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Well, it appears
the cat's
out of the bag. Amulet is going to be turned into a live-action
movie, with Jaden and Willow Smith (the children of Will and Jada
Pinkett Smith) as the leads. I never imagined we would be moving
so quickly on the film side of things. I better get the next few
books done a little faster! Anyway, I'm really looking forward to
meeting the Smiths. I've been a huge fan ever since the early Fresh
Prince days, and seeing the kind of work they've been doing lately,
I can see that we'll be on the same wavelength on this project.
This is going to be cool.
Seeing as how I haven't posted much on the website the past few weeks, I decided I better dust it off and start posting new material. So here is the first entry in an ongoing series of tutorials on how I work on Amulet (I'll be posting them slightly out of order). This will show you how to flat an Amulet page. The process of "flatting" is very helpful for a colorist, since all of the major shapes are masked and ready to be digitally painted. This step-by-step shows you how we did this on Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper. For most of you, I imagine this will be dry reading, but for those who like the technical details, this post's for you! In other news, a Copper book is now definitely underway. I just signed a book deal with a major publisher for a paperback version of the book, and Gallery Nucleus will be creating a limited edition run of 2,000 oversized hardcovers. This also means I will be creating a new set of strips to add to the collection and they will be posted for viewing in the months ahead. For readers of Copper, thanks for being so patient. Speaking of Nucleus, be sure to check out their new Frank and Frank book. It's skinny and awesome. Flight 5 is also nearly wrapped up, and this collection looks to be the best one in the series. We even have several stories that are about 40 pages in length. Epic! My hope is that this segues into the advancement of more professional graphic novelists in the field. We need more talented folks to keep this going! For those of you gearing up to try and do this thing, I have more tutorials on the way...
I just returned from the first leg of the Amulet book tour in Toronto and the greater Detroit area. Amy was happy to know that I finally experienced a real Northeastern American winter, as a big snowstorm swept through Toronto. It was great to see snow falling in the city, something I never really experienced. Thanks to Denise, Nikole, Michele, Chris, Peter, Ab, Kean and everyone who helped make the trip a fun and eventful time. I was glad to finally be able to talk to kids who read the book, and now I'm pumped to get more books out on the shelf for them. Also, here's an interview I did for the National Post in Canada, and here's one over at Publisher's Weekly.
Jellaby and Amulet
in Toronto Hey all! I'm in Toronto right now on the first leg of the Amulet book tour. It's pretty neat to see snow on city streets. Being from Southern California, I don't get to see much of this type of stuff. Strangely enough, despite it being technically colder here, I felt it was colder back at home. It must be the dry weather in Los Angeles. Today, my friend Kean Soo and I will be speaking at the Keep Toronto Reading event at the North York Central Library. You can read an article about us in the Toronto Star by clicking here. And here's the event info on Facebook. By the way, Kean Soo's Jellaby comes out today, so be sure to look for it on store shelves! On Wednesday, Kean and I will also be signing books at The Beguiling from 5 to 7pm. Click here for more info at their site, and here for info on Chris Butcher's blog. I love that store. For those of
you in the states that hold their Presidental primaries today, please
be sure to head to the polls and vote. I already put in my ballot
(by mail), and I feel incredibly lucky to be able to vote for a
future President that I will admire and be proud of.
New York Magazine has a nice preview of the book up at their website. I love the layout of the piece. Check it out here. I also just realized that a recent Amulet-related interview went up at Newsarama. More preview pages in the link.
Amulet Hardcover
I just received the Amulet hardcover in the mail and it looks and feels great! The weight and heft of the hardcover makes the book feel just right, and the satin finish feels good to hold. I've been told they are already moving into the second printing of the book (after a 41,000 copy first printing of the paperback and a 5,000 copy first printing of the hardcover), so the logo color and design will be switched back to my original design very soon. If you have a gold-colored logo, it means you have a first printing! Thanks to all the people who sent kind words of support for the book. It sounds like the kids are really enjoying the story and characters, and that's the most important thing.
Amulet Desktop November 1st , 2007 Here's a desktop image made from one of the panels in Amulet. You can download it at either 1024 or 1280 resolution. I got word from my editor that they're already moving into a second printing of the paperback edition before the release date (likely due to heavy Book Fair pre-orders). This means we'll have a revised edition, with the proper logo and text colors available on the release date. The copies with the unapproved yellow logo and text will thankfully be the only ones in existence, but I guess that makes them collector's items. Heheh.
Amulet Paperback October 27th, 2007
I just received the Amulet paperback edition in the mail yesterday. The print quality overall is very nice, especially considering its ten dollar price point. I'm not a fan of Scholastic's decision to change the logo color to yellow, but hopefully we can get that fixed in subsequent printings. I'll be receiving the hardcover edition soon, and I'll be sure to post some photos of it. By the way, my editor tells me the books will be sneaking into stores in December, though the official release date is January. Here's a look at some of the interior pages...
Amulet Cover September 6th, 2007
Here's the cover image for Amulet Book One. It is now available for very early pre-ordering on Amazon in either hardcover or paperback formats. I've begun thumbnailing Amulet Book 2 and I'm excited about this series. Now that most of the heavy lifting- establishing the characters, the world, and the themes - is done, it's time to really fine-tune everything and amplify all the good stuff. This is my favorite part. More Amulet-related news and other goodies (desktops, etc.) are on the way.
June 29th , 2007
I was beginning to think that production on this book would go on forever, but Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper is finally finished. Many thanks go out to Alan Beadle (pictured above with Amy and me), Erik Martin, Shadi Muklashy, Chris Appelhans, Dawn Fujioka, and Dave Au for helping out during the final week of production. For the long final stretch, however, it was just Amy and me, painting pages at a breakneck pace. If she wasn't here by my side, the book would never have been completed.
