Pass to Artist → Draft Master Concept → Incorporate into Comic
The first two phrases are done by myself and Vince, the translation portion is done by our master conlanger Jamin, and then those documents are then passed to artist Vinse for the final three phases. And then it’s of course up to me and Vince to facilitate everything in our role as editor/producer of the project.
Mythopoeia: No Stone Unturned, we like to say!
Those are Big Walls!
So we discovered after Vinse incorporated all of the eight poems drafted into the final version of the design. Turns out eight was not enough to fill the entire massive wall. But what do?!?
Well, make more poems of course! But this time, instead of just me getting in on the action, our editor Ell had a great idea: why not invite fans to participate in the mythology, the worldbuilding of Glow directly?
So to that end, we’re leaving several of the panels blank and creating a campaign reward tier for backers to come up with their own mythology, which will then be translated into Nymeran, and then incorporated on the cypher.
Hurray, crowdsourcing! I think we’ll be offering somewhere between 2-4 of these poems, so hopefully our fans are into the idea as much as we are.
The Secret
So, 3/4 of the way through designing this runic cypher, I realized that we been designing for just one runic cypher when there are in fact two distinct ones (!) in the issue - one in the past timeline with Myra / Kelbourne, and one in the present timeline with Koken and Yassar.
I think this ended up being a blessing in disguise because going through the entire design process really re-energized my passion for Nymeran and the possibilities of working with a fictional language. So, with that in mind, for this second wall I decided to create an easter egg for the most hardcore fans of Glow, the ones willing the learn and decipher Nymeran themselves - or read to the very end of designer diaries like this one :P
The above is the secret. The message hidden behind the world of Glow, what I’ve coalesced in my time working on the project, and what I am attempting to convey with its story, themes, and characters. So it is said, so shall it be so.
If you got this far, thanks for reading.
Remember that Glow #8 goes live on Tuesday, May 19th, 2026.
I’ll see you there. Until next time!
Ray