Tuesday, July 30, 2024

ALAMAT: ORIGINS
[Addendum 4] (3 of 3)

In prepping ALAMAT: ORIGINS, Budjette Tan conducted a trio of Q&A's with me covering AVATAR, HORUS, and DHAMPYR.

Some of the Q&A content made it into the story Intros in ORIGINS.
Most, did not.

So I'll be posting the Q&A's here, uncut, so you can all see what was left on the cutting room floor.

Third up: AVATAR.

Same question – what’s your elevator pitch for AVATAR?

 

A beloved hero’s “best friend” (ala Jimmy Olsen)/youthful sidekick, crippled during a brutal supervillain battle, is given a chance to become that hero, oblivious to the sinister machinations going on behind the scenes of his very own “origin” story.

 

At this point in time, you’d already written Horus (and maybe Bathala?) – what was your approach to writing another guy with a cape? What was the impetus that got you excited to tell the story of Avatar?

 

One of the many things I’ve learned over the years is to never question the inspiration.

If an idea presents itself, and I’ve kicked all the tires and deemed it sound enough to take out on the road, on a journey that appears worthwhile, headed towards an intriguing and interesting destination, then I just slam those keys home, rev the engine, and head out on that highway…

 

So when AVATAR popped into my head, I didn’t really stop to think, “Well, it has to be different from those other Superman archetype characters I’ve written”; that consideration comes later, in the molding of the material.

Trust the process is another thing I’ve learned, so you drive down that highway the inspiration has presented to you, and you trust that the journey will be different from those you’ve taken before.

 

Plus, AVATAR (one of whose core ideas is: what if someone whose ability to move freely had been taken away from him, was suddenly given a chance to fly*) came around after a significant amount of time in which I wrote nothing, a sustained period where no idea seemed potent enough to pursue. It was a creative wasteland I was tired of inhabiting, and AVATAR was the rescuing hand that took me out of it.

 

So, really, there was no second guessing about me writing “another guy in a cape”. It was actually me leaning in and embracing all of that, an attitude that I’ve adopted time and again since then.

 

* In retrospect, given the creative rut I was in at the time, that metaphor is definitely not lost on me.

 

If AVATAR reached up to issue 100, what would he be doing? How would you make that milestone issue super special?

 

I imagine issue 100 would be the culmination of the whole “Terra Armada” subplot, when the fact that Tiercel is really a manipulative SOB who’s positioned all these heroes as pawns and expendable pieces on his chessboard has become common knowledge to Avatar and Horus.

The war they’ve been unwittingly trained for should reach its end at that point, and, well, it really isn’t actually a happy ending, honestly…

Would that make it “super special” enough…?
:P

 

And there you go.

While I also re-lettered AVATAR, it was more for the sake of readability.
Because the original publication was oversized, it was essentially shrunk down to the dimensions/proportions of ALAMAT: ORIGINS.
If I'd left the original lettering as it was, the issue would have possibly been a difficult read. So it was a matter of increasing the font size, rather than a full-on remastering ala HORUS.

Additionally, since the request was for "first issues", that's what appears in ORIGINS; the main story in AVATAR issue 1.
But there's actually a Prologue chapter, which ran in the final issue of PANTHEON, with art by the one and only Carl Vergara, where we see Tiercel make the offer to the crippled Saul that turns him into (the new) Avatar.
Maybe (hopefully?) we'll get to see that one reprinted too, somewhere down the line...

I think that's all I've got for now...
Honestly not sure if I'll be back with more ORIGINS posts, but if you have any specific questions (about AVATAR or HORUS or DHAMPYR) then that would ensure my return...
So, any questions, please feel free to leave them in the Comments section and I'll see what I can do to answer them.

you can't drink just six,

Dave

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