Comics and I have a long, long history. Back in the eighties I was trying to break into the industry as an artist, and I sent submission after submission to Marvel and DC, at the time the only American publishers there were. I even moved to New York for a year, hoping to improve my chances, but they had all the artists they needed, and they just weren’t hiring.
I moved back to Seattle all disgruntled and disillusioned. But about that time there was a new wave happening in comics. Independents were popping up all over the place, publishing black-and-white comics, and people seemed to be buying them. I got together with a half-dozen would-be comics creators, and with the help of a business-major friend, we started Jet City Comics.
My title was called Shadowlord, a dark fantasy story about a guy who lived in Seattle but was secretly an exiled bastard son of a Shadowlord, one of the rulers of a swords-and-sorcery dimension where it’s always night. When his father and all his legitimate heirs are assassinated, the bastard son is the last of his line, with the hereditary power to command demons. With otherworldly monsters trying to kill him, an imp arrives to transport him to Shadow, where he must assume the throne, unravel a secret conspiracy, and learn to command demons, all while fending off frequent murder attempts. As you might suppose, hijinks ensued.
We could have a comic book printed in black and white for about two thousand bucks, a sum we had to borrow and then pay back with each cycle. There was only one distributor for the whole country, but they treated us well, and we got into comics shops coast to coast. The profits on a book amounted to two or three hundred bucks after we paid back our investor, so we never really got ahead. Eventually I had to move to Los Angeles to pursue another career, and that was that.
I still read superhero comics back then, but when the comic book investment bubble happened in the nineties the overall quality of superhero comics plummeted. I lost interest in mainstream comics for a couple of decades, reading only independent and Vertigo titles.
In the late nineties, with a new wife and a well-established career in magazine publishing, I moved back to Seattle. I telecommuted for the next five years, but magazines as a medium were dying out, and I eventually found myself mostly unemployed. With my obsolete skillset, I was finally forced to fall back on my military experience and took a job in security.
In the oughts popular culture had suddenly taken an interest in Japanese manga. By then all the comic book shops had disappeared, and the local Barnes & Noble had reduced their comics section to one four-foot rack of graphic novels and compilations. But they had two full aisles of manga, all translated and republished for Americans. I started reading manga, and found some that I liked.
I had a strong desire to draw comics again, and my security job wasn’t all-consuming like my publishing career had been. My freelance illustration work was nearly gone, being magazine-related, so I had time on my hands. With American-style comics seemingly dying out and manga booming, I decided to try drawing some manga. It took me a few months, but I taught myself how to draw in that style, and then I started the monumental opus that became Dei Umbra: The Shadow of God.
In Japan, manga is produced at a hectic pace, and to maintain that pace manga-ka hire helpers and form a whole studio, often with a one-word name. I was just one guy, but in the manga tradition I assumed a one-word name: Crylock. I built myself a website and started posting the pages as I finished them, thinking I might be able to get a little feedback and build a bit of an online readership. Ultimately, my plan was to finish Dei Umbra, and then find a publisher for it, but in putting it online I inadvertently joined a genre called Online Comics.
I submitted my site to a couple of online comics compiler sites, where there are links to hundreds of online comics, and they’re ranked by popularity. Dei Umbra failed to achieve much popularity there, and being the two-hundred and fiftieth most popular comic on one of those sites doesn’t garner much attention. The popular comics were light, fluffy things, aimed at a much younger audience than my story, and their popularity was maintained by a constant flow or promotions, giveaways and contests, which I had no interest in doing. I continued to post to my website anyway, but I gave up on trying to compete with online comics.
I had a secondary comic called The Shadow of the Necromancer, that I’d been working on, off-and-on, since long before Dei Umbra. It had begun as a short story I wrote, then expanded into the beginnings of a fantasy novel. I’d adapted it into a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, and had some friends play it for a while, but the campaign was never finished. It provided me with a lot of background material though. I just couldn’t decide whether I wanted to write it as a novel or draw it as a graphic novel. I had drawn several pages of it as a comic, and I added them to my website. At one point I got enthusiastic about it and updated it, re-drew a few of the pages, and even re-designed my website with a Shadow of the Necromancer theme. It has since taken a backseat to Dei Umbra, and at this point its fate is uncertain, but I’ve kept it on the site just in case. It has an epic storyline behind it, but I might end up writing it as a fantasy novel after all.
Years passed while I worked on Dei Umbra. Marvel and DC started making movies based on their comic books, and the movies were great. Their popularity brought superhero comics back into the spotlight, and comics shops started appearing once more.
I started reading superhero comics again, and I found that the writing had improved exponentially, and much of the artwork had gotten better, as well. I started catching up on my old favorites, starting with Spider-man and working my way through them all.
It wasn’t long before I started thinking about doing my own superhero comic. My love for them goes all the way back to my childhood, and I found that I really wanted to do it, but with so much time and effort invested in Dei Umbra, I knew I shouldn’t divide my time like that.
Well, y’know, I did it anyway. I’d been working on Dei Umbra for six years at that point, and it’s hard to maintain much enthusiasm for a project that takes that long. Once I started really thinking seriously about doing a superhero comic, ideas flowed like a deluge. I eventually narrowed it down to two essential characters, and the ideas for their adventures got winnowed down to just two storylines. I should have gotten it down to one, but I just couldn’t, so I ended up starting two new superhero comics.
I really shouldn’t have. Here I am, only sixteen pages away from finally finishing Dei Umbra, and now I’m spending most of my time working on Shadowjack and Girl 7. But you know, as one popular novelist wrote on his blog, “If I have more than one project going at once, no matter which I choose to work on, I always have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m fucking off on something.”