Evolution of ANCESTOR

malachiward:

Matt Sheean and I had been working out the idea for Ancestor for awhile before Brandon Graham asked if we could do something for Island. Towards the end of 2013 we put together a pitch for Ancestor as a mini-series. Here are the first three pages from that -

Nothing happened with the pitch, but by the time it was decided that Ancestor would be serialized in the pages of Island, Matt and I knew we’d be re-writing and redrawing what was done for the pitch. These pages changed significantly:
• It went from three pages to five. I mean, we were gonna get a page rate, why condense things?? Really though, this sequence was the most personal and insightful sequence for the main character in the first chapter, so we wanted it to really resonate, and that required a bit more real estate.
• We changed the way the ‘title’ was displayed, partially because of how we wanted the subsequent chapters to be titled. We wanted to make it more minimal right off the bat, to visually indicate the beginning of our story in the pages of many other stories inside the anthology.
• We had a firmer grasp on how we would depict The Service, so we ditched the more metaphorical ‘brain opening’ up idea and went with something we would depict more consistently through out the series.

Of course there were all kinds of smaller changes too, take a look at the finished pages:

If you have any comments/questions, feel free to hit the ‘ol “ask” button.

Mannn, I love this stuff Matt and Malachi are doing