A Tale Long in the Making

As you may have noticed, our first graphic novel: Wayfarer’s Moon: The Road from Southfield is now available. It has been a long, arduous trek getting it here, so I thought I would share with you just what exactly went into the making of this book.

It began long, long ago, when Thor, God of Lightning, wiped out the dinosaurs. He squished them all with his great hammer Mjolnir, which is why they’re now oil. No one’s sure why Thor did this, but it probably had something to do with getting drunk and having a really big hammer.

Regardless, the Earth was now safe for humanity. Fast forward a lot and eventually you come to the Egyptians. They built some pyramids and invented papyrus. Papyrus is important because it was the first form of writing surface that didn’t require a chisel. Also, it could be used as toilet paper, an oft-overlooked advantage.

Jumping ahead a bit more, we get to Guttenburg, who invented the printing press. This allowed for the mass production of reading materials and was initially used to print Bibles. I’m assuming porn was the second thing it was used to print, but I might be wrong about that (it could be the third thing after fanfics).

Lots of things happened. Stuff was built, some of it was blown up, new stuff was built on top of the old stuff, things were blown up some more, and viola, it was the Age of Information.

NOTE: Yes, I wrote ‘viola’ intentionally. I always use that instead of ‘voila .’ I think it’s funny.

This brings us to just a couple years ago, when a pair of nerds in Redmond, Washington decided to make a comic.

In short, it’s all Leigh’s fault.

One night, Leigh turned to me and said “Hey, we should make a comic.” We both laughed hearty, manly laughs and went back to felling trees with other trees. Later that night, however, I went home and began to think about what kind of comic I wanted to make. What would the characters be like? What would they do? Would making a comic get me girls?

I thought and thought and thought and eventually, came up with a comic concept. I jotted down some notes and left it at that.

A year or so later, as we were catching great whites with our bare hands, Leigh once again said “Hey, I think we should do a comic.”

At which point I said “You mean, like this?” and revealed the notes I’d jotted down.
Leigh read the notes and we had several discussions, often while doing amazingly manly things like scaling El Capitan while blindfolded and wearing scuba gear.

And now, a few years later, we have our first trade paperback.

Now, in all seriousness, that is pretty much how it happened, minus the silly parts. Leigh and I decided to make a comic. A comic we would want to read. Happily, it also turned out to be a comic that other people wanted to read as well. And hopefully, this summer, Wayfarer’s Moon: The Road from Southfield will be in comic stores across the country.

So, not too bad for “Hey, we should make a comic.”

Cheers,
-Jason