Buying the Cow Before the Horse...

In the summer of 2005, alot of events lined up in a very weird ways concerning Enlightenment. Daniel and I had finished our preview book and were sending it to the printers; Because we only wanted to print a small handful of books to use in gaining the interest of publishers, we planned on using Comixpress. By the time I had the files in my posession, I had gotten a series of e-mails from friends of mine concerning comics they were going to press with themselves.

The first e-mail was from The Megazeen; They were planning on putting out a special giveaway issue for the Wizard World con in Philly, and they had some ad space they needed to fill. Dan and I decided this would be a cool idea, since (according to Comicxpress) we should have had copies of our books in our posession by then so it might be a nice way to get people to know about the book. For that ad, Dan did this- it has nothing to do with anything in the book, but it's features a creature that will make it into a later story and its cool as hell...

The second e-mail came from a friend in the UK; He was part of a book called Sam119 and he ALSO had some ad space he needed to fill. We agreed to trade ads with him (and Megazeen as well) and because his book was in full color, Dan wanted to do a special ad for that. Since the book was called the devil you know, Dan did this, which features a very traditional devil image- a motif which will run though all the Enlightenment books...

The third e-mail I got was from Chuck Satterlee; He too was doing a book called Of Bitter Souls for a new company called Speakeasy. Like the other two friends of mine, he wanted to do an ad trade. Since he didn't have an ad prepared and we were ready to go to press, Chuck just agreed to run this ad for us- later I found out from Adam, the companie's owner, that he agreed to let our ad run but he had rejected some other ads from far more established creative teams.

Running that ad set in motion a very rapid series of events- Chuck asked to see more of the book, so I sent him a PDF of the preview. He loved it so much, he called Adam from Speakeasy and told him he should sign Dan and I to do Enlightenment through Speakeasy. Adam liked the art from the ad, and after seeing the PDF, decided if Dan and I could come to San Diego for the con, he'd meet with us to discuss making a deal. This, of course, made Dan and I excited beyond belief and we found a way to get there. I would up flying 9 hours to get there, was on the ground for 21 and took a 11 hour, rain hampered flight home... and all for a meeting that lasted less than 5 minutes!

After the fact, I heard several stories surrounding the events of that day which I can't repeat here... but I will say that although the meeting was very positive, we didn't come away with a Speakeasy contract. All of that was for the best, however, because Adam ended up folding the company less than 6 months later and it caused Dan and I to make 2 major changes to our plans for the book. We decided that Enlightenment would be in color, and that it would be broken up into comic sized issues. To make this work, I wrote a new opening sequence to the story taking an existing scene from late in our original script and fleshing it out with new material. This scene, which is now our Graphic Novel's first chapter, set in motion a variety of sweeping changes to the storyline that forced me to re-work and re-write our script and yielded the story we have now...

Today's image is a cool pin-up from the original preview; It has nothing to do with anything, but it's also a very hot image... Oh- and we did one more ad in automata, announcing a 12 issue min-series that never happened...