Some History
I intended on including this at the end of Issue #4 but couldn't find a place for it. So I've decided to publish it here. Sort of a 'thanks' to everyone who had a hand in making this book happen.
The comic you hold in your hands is twelve years in the making. Not to produce, but this character has been in my head, believe it or not, for twleve freakin' years! For those who care I will try to give a brief overview. In 1992, I was home from college visiting my friends Kevin Harthun and Christian Bates and we, being comic fans and all around creative types, thought: wouldn’t it be unique and interesting to do a comic book about a hero who could control their blood. Give themselves adrenaline rushes, increase their stamina, etc. And wouldn’t it also be cool to make the character a strong female protagonist (back then it was unique, now there seem to be a lot of them). We gave her the name Amber O’Neill and called the idea Bloodstream but the brainstorming sort of stopped there. Other than a few sketches and an airbrushed t-shirt, I didn’t devote a whole lot of time to the concept.
Now jump ahead to 1995, I’ve graduated from art school with my degree in painting and a friend gives me a bunch of graphic novels she doesn’t want anymore. I have been reading comics since I was 8 years of age, (mostly marvel titles, Spider-man, FF and the Hulk) but being busy with art school I was not up on current books. In the stack were The Watchmen, Swamp Thing and a little number called Dark Knight Returns. Damn! I was blown away. These books changed my life. I was seriously enthralled. All through school I’d tried to incorporate comics into my painting. But now that I was out of school I knew I wanted to make an actual comic book. So I dug up Bloodstream and tried to come up with a story. I knew I wanted to base it in real science so I did some research in DNA and cloning and stumbled upon something perfect for the story--blood substitutes. I wrote a few scenes and ran it past my girlfriend at the time, Samantha Fields. I even ran her in an RPG to try and add some realism to the character’s decisions. That summer I did some pencil pages on bristol paper in the industry standard style and went to Comic-Con in San Diego. Generally the feedback was positive but not overly enthusiastic. One negative review was from a certain industry giant (who will go unnamed) who ripped me a new one (I’ve come to understand over the years that he goes to the conventions just to do that to aspiring artists).
Nevertheless, I decided to approach comics in a style that I knew. Painting. A lot of my favorite comic book illustrators were painting books, Kent Williams, Dave Mckean, Bill Sienkiewicz. So I began taking some shots of friends as characters for reference and did a few painted pages in ink wash. In the meanwhile, I was doing various jobs and illustration work to stay afloat. I kept up with comics and tried many times to get jobs in the professional arena. To keep the momentum up, I would collaborate with friends on independent anthologies (Bloodnut, Dead in Memphis). The Bloodstream story, however, was not coming along as I’d hoped. Unhappy with my own writing, I kept giving it to friends to see if they could give it the spark I needed to get the imagery in my head flowing and motivate me to start. I got help from a guy named Cliff McKellar and another friend Pete Lacy. But ultimately I knew the only way I was going to be happy with this character was to sit down and write it myself.
In 1999, I meet my true love Penelope Register at an art show here in Memphis. We started dating and I find out that among other talents she has a gift for writing. Had even been picked up by Paramount to script an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation (which they never used). She gathered all of my notes and began condensing everything together to form Amber’s history. She wrote the first few chapters, added flashbacks and a new character: a sister. I knew I always wanted to include flashbacks but Penny really gave them a dreamy verisimilar quality, drawing from her own memories with her little sister. I was so excited at these new developments that I snatched the story back from her (sorry, baby) and tried to finish it myself. Well it sort of went back and forth between us until we finally had a completed version of the origin story. At the 2001 San Diego Con we gained the interest of an up and coming publisher called Etherian and were all set to produce the book when 911 kicked that square in the ass. The offices of Etherian Comics were in New York and they had to shut down everything. In the next few years, I did a few more pages in acrylic wash and sharpened the story further. I then showed it to some people at the 2003 Wonder Con in San Francisco including a publisher at DC who asked me to send it to him in the mail. I did that and sent a submission to Image at the same time. I heard back from Jim Valentino via email in a weeks time. And,..well, there you go.
