Fire in the Dust
Hello and welcome to my comic blog about Shattered World. I’ve been invited by Pages ‘N’ Pages to create a comic book and post the pages on the site for you folks: my legions of fans (hello legions!).
The comic I’m talking about is called Shattered World, a setting where the world has been broken apart with only floating motes of land floating in a seemingly endless sky. The world itself is called Skye, and its people are a medley of fantastic races and creatures from the world that was, living in cities and settlements on rocks from as small as a house to as large as a continent.
Now, a world filled with monsters and magic needs heroes, and powerful ones at that. In more modern comic books, superheroes defend the people. For this setting, while being fantastic, heroes fill much the same niche: Epic heroes, with mythological powers, in fantastic cities or defending the wilderness are this world’s heroes. Villains include an array of bizarre foes, from dark sorcerers and vampire hordes, to beings of cosmic energy from the great beyond.
I’m a big fan of fantasy and comic books, as well as roleplaying games. In doing a comic book, it really is natural for me to do something that bridges the gap between superheroes and fantasy heroes. Artistically, I like the option of special effects and strange terrains, but also the classic superhero tropes like characters with effectively super-powers.
So far I’ve been hashing out the page and story ideas, as I’ve had some of them for a while now. I’ve got several pages finished for the script, and I’ve got some of the rough sketches of the final comic done. I did an earlier comic, set in the same setting but less fantastic in scope. It was ok, but I learned a lot about art from it. And the need for a script, direction, and someone to talk to about all of this.
Thanks to my brother-in-law, Andrew Burns of Biffbampop! (dot com), I’ve drawn up some outlines for the first few stories. That was hard, in that I had to shut up all the ideas in my head and write a concept in one sentence for each issue. Focus, something I think everyone who’s creative likely has to learn, was strange but fun, and I pumped out a bunch of good ones. We did this exercise for another comic idea that came up, a vampire detective story, but my art style development I’d like to work on with Shattered World rather than go dark right away (I might do it a little later, though). The story for that one came right out in one sitting, but I wasn’t up for drawing modern *yet*.
One thing that almost stopped the project was my finishing the first page… and losing it. Yeah, my whole portfolio, and some Thor comics, gone; someone grabbed them, and hasn’t sent them to the address on it. Really nice page. I won’t be carting around a portfolio again, let me tell you. Nope, from now on I’m staying put with the art, from my home base, and uploading everything I get online asap. …another good reason for posting it all on a website!
My plan with this blog is to document the process and development of it. I’ll be doing the script, story, art, and even things like lettering and coloring when the whole thing comes together. I’ll be getting software for coloring and lettering, and when that’s done… well, this’ll be one heck of a comic!
In the meantime, this is a journal to note my progress as an artist. If you see something you like or don’t like, or if you as an artist have an opinion (especially if you can cite stuff you’re talking about so I can look further), please post a comment!
