Interviews!

Here's a nice interview with me about SHADRACH, with new art.



And here's a two-part interview covering my entire career.

Here, a friend talks about me. (Among more important things.)

And here I talk about The 99, another comic I write.

And right here, I shut up for a change!

Cross-Promotion Alert!

I'll be at Jim Hanley's Universe in Manhattan this Wednesday evening, signing the brand-new first issue of NAMOR: THE FIRST MUTANT, my new monthly title from Marvel. Also signing: Jonathan Hickman, Dan Slott, Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, and Nick Spencer. Come on out, whisper "Force Majeure," and I'll show you some Shadrach artwork.

Listen to Me

Here's an interview I recorded a little while back, focusing heavily on SHADRACH STONE. The Shadrach material starts about five minutes in. The MP3 link seems to be broken, but the Enhanced AAC version works.

And I should have a long, career-spanning interview up on Comic Book Resources soon, to celebrate the release of my new Marvel monthly NAMOR: THE FIRST MUTANT this week. That'll cover SHADRACH, too. Links to come!

Further Reading

From SHADRACH STONE, page 17:



Vida, Shadrach’s girlfriend, refers here to a theory propagated by the late Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson is best known as the coauthor of the Illuminatus! trilogy, but I’ve always found his nonfiction books fascinating. They cover topics ranging from drugs and libertarianism to James Joyce, quantum physics, and conspiracy theories.

I first came across this particular theory, about the relationship between brain chemistry and reality, in Wilson’s book Right Where You Are Sitting Now (1982). The essay “By Way of Summary” begins:

Your brain has 20 billion bits of information. The repeating loops between various bits make up your private reality-labyrinth, the thoughts, feelings and (apparent) sense impressions that you keep encountering over and over, year after year.

You encounter them over and over precisely because they are repeating tape loops.

Ethnomethodology demonstrates that the loops can be broken at any point, a process technically known as breaching. The result is a rapid reorganization as the 20 billion bits quantum-jump to a different order of coherence. A new “you” and a new “external world” appear in the process. [Emphasis Wilson’s.]

There are [ten to the 2,783,000th power] possible permutations; alternative models of “you” and the “external world.”

And just as I was preparing the complete graphic-novel script for SHADRACH, I came across this passage in Wilson’s final book, Email to the Universe (2005):

Every nervous system creates its own “reality.” Out of the billions, or billions of billions, of energies intersecting the room in which you read this, your brain, performing 100,000,000 processes per minute (almost all of them unconscious to those circuits called the ego and recognized as “me”) arranges a few hundred or thousand into the Gestalt which you experience as the “reality” of the room…I call this neurological relativism, or the relativity of perceived “reality.”

SHADRACH STONE wouldn’t exist without Wilson’s writings. They’re highly recommended.

Meet the Cast

Here's a quick rundown of our main characters:


SHADRACH STONE. Big Man. Big liar. Big comeuppance. The key to the universe, maybe.


VIDA. Fashion model with a double life. When she and Shadrach say “I love you” to each other, even they're not sure if they're telling the truth.


YOUNG SHADRACH STONE. Big Man in training.


FOSTER. Book editor, Epex Publishing. Not such a Big Man.


TRACE. Nice guy. Really knows his way around the Substrate.


SIDDRA. Mysterious.


GRID. Another Big Man.


JON PROCTOR. Just finished drawing 102 pages!

The Big Question

Okay, so: SHADRACH STONE. Original graphic novel. Paranormal adventure. Bold color art. Big Questions of Life.



But I know what you're wondering.



Is there sex in this book?

...

...well...





...yeah.



I can't promise it's NICE sex. But it's there, and it's there for a reason.

Next time: Back to business.

Shadrach: The Early Days

During the development process for this graphic novel, Jon Proctor turned out an amazing variety of sample pieces. Some of these were intended to help us place the book with a publisher; some were character studies; and still others were just exercises in color and design.

Here are a few of them.


An early, very noirish study of Shadrach and Vida, his girlfriend.


Just Vida.


A scene from the book, isolated with no background and high-contrast color.


Vida in "Flaunt" magazine. Note the bar code -- Proctor, master of detail!


Watch the skies...

Welcome New Liars

We're getting a lot of traffic from some new publicity for the book, so welcome to everyone who's followed us here from Broken Frontier, The Comics Reporter, or my ramblings on Twitter and Facebook.

SHADRACH STONE is a paranormal/science fiction graphic novel. Basically, it's all about Lies. You can read my basic intro to it here, and I tell the history of the project in excruciating detail here, here, and here. SHADRACH will be published with two alternate covers -- you can see them both here.

There's more behind-the-scenes info and previews scattered throughout the blog. I'll be posting more soon, but meanwhile, here's some nice art you probably haven't seen yet:

Two Covers

SHADRACH STONE, the graphic novel, will feature not one but two covers. The first is by the Man Himself, the book's co-creator and master designer, Jon Proctor:



And the second is by award-winning painter/illustrator Jon Foster:



Which one do you prefer?