The Work Journal of Artist John Amor

Fuckyeah1888

First Look: 1888

Colors by Homeros Gilani

Two weeks to go before the pledge period ends, so if you’d like to see this scene played out, I highly recommend heading over to Kickstarter and backing the project.

Reign of the Ripper

For over a year now, I’ve been working with Wolfgang Parker to craft a story of Victorian horror worthy of the legend of Jack the Ripper.  1888 is a unique take on the White Chapel mythos that I believe draws in Hellboy fans, Classic Horror aficionados, and Crime Noir enthusiasts.  The project is currently on kickstarter.com, as we are welcoming pledges and participants in the sharing of the creative process.  I’ll let Wolfgang tell you more, as he is slightly prettier than me.  but only by a little bit.

Back this Project.

Kick-Starting 1888

Click to Pledge

A – B – C

So I figure now’s as good a time as any to wrap up the 2009 set of entries to this thing.  Maybe in a year or so I can look back and marvel at how much (or how little) I got done.  Hopefully the latter, by comparison of course.  Don’t begrudge me my optimism, it is Winter Time in my Summertown Country.

As with the year prior, 2009 saw me taking on more indies as a promise to myself to build a semblance of discipline for the grind, as well as take as many shots as I humanly could.  Learning how many chambers my pistol’s got, as it were.  How much I learn and retain remains a work in progress.  That said, DAMN that was a busy year.

JENNY STRANGE is on hold as Justin and I scout for a colorist.  SOVENA RED got shopped around and may yet continue with Scholastic.  Taking Christmas breather from game design gig as suits prepare second ongoing contract.  Might shelf it or bow out if other ongoing book projects begin to pick up steam.  Speaking of which…

JUDAH trudges on in healthy machine gun spurts.  I am convinced Will is trying to see how much more he can shock me with every five-page set.

HARBINGER WAR concept art is steadily taking shape as Jad and I have poured over Moebius, Frazetta, and Ash Wood art books to see how much writing we can get done with just visuals.  If that didn’t make sense, trust us… it will.

PLUCK scripts are beginning to pour in just as I do concept sketches for characters who may or may not be little more than cannon fodder.  Yes, Gabe is keeping it THAT close to his chest since he knows I’ll reveal just about anything if I’m not careful.  The Brothers White and myself  look forward to pissing on D&D tropes on ZUDA next year!

1888 is in retool mode as Wolfgang and I are streamlining that beast of a book into a prestige-format monster and I gotta say… just because artists need to read scripts and put pencil to paper before anyone else gets to see anything, doesn’t mean all the twistedness only comes from him.  Damn it, WP.

And 2010 will see me dipping my toes into new properties CLOSETWORLD — a planned webcomic much akin to Little Nemo, with Matt Yocum; and GEEK GODS — a contemporary fantasy combining sword and sorcery with the familiar charm of Archie, with Wade Alan Steele.

There’s a couple of other exciting things I really want to share but can’t yet, but suffice it to say that the ol’ work journal is thankfully going to be regularly updated for the next few months at least.  It seems like a ton of work… and it’s certainly not a walk in the park.  But I always take the Zen of Glengarry Glen Ross with me, and it helps to simplify what would otherwise very easily cause me to burst into flames.  It’s the closest I’ll get to a mantra when trying to simply get things done — A — B — C.

Always Be Closing, Baldwin said.  And as far as I’m concerned, it keeps you focused enough to not look back as you try to keep moving forward in a narrow and tricky road.

Always, all ways, be closing.

Gleep gloop, 2010.  Gleep motherfucking gloop.

Avatarded

Warren Sanchez is a 3-D animator.  A damn good one at that.  Warren Sanchez and I used to work together at an advertising/animation studio.  He knows I like to read a lot of comics and watch a lot of effects-heavy films.

Warren Sanchez knows I like to curse a lot.

Warren Sanchez has never heard me curse out of sheer awe of a movie’s visuals.

And then we saw Avatar.

2009 in Film is a closed book as far as I’m concerned.  Thanks, Jim.  After the Star Wars prequels, Transformers, and G.I. fucking Joe… I badly needed that.

::::    ::::    ::::    ::::

On the other side of the bowl of awesome sauce, I was at first worried about a project Jad and I were working on that was superficially similar.  HARBINGER WAR is a sci-fi tale pivoting on the premise of cavemen battling an extra-terrestrial threat.  The parallels are all there, but then I thankfully unclenched when I realized Lucas had beat Cameron to the punch with Phantom Menace, and Burroughs spanked them both with the Barsoom books decades before.

So yes, I’m good.  This, as they say, is fuel for a hopeful and mighty fire.  A movie hasn’t thrilled me like that in a long time, and if nothing else… it felt amazing being a wide-eyed kid again.

