Sunday, June 21, 2009

An excerpt from Page 41




After a hiatus of more than a year, I am finally working again on a graphic novel set in my Noantri world. This epic is about the great theophore Enlil (see this By-Product entry) and his adventures with geo-scientists and an erupting volcano which threatens an entire populated coastline. I am on page 41 out of a projected 80. In these two frames, Enlil collapses to the floor (under a light fixture on the wall) after holding a psionic gateway to allow a spy to pass through into forbidden territory. His assistant, wearing mittens in an unheated bunker, rushes to attend to him. These drawings, done in ink on illustration board, will be colored traditionally using watercolor. But I am debating whether to change over to coloring them in Photoshop. The amount of time spent is almost the same. All comics are now colored digitally. When I started this epic in 1999, this was not true.

I am making my own comics because I want the Noantri world to come to life in words and pictures. But I am also making them because the current world of comic books, huge and popular as it is, seems to have nothing to appeal to me any more. The level of violence and exploitation is way too much for me. Nature's violence is enough for me.

The name of this graphic novel is THE FLAMING RAMPARTS and I may show more excerpts from it though I plan to publish it on paper rather than the web.

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