So this is something new: a commentary on my first issue. I thought some folks might enjoy. I enjoy discussing my comics deeply, and I wanted to share the creative process about making them. The first issue especially was one I put a lot of time, effort, and heart into as it was my first self-published work ever. I also think it is my clunkiest, as it was my first issue trying to make an indie comic after so many years of practice.
As I have told my close friends, I invented Emerald-Man sometime around 2012-2013, as I was getting into my later years of middle school.
He started off as a funny little character, in a lot of drawings of many different superheroes that I was contemplating. Back then, I was drawing a comedic comic called “Pie”. It was a comic about a middle aged man named “Pie Dezzert” and his family of food-obsessed freaks. I noticed 2 things: 1) I am not very funny when I write, and 2) I preferred drawing adventures of him as a superhero rather than the comedic middle-aged man Pie was supposed to be.
Thus, I drew many alternatives, perhaps to cameo in Pie as the hero he often was saved by or interacted with. I was allured to one design: that of Emerald-Man. Out of all of them, his concept gripped me, and I continued to draw him and his adventures through my high school years as my art improved.
He went through many iterations through the years. There was a time in 2016 I even considered making his character into a woman instead. (I blame my growing fascination with girls at that age.) Ultimately, however, in my last year of high school I wanted a different, fresher angle to Emerald-Man. A problem always got to me: how do I explain where he got his powers over jewels? The main concept was his new necklace. A magic one inherited from his father. I delved deeper into reading about celtic myth and legends, and grew fascinated with the concepts of druids.
Then, in the year 2017, I drew a concept of many different “Emerald-Men” from the past. I drew one design, “medieval”, and realized I preferred that design to the geometric one he had at the time. I realized it was a risk, and a very strange choice, but I preferred the medieval design, and so I decided to fully embrace it.
Then new concepts started to come to me. Where did he learn his magic from? I envisioned an elven maid named “Dana”, named after the Irish mother god of Tuatha de Danann. She would be a princess and would teach Emerald-Man how to cast spells and bend the earth to his whim.
However, I found myself not wanting a god intervening in my character’s stories, and so I decided Danu would be a mere druid of a past life, now a spirit guiding Emerald-Man on his journey to become a hero. The more I wrote her, the more I realized she would be the deuteragonist of the story, being a character haunted by her past decisions and needing protection by a knight.
Then there is Fetch. I admit there was a certain amount of edginess when I first created him, trying to make him a scary shapeshifter assassin. However, as I developed him more, I also figured he needed to have some connection to Danu, and embrace his ghostly form.
Poor Fetch had quite the bit of conceptual changes for his design, besides the mask. For a good year or so I thought of making him like a wraith with no legs! But that was abandoned, as I wanted him more human and more material. After all, he is a man cursed to nothingness, but he still feels the pain of living. That should apply to his physicality.
With those characters, the concept of Emerald-Man was renewed into a new story: one of Stephen Barnes becoming a druid after the death of his father, to protect the druid Danu from the evil spirit Fetch hunting her. That is where we begin our first issue.
This first issue was worked on for two years, with me coming out of college and wanting to work on it, but procrastinating. I made quite a few attempts. This for example was an attempt at the opening scene. I like it, and in some ways I wish I kept this one. But the newer one I felt had more emotion to it. That, and designs to Carolina White being much different was nessecary.
I feel the need to note that Stephen in this draft was much edgier than he was in issue 1. Which is saying something! He was downright rude to Carolina in this version of the script. I wanted him far more sympathetic.
Here is the original opening page. I like part of it, but at the same time I didn’t like the coloring style, and I felt it revealed too much. Also, Danu was redesigned to have white to align more with historical druids and what they wore. One may also notice the use of rhyme here; I abandoned that. Perhaps I should not have, but I felt making it poetic became pretentious. (Also, I am not very good at poetry.) I also wanted the opening to be more clear for the readers: Fetch isn’t just killing for fun, he has a true grudge.
And thus we have the version I have published. A vengeful phantom seeking to kill the one who cursed him, to lift his horrible curse. As the readers knows, however, this was not the case!
Now the beginning of Issue 1 is one of the least changed things to my scripts. The part with Carolina giving Stephen his necklace, and then Fetch attempting to kill him in the graveyard, those have remained relatively unchanged. What I did change was the action afterward. The gangsters were originally a single man, but I felt a posse was more necessary and showed more of an element of bravery to Carolina. (Which was supposed to inspire Stephen.)
That is really all I have to say for the first issue. One last remark:
This page was hell to color, but it also one of my favorites I have drawn. It was faithful of my script, to have the “shadow” of his father’s death hang over him in this moment. I suppose it doesn’t look like the most impressive page ever, but I am quite proud of it, and I think it gets the message across!
I will likely write commentary for the next two parts of “Last of the Druids”, so be prepared for that.