-Adam Shaw
October 2005
The comic you hold in your hands is twelve years in the making. Not to produce, but this character has been in my head, believe it or not, for twleve freakin' years! For those who care I will try to give a brief overview. In 1992, I was home from college visiting my friends Kevin Harthun and Christian Bates and we, being comic fans and all around creative types, thought: wouldn’t it be unique and interesting to do a comic book about a hero who could control their blood. Give themselves adrenaline rushes, increase their stamina, etc. And wouldn’t it also be cool to make the character a strong female protagonist (back then it was unique, now there seem to be a lot of them). We gave her the name Amber O’Neill and called the idea Bloodstream but the brainstorming sort of stopped there. Other than a few sketches and an airbrushed t-shirt, I didn’t devote a whole lot of time to the concept.
Now jump ahead to 1995, I’ve graduated from art school with my degree in painting and a friend gives me a bunch of graphic novels she doesn’t want anymore. I have been reading comics since I was 8 years of age, (mostly marvel titles, Spider-man, FF and the Hulk) but being busy with art school I was not up on current books. In the stack were The Watchmen, Swamp Thing and a little number called Dark Knight Returns. Damn! I was blown away. These books changed my life. I was seriously enthralled. All through school I’d tried to incorporate comics into my painting. But now that I was out of school I knew I wanted to make an actual comic book. So I dug up Bloodstream and tried to come up with a story. I knew I wanted to base it in real science so I did some research in DNA and cloning and stumbled upon something perfect for the story--blood substitutes. I wrote a few scenes and ran it past my girlfriend at the time, Samantha Fields. I even ran her in an RPG to try and add some realism to the character’s decisions. That summer I did some pencil pages on bristol paper in the industry standard style and went to Comic-Con in San Diego. Generally the feedback was positive but not overly enthusiastic. One negative review was from a certain industry giant (who will go unnamed) who ripped me a new one (I’ve come to understand over the years that he goes to the conventions just to do that to aspiring artists).
Nevertheless, I decided to approach comics in a style that I knew. Painting. A lot of my favorite comic book illustrators were painting books, Kent Williams, Dave Mckean, Bill Sienkiewicz. So I began taking some shots of friends as characters for reference and did a few painted pages in ink wash. In the meanwhile, I was doing various jobs and illustration work to stay afloat. I kept up with comics and tried many times to get jobs in the professional arena. To keep the momentum up, I would collaborate with friends on independent anthologies (Bloodnut, Dead in Memphis). The Bloodstream story, however, was not coming along as I’d hoped. Unhappy with my own writing, I kept giving it to friends to see if they could give it the spark I needed to get the imagery in my head flowing and motivate me to start. I got help from a guy named Cliff McKellar and another friend Pete Lacy. But ultimately I knew the only way I was going to be happy with this character was to sit down and write it myself.
In 1999, I meet my true love Penelope Register at an art show here in Memphis. We started dating and I find out that among other talents she has a gift for writing. Had even been picked up by Paramount to script an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation (which they never used). She gathered all of my notes and began condensing everything together to form Amber’s history. She wrote the first few chapters, added flashbacks and a new character: a sister. I knew I always wanted to include flashbacks but Penny really gave them a dreamy verisimilar quality, drawing from her own memories with her little sister. I was so excited at these new developments that I snatched the story back from her (sorry, baby) and tried to finish it myself. Well it sort of went back and forth between us until we finally had a completed version of the origin story. At the 2001 San Diego Con we gained the interest of an up and coming publisher called Etherian and were all set to produce the book when 911 kicked that square in the ass. The offices of Etherian Comics were in New York and they had to shut down everything. In the next few years, I did a few more pages in acrylic wash and sharpened the story further. I then showed it to some people at the 2003 Wonder Con in San Francisco including a publisher at DC who asked me to send it to him in the mail. I did that and sent a submission to Image at the same time. I heard back from Jim Valentino via email in a weeks time. And,..well, there you go.
-Adam Shaw
October 2005
1 Comments:
I was the lucky recipient of the aforementioned airbrushed t-shirt. - christian bates
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