Anyway, I'll be back on this blog a little more often now. Thanks for sticking around despite the lack of updates. Now, it's time for some sleep...
May 20th , 2007
I'm just about finished with the inking of Amulet. Well, there is no actual ink involved (since the finals are done in pencil), but it's essentially the same process. Recently, I decided that I needed to get help on the color production of the book, and so I enlisted the aid of a team of assistants. I don't know how I would be able to finish this book without these guys, many of whom were referred to me by legendary drawing instructor Kevin Chen. The in-house team includes my lead assistant Alan Beadle (who has been with me for quite a few months now), Dawn Fujioka, Katy Wu, Arree Chung, Erik Martin, Sho Katayama, Shadi Muklashy, and of course, my always supportive Amy. I have also been receiving help from friends outside the studio. Kean Soo, Matthew Armstrong, and Sarah Mensinga have been flatting some of the pages. For two years, production on Amulet was an exhausting and oftentimes torturous process when working by myself. With a team, however, I look forward to coming to the studio every day. Now, work gets done at a steady clip and we still have time to just chat, hang out and play Settlers of Catan at the end of a hard day's work. I'm very fortunate. Life is good. And I have my friends to thank for it. Oh, and since deciding to treat the book like a team production, I gave myself enough time to work out the story without stressing out, and now it all reads very well. It's a much, much stronger book, and also about 40 pages shorter! I can't wait to share Amulet with the readers.
Simplify & Amplify February 17th, 2007
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!
One More Time February 1st, 2007
The newest rough draft of Amulet is complete, but I think I'll have to go back in there and do a little more tweaking before heading back into full production mode. The new version of the story is a little over 200 pages long, and about 65 percent of it is entirely new material (created since the previous draft). Going back and retelling the story with a calm confidence has done wonders for it. Now that the story has a definite shape and feel, it's all about sculpting it into its final form. This is my favorite part of the process. Speaking of process, Stephen Timothy McCranie sent in this nice illustration inspired by my rant about creating graphic novels. Heheh. Thanks Stephen!
The End of the Tunnel is the Beginning of the Next... January 24th, 2007
The thumbnailed pages of the new draft of Amulet are nearly complete. I still have to draw the thumbnails for the final few pages, smooth out 3 or 4 transition scenes, and I'll be back on production full time. The new draft is going to make the book about 224 pages long. It's going to be a long haul to the finish line.
Working Round the Clock January 17th, 2007
For the longest time, the book looked like a big pile of shattered glass after I decided to scrap more than half of the pages I had drawn. Now, I am happy to say it has some semblance of cohesiveness, and the brutal beating I gave it seems to have done the story some good. I still have to rescript and thumbnail the final sequences to see if it all works. Knock on wood... The picture above is of me digitally painting the new cover for the Flight Volume 1 reissue...
The Slowest Typewriter December 12th, 2006 As a reader of graphic novels, it always bugs me that most long form comics read like they are the first draft of the material, when in fact they often are. And for good reason. As a creator of graphic novels, I am exhausted by my selfish reader tendencies by having to redraw page after page to smooth out the reading experience. I can see why, over the years, creators often compromised their stories under the pressures of deadlines and satiating the public's thirst for the material. For the large amounts of time and energy a creator must spend to create the work, the reader only gets a small handful of information to chew on. Sometimes, working out the details are not an option. This is the pickle that the readers and creators of comics seem to always find themselves in. Readers are very forgiving of the story elements in a comic book. This is unlike other media, like films or novels, where audiences often criticize stories with sharpened talons, and only the very best and most appealing works make their way through the gauntlet. Is it because comics readers understand how difficult the process is and are simply happy to have reading material? Or is it simply that we have low expectations of the medium, as opposed to extremely high ones for films and novels? Amulet has been an experiment in treating the graphic novel with the standards of filmwatching and novel reading in mind, and I have to admit that it's been an incredibly exhausting project. I'm currently in the middle of redrafting and redrawing nearly half the book to bring it up to snuff. The book already reads well, but I think Scholastic's incredibly high expectations and my own (possibly foolish) ambitions want the book to work like a very well-oiled machine. I've actually burnt myself out several times now, and I just took a much needed break from the extreme deadline pressures to refocus the narrative and build up enough energy to go back at it. I've already drawn well over 300 pages (penciled, some inked) to produce a book that will be about 200 pages in length, and I'm about to draw at least 70 more. One thing that I am realizing is that I am not naturally a good writer. I have to work hard at it. But I do know good writing when I see it, so I just have to keep throwing stuff at the wall and hope I see something that sticks. For those of you aspiring graphic novelists out there that are likewise not naturally gifted, I highly recommend scheduling enough time to do about twice the amount of work you would need for the final product (something I should have already learned from working on films), otherwise it's likely that you can end up with a case of first-draftitis or a stream-of-consciousness project , neither of which are necessarily bad things. In any case, we'll have to figure out how we can get the comics medium, a vessel akin to a ridiculously slow typewriter, to sing at the level of the brightest media available to the public. Much of the problem can be solved with more disciplined work methods, but with more structured systems comes heavy pros and cons, something I'll talk about in a later entry. Back to work for now... -Kazu
New Section September 7th, 2006
Welcome to the new Amulet section of the website. This is where I'll post less frequent updates related to the upcoming books. Since Amulet takes up nearly all of my time and energy these days, I figured the project deserved a spiffy section all to itself. Please check back for more updates, or watch the Bolt City front page for even more news related to all of my projects. Thanks for reading! -Kazu
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