Making Faces

I never really feel comfortable sitting still and waiting for word to come in about things I’m waiting for word on — I’m sorry if that’s not vague enough, I’ll try harder next time — so Jad and I are plowing forward with our joint comic venture.  Just in case you didn’t catch previous mentions of HARBINGER WAR, it’s a Zuda pitch we’re collaborating on.  Set in the distant past, it’s gonna play with a lot of sci-fi elements (her department) while balancing all the smart stuff with monsters and boobies (my department).

She’s turned in a draft for the initial script, and together we’re whittling that down to the smoothest and tightest read it can possibly be.  No specific looks for specific characters have been established yet, which is why I’m still playing with design aesthetics and mix n’ matching elements.  Prehistoric-set stories tend to be pastiche pieces, wardrobe-wise, so I’ll need to take a few liberties, stylistically.  They had lip gloss back then right?  Right.  Sweet.

Don’t Call it a Collab

As I’m working on a handful of projects I’ve started a little something-something with my lady Jad Montenegro.  We’ll be taking turns talking about our progress:

So John came to me with a proposal to do a comic together, aside from the  sheer audacity of a previously conceptualized “relationship strip” *John slaps hand to forehead*, he wanted to do another project entirely, one that wasn’t borne of a need to shamelessly indulge our egos, and when I heard his idea to wrap the storyline around one simple, beautiful concept, there was nothing I could do but to agree.

I mean, come on:

Cavemen versus Aliens.

.

Tell me how any self-respecting sci-fi lover could resist taking that and not going to TOWN with it, you know?

Drawing inspiration from the likes of sci-fi romance and tall-tale spinning Arthur C. Clarke to the classic iconoclasm (iconoclasstic?) of Isaac Asimov, to Frank Herbert’s Duneverse sagas and Bradbury’s moody, chronicling cynicism (to name just a few of the authors I grew up reading), I guess I’m pretty set for helping create this rippin’ yarn of a graphic novel. If anything, I’ve certainly got the enthusiasm covered.

I’ve never done this before, but that’s where John comes in: he’s good at showing me the ropes.

Huh.

I zoned out for a bit.

Anyway, that’s what me and the boy have got in the kitchen, and hopefully we’ll have something in the coming weeks for you folks to sink your teeth into.

— Jad

Strip for Me…

Someone smart once said, “Part of knowing what you’re good at is knowing how many permutations you can stretch and skew yourself to and safely get away with, without too much bloodshed.” And then I put it in a journal entry and cheapened it.

It was the middle 2005, and the local scene had shriveled up and died, so no one in his right mind was doing independent comics anymore, much less looking to fund any.

It’s a metaphor

Fresh out of college and taking baby steps into law school, I sought a creative outlet and found it in the local newspaper — though when I say I sought, I don’t mean I needed a challenge or something to do in my free time.  Coz believe me, school plus work was tough enough; and free time was a luxury I devoted to sleep.  Luckily, the summer before shit got real, I had made the right calls and talked to the right people and sent the right hookers to the right addresses, and at twenty years old I got my first regularly paying gig with my weekly serial comic strip, ALTERED EGOS.

Click.  Big.

The people at the paper had seen my previous comic stuff, and when I first spoke to my editor to pitch another, more action-oriented strip, I realized that I had gotten spoiled from working with friends on SUKOL and POPCORN for so long.  I had grown accustomed to communicating my act structures and story arcs in chirps and grunts.  Had I known how to whistle, it might have helped.  But no, the pre-prod was a mess, and it slowly became obvious that I wouldn’t be able to pull off a series that only worked linear, at least not the way I’d want to.  So I went with comedy and the gag-a-week format.

ALTERED EGOS was an exploration of the superhero lifestyle minus all the glitz and glamour.  Marvel Team-up meets Seinfeld, written by Bart Simpson.  And it acted like a sort of psychic anchor in a pretty lousy time in my life, which was right around the same time I discovered the bottle.  These characters meant a lot to me and still do, which is why I’m sharing them here.

Incidentally (and conveniently, transition-wise), I will be starting a brand new comic strip pretty soon with my girlfriend.  Drawing much inspiration from the blunt truths of XKCD and the dry humor of Butternutsquash, Jad and I have put together a… (wait for it)… relationship strip.

.   .   .

And THAT was the sound of the last cries of my mojo whimpering out of existence.

FOR the LOVE OF… (or FTLO) is planned to be a weekly strip, depending on our schedules, and is pretty much being stylistically inspired by Adam Warren’s approach to Empowered over at Dark Horse.  Rough… but not.

It’s five in the morning, kids.

Anyway check back here for the first strip of FTLO soon, as well as updates on a few other projects I have gaining some steam.  Meantime, don’t just thank it.  Spank it.

Look! Previews!

what.

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