About

Introduction to the website and concept

The unofficial website it devoted to the graphic novel Requiem Vampire Knight, and to a lesser extent, its spin-off Claudia Vampire Knight. These series, operating in a world called Resurrection, are published by Nickel Editions since November 2000.
The 8th volume of Requiem Vampire Knight was released (in French) in November 2008 and is titled Queen of the dead souls. The 3rd volume of Claudia Vampire Knight was released in December 2007. We invite you to discover the world of Requiem, its authors, characters, summaries of each volume and many other things...

The website Resurrection The Evil's Nest was launched in September 2007. Although Internet is big, it is sometimes hard to find what you seek, especially about Franco-Belgian comic books. Indeed you don't find much references on the web out of those two countries (French comic books don't export easily, hell knows why?)
With somecommercial success, small websites created by the publishing houses have emerged, giving these comic books a representation on the web. However it applies only to series having high sales. Moreover what we get is a showcase website, whose content will not move. Regarding the other less successful serie, the publisher only provides a summary and a quick overview of the comic, sometimes a trailer.
The main issue with these websites is their purpose: advertisement. You get subjective reviews and no possibility to share your reveiws. Thankfully now several well-built websites exist to let the readers share their feedback about their readings. But what happens when you enjoy a graphic novel so much that your eyes jump out every time you turn a page? You want to know more about it, about its authors. You want to see more as well, you want to share this feeling with other people, you become addicted! At this point you need more information than a general website about comic books can give you. You need a fan site, with no limit of information, given that the whole website is dedicated to the comic book and its derivatives. After seeking for a while, I had to admit the obvious, Requiem didn't have any fan site. So I created Resurrection The Evil's nest.
Our team is very small, updates take time, but we have a full control and (almost) a total freedom regarding the content. The pace of release for a new volume of Requiem Vampire Knight is between one and one and a half year. That should allow us to have a complete website before the release of the final volume!

Why Requiem Vampire Knight?

Olivier Ledroit is a universally recognized artist whose success is growing from year to year. The gothic and dark universe of the comic Requiem Chevalier Vampire is masterfully rendered and each page is a feast for the eyes. Ledroit excels in details, and is never stingy with cinematographic references of all kinds.
The scenario started on an idea by Oliver and got developed by Pat Mills. It gives a fast and brutal insertion inside this dystopian universe that is Resurrection. Requiem Vampire Knight is irreverent, unjust, violent, subversive and yet plenty of humor. An explosive cocktail whose drawings make fireworks out of it. It's also a story mixing love, hate, passion, power, politics, conspiracies, revenge and redemption.

The purpose of this site is both to present the comic Requiem Vampire Knight to occasional visitors and to offer fans a maximum of contents and news on the authors and the comic. We also try to propose as much exchange as we can (forum, fan-art, dedications, comments, reports...) When the website was created the series was already on Volume 7, and yet online content or website truly dedicated to Requiem didn't exist.

Nickel editions are publishers with very modest means, created for the primary purpose of seeing the project Requiem succeed (c.f. the biography of the authors). Although an official website is published, it had been under alterations and attacks, to finally be reduced to a homepage and an online store. After about a year of research and occasional random web search, I had to admit the obvious Requiem Chevalier Vampire had almost no visibility at all on the web. The solution has imposed itself: create the site myself. I wanted to try to collect, or at least simply launch a process that would see the creation of several sites devoted to the authors and their work.

Reinforcements

Eventually it didn't take long to find someone wishing to join the adventure and invest in the website. Elsmador came with a lot of ideas, and quickly offered to participate in the drafting of sections presenting the comic, including the presentation of races and characters involved. Then came the time for the forum, which Elsmador still moderates and now has about 230 members, including a hard core of about 40 regular and about 15 members participating actively. Commenting on these numbers I would say it is very satisfying, myself I have had little hope at the beginning. One must remind that our website is devoted to a comic book for adults whose subject is not especially federative: a former Nazi soldier dies and finds himself on Resurrection when he will become a knight of the most powerful race of this world, vampire.
After Els it has been respectively Alucard and then Hevydevy who joined the team to handle the news too (they already were giving us a lot of updates earlier, through the forum).

Following closely the news inherent to the authors and some other comics that we particularly appreciated allows us to get regular visitors, despite the frequency of publication which is about 1 to 1,5 years .
Currently the website gets between 150 and 200 visits each day, going beyond 300 in period of new release.

Website's evolution

Projects regarding the built of files regarding Requiem and its universe were launched with Els in 2008 and 2009. At the moment only a part of these files has been made, as other developments have been launched in parallel. Thus we had new sections about: autographs, fanarts, the Claudia Vampire Knight section, and illustrations by Olivier Ledroit. The website has greatly enhanced it's range of content at this stage. Finally, the interviews section started and some have even been made in the name of the website!

In August 2009 the site has undergone a restructuring of code to be W3C for XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. The Wolrd Wide Web Consortium is an international non-profit community charged with promoting the compatibility of technologies used over the Internet. This organization does not impose any particular technology, it limits itself into making recommendations to ensure better compatibility within the web.
In our case, having a website meeting the recommendations of the W3C ensures its durability over the time and a better display compatibility among the different web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, etc.). This upgrade has been accompanied with changes in the website design and the addition of a photo gallery system to get the picture viewing activity more user-friendly. RSS have also been improved, and a specific effort has been provided about optimizing the loading time on the web pages.
Eventually, the English section just started recently (02-2010). The work is still in progress, but one can navigate through the main sections easily and the news are operational. The section about Requiem has been adapted from the French Flash version. The Flash has been banned in the favour of a PHP / MySQL / Javascript combination. The good result lead me to do the same work on the French version.

What's next?

The new features coming in the near future are:

• A complete English version of the website.
• Finish the conversion of the Requiem French's section.
• A long-standing project, the devil's dictionary, is still pending.