I love, love love a good treasure hunter story. I love it! Two of my favorite movies of late have been the new National Treasure films and the always dependable Indiana Jones series. And now I am in love with the Uncharted game series. Recently a buddy of mine, Josh Ulrich, started up his own treasure hunter series called Jacki Rose. It’s great fun and I highly recommend checking it out. But around a year ago I began writing and drawing a story called Kevin and The Golden Temple. It was a short story in the same vein as an Indiana Jones series but with a young twist and a dash more fantasy. At the time it was intended to be a short story, about 60 pages in total. As I kind of worked through the details of what the story was I saw a much better and more complex story I could tell. Unfortunately, or fortunately I guess, the project fell apart and I was left with this short, badly paced story (I had to compress the whole thing down to like 20 pages). I really fell in love with the adventure and characters I was creating and actually this was the idea I was going to turn into my next online project. Then The King’s Game happened and I started working on the pitch for that project. And if you have been following me in the past you know that my previous agent left the firm I am signed on with and that left me to transition to another agent. Through much conversation with her, she basically answered what I had been feeling all along: I just need to actually finish a project and then we can go submit to publishers. Basically, I’m not at a point where pitching a book makes a lot of sense. I have no finished works to my credit, I only have pitches and ultimately very little presence in the bigger comics world. So, how can I expect a publisher to get on board with me?
This took a bit of time to swallow, though I knew it was true. She asked that I work some more on The King’s Game, but ultimately started debating whether that was the best project for my new found devotion to completing projects. Thus the Kevin story reared its head again.
This story about Kevin is a blast of a tale. Adventure, fantasy, humor and other worlds await our little treasure hunter and I felt that this project most speaks to the audience I want to right now and because of the story structure I can actually finish chunk of it faster and have completed material to show to everyone. Basically the book will divided into three installments at about 100 pages each. Targeted at a younger audience and I will be looking to put out one volume a year. I am planning on issuing this online as a webcomic so, that will be coming up online by the end of this current month.
Sorry if anyone out there was jonesin for some King’s Game. I am very much excited about that book, but the tone, length and spirit of the material is just not something I feel ready to tell yet. It will be on the docket for the next go round. But for now, as Josh and I say all of the time now, make books son!
So, I will be updating later about the exciting adventure of Kevin and the Light of Destiny. Here’s an old image from the short story version:
