The road to Enlightenment

When you are deep into any journey, sometimes it pays you strong dividends to reflect on how you got where you are. A good portion of the feedback I’ve gotten about Enlightenment, aside from things like “wow” and “That freaked out my freakin' freaker,” is on the subject of how Dan and I got together and the evolution of the story. It’s not a very linear story, but many times, true stories run through time in creative ways. Like any good story, this will take time to tell…

Back in March of 2003, I was entered into a “competition” of sorts; The goal was to take anything that appeared in the Bible and make as creative a comic as possible from it. The artist I hooked up with and I decided to turn a somewhat boring section of the history of the kings of Israel into a violent space epic, filled with Tiki god robots who ate people and interplanetary destruction, and all without changing one word of text from the Book itself. In my hubris of the moment, I thought to myself that I had co-created the coolest and most original thing in the competition. That was- until I saw the work of one Mr. Daniel Bradford.

Now- and by this I mean no offense to the writer of the piece- it wasn’t some original twist or piece of dialogue which grabbed me; It was the art. From the moment I saw his work, I immediately saw a kindred spirit- someone who I felt I not only understood, but someone who was pushing himself in a direction that was pointing toward amazing things to come. Even though by Dan’s standards today, that story was crude and didn’t live up to Dan’s ideals, there were elements in that work that grabbed me. I figured that Dan MUST be a professional- something that we’d both chuckle over later- so I searched the internet to find out what else he did. My quest was fruitless, except for some comics he did for the Arizona Daily Wildcat. When I contacted him, he was impressed that I did my homework…