DM of the Rings Remaster: The Copious Backstory I

By Bay Posted Sunday Jan 1, 2023

Filed under: DM of the Rings Remaster 32 comments


Welcome to the remastering of what is possibly my dad’s most significant legacy; DM of the Rings. These posts should go up once a week, one page a week, every Sunday starting today until it’s completely redone. People have been asking for a downloadable or higher-quality version for years, but sadly, all original copies were lost to an old hard drive. My youngest brother, Issac is gathering every screenshot needed and formatting the panels just like the original copies. Peter, my slighter older little brother, is consulting. With years of studying comics near-professionally, he’s good at spotting places where we can make little readability improvements.

My posts will continue to go up once a week, every Friday, on whatever I fancy posting about. For the remastering, I do the extra managing stuff such as; making sure everyone knows what we are doing, making a header no one remembered we needed, and writing the little snippets like this one that goes below the comic.

To set expectations: I know the original version had some pages go up together, like this one. But for the sake of everyone’s stress levels and the need to do everything from scratch, we will be posting this as single pages only. I’d worry about annoying cliffhangers, but seeing as the OG came out when I was eight, I think everyone should be fine.

Also, we cannot sell hard copies of DM of the Rings once it’s done. I don’t suspect anyone will be surprised about that due to logical copyright law. However, Patreon subscribers will get pages a week early on Saturday.  And, once every page is out and refinished to be shiny and new, we will have the option to download it, for free, for everyone. I’m sure everyone is deeply disappointed that we cannot take your overabundance of hard-earned cash in exchange for this glorious bastard of a comic, but we will have to simply go on.

Edit: A reader has graciously taken on translating  the updated comic to French. He created a blog for it here where you can read the French version at the same pace as the blog (Patreon update is still a week ahead).

 


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32 thoughts on “DM of the Rings Remaster: The Copious Backstory I

  1. LizTheWhiz says:

    Like a lot of people, DM of the Rings was how I got into Shamus’ work as a young man a little under a decade ago. Seeing it again in HD as a grown woman in grad school is bringing back a lot of memories.

    Are y’all using the same software that he originally used, or something else?

    1. Bell says:

      Are you me? I could have posted that exact comment word for word.

      As in *word for word*, including the thing you did. Eerie start to my morning seeing that.

  2. Tuck says:

    That glorious header image would make this worthwhile even if it was just this one post! Looking forward to re-reading it all. :D

    1. Fizban says:

      Glorious indeed, damn o.O

    2. Amstrad says:

      Thirding the praise for that header, it’s a good’un!

  3. Tektotherriggen says:

    This is brilliant, thank you so much!

  4. Lino says:

    This is definitely a neat idea! My only suggestion is to include the original snippet below the comic strip. I’m still going to revisit the old strips just to read the comments, but it’s absolutely awesome to have these comics in HD!

    1. Falling says:

      Yes, I agree. Shamus always had a lot of interesting insights to go along with his comics and it would be a shame to lose that in the hd update.

      Love the project idea.

  5. Matt` says:

    Spotted a typo in the 4th speech balloon: “of” in place of “if”.

    1. Noah Gibbs says:

      Could also use a final period on the sentence.

      1. Michael says:

        One more typo: it looks like Frodo’s line “my stats are rubbish” starts with a lowercase ‘m’ that should be capitalized.

  6. Noah Gibbs says:

    This was how I found Shamus as well. Not kidding on the glorious header image. That’s wonderful.

  7. Groboclown says:

    No first post parody?

    1. BlueHorus says:

      “First” posts? Now THAT truly brought me back.

      This should definitely be a thing.

  8. evileeyore says:

    And put the whole post up on the home page? Shamus would be proud.

  9. unit3000-21 says:

    I just love the header image :)

  10. Sleeping Dragon says:

    Oh wow, so many fond memories of this series. Will be lovely to revisit it posted one episode at a time now. Just going to add I’ll welcome any tabletop anecdotes more or less pertinent to a given scene or idea.

  11. Adam says:

    I’m so happy to see this! The banner image is great.

  12. WarlockOfOz says:

    Ooooh. Thank you!

  13. Santiago says:

    This is a wonderful tribute! I look forward to reading week to week like it’s 2006

  14. Philadelphus says:

    Oh, wow, I thought at first that the higher-quality original images had (against the odds) been found again*, but remaking the entire thing from scratch? That’s impressive. I only stumbled on this site years after the original run was complete, so it’ll be interesting seeing them come out over time rather than reading the whole thing in one go.

    *Or maybe some sort of AI-assisted upscaling? That sounds like a project Shamus might write a series about.

  15. Joshua says:

    So glad to see this! I remember the days of 2006 when a friend sent a link to this comic, which was at the time probably 6-7 strips in.

  16. Rolland says:

    So excited!! I never read through the entire thing since I got into Shamus’ blog long after DM of the Rings was over, so I really look forward to this project!

  17. Simplex says:

    This is a great project!
    In a perfect world the images would be sourced from the 4K bluray but I realise we do not live in a perfect world and that it would require a lot of time, money and effort.

  18. johann says:

    Thank you for your work. So sorry for your loss. I read (and re-read) the originals long ago. I was redirected here by https://www.darthsanddroids.net/ which was inspired by DM of the Rings, also long ago.

    I look forward to seeing this again.

  19. Makot says:

    That is a great and wondrous project ^^

    And, as mentioned above, any tabletop anecdotes in commentary would be most welcome.

  20. Patrick the Bemused says:

    NEE!

  21. Reyin says:

    This is such a great idea. I love this.
    Thank you.
    :_)

  22. MelTorefas says:

    Wow, amazing work. Thank you all! DM of the Rings is when I started reading this site, and its awesome to see this go up.

  23. Alberek says:

    This takes me back to when I started GMing!
    Lot’s of my friends talk me about it (we weren’t even from USA)

    1. DanB says:

      Awesome! Thank you all for updating some fond memories. I’m going to make this required reading for my 14 year old :-)

  24. Triel Sparkis says:

    Seeing the picture at the top — after all these years since I read it in college (’07-08ish) it’s still my dream to see the Lord of the Rings actors to do a table reading of DM of the Rings. I read the comic in their voices and it is HILAROUS! :D

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