Production continues on Amulet at a brisk pace. I've been producing between six to ten pages of pencils or inks a day, staying up till 6 or 7 in the morning. Still redrafting material to clear up backstory information and to make it read better overall, and this is what takes the most time. My current mantra is "simplify and amplify". I'm aiming for the simplest way to get the story information across while heightening the emotions as much as possible.
One thing I didn't realize is how difficult fantasy world-building could be. In Daisy Kutter, I just let the fantasy setting sit in the background, the ways of the world in which Daisy and Tom lived being secondary to the emotional conflicts. Now, with a comic that is about much more than just the emotional conflicts of the characters, I'm finding the world-building to be quite a challenge. When working with child protagonists it's very difficult to imbue them with emotional weight and baggage, since they're at a stage of their lives where they are still observing and making their earliest decisions rather than living with the weight of their past. This makes the world they travel through all the more important, itself becoming a major character in the play.
Being a writer that hates exposition, I've been having a difficult time getting the world-building information in there without compromising the natural flow of the story. I'm not sure I'm doing the best job of it, but this has been a very good experience that I'll take with me onto Book Two, which will hopefully be a little less laborious on the story front.
In other news, I picked up the new Shazam: Monster Society of Evil comic by Jeff Smith (with colors by Steve Hamaker). It's just a great, fun all-ages comic book in the vein of old-fashioned serialized adventures. And the artwork is stunningly beautiful. Steve's colors do a fantastic job of complementing the storytelling and it makes re-reading the comic a joy. Speaking of Jeff Smith, he also designed the new Pogo collection coming out through Fantagraphics Books. I've been waiting for this for years!
