Name: C. Thomas Anderson
Tell us a little about yourself: I’m a self taught artist and writer working to create graphic novels and eventually novels. I’ve been drawing and writing comics for nearly 10 years, mainly basing my style on manga. In this last year I’ve begun drawing the stories I’ve built up over time as well as drawing comics for a page rate for various indie creators. I am working to earn enough drawing comics that I can rely less and less on my day job, in the long term I want to get skilled enough to draw a weekly series.
What authors do you draw inspiration from and why: The creators that inspired me first and foremost are the combination of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata: the team behind Death Note, Bakuman, Platinum End and various other comics. The first two are of particular importance to me, Bakuman most of all for giving me the idea to draw comics at all. Tsugumi Ohba’s engaging and clever writing gave me an idea of how to compose a serial story, while Takeshi Obata’s art set an almost insurmountable level of quality to strive for, or to overcome.
Takehiko Inoue was also formative for me in displaying different ways to elevate the format I hadn’t seen before. He and Takeshi Obata sit amongst the best comic artists alive.
And a special mention to Yumi Hotta’s Hikaru no Go, also drawn by Takeshi Obata. A great story that gives me a lot of nostalgia.
Tell us about your book: The book I’m working on currently is called The Rains of Ganymede, a sci-fi western focused mainly on creating smooth dialogue, realized characters and depthful worldbuilding, that I want to unroll over the course of the 10-12 chapters. I consider it a sci-fi western in the scope of the story and the simplicity of the overall driving plot element which is: We need to escape.
The story is set in the far future when the solar system has been terraformed and colonized, but our focus is solely on a young woman Leah Morris and a group of people who are trapped on the prison moon of Ganymede.
In their own ways Leah and her companions escaped the prison blocks above ground and made their way into the sewers below, forming their own sort of community outside the domain of the military police. However Leah is no longer satisfied with her life, or lack thereof. When an opportunity into the massive “free” city called the Parole Zone arises, Leah will take her chance at freedom, or die trying.
How long did it take you to write it? What were some of the challenges: The book is still being worked on, so far I have one 28 page first chapter finished. I drew about 130 pages of storyboards, and then scrapped 80 and rewrote them. I was playing around with character choices and going down different avenues, trying to decide what were the most likely decisions my characters would make. I created the world my story exists in first, deciding the structure of the prison-moon in relative detail, and now I have to essentially solve my own puzzle. This leads to a lot of rewriting, but each time I’m confident its a more realized and thoughtful sequence than the one it replaced. When I drew the final draft of this first chapter, I drew 17 pages of the final draft, then rewrote the last half of the chapter one night and extended it by 3 pages. The changes made certain events more character defining and decisive moments, as compared to happenstance and coincidence. This of course made the next 100 and something pages out of date, but I think it will come out a stronger story overall.
What is a unique or interesting bit of lore or background detail about your world: I am a fan of the structure I created for the solar system, but I don’t think it will ever get much focus. Ganymede is a moon of Jupiter that is tidally locked, so it is “day” for about 7 earth days, then “night” for another 7 or so. You can almost never see the sky, but the book gets into that in a later chapter… Jupiter is a gas giant so there is no surface colony, but it has massive space stations in orbit that house much of the wealth in the solar system. Jupiter’s wealth is second only to the floating cities of Venus, that float in the layer of the atmosphere on Venus that is naturally habitable by humans. Earth was left long ago in what is colloquially referred to as the great migration, leaving behind only a relatively small number of families called Keepers to tend humanity’s birthplace. The major cities on earth were dismantled during the great migration, all in an effort to repair earth’s environment. Humanity largely went to Mars first, or the moon. Mars was terraformed and made green and blue, and humanity intended to approach mars smarter after their experiences on earth. Unfortunately, it was significantly worse. Mars has become the hub of industry in the solar system, and is set on a more destructive path than even earth was. There is a bit more but that is the stuff thats particularly fun. Also Leah’s father and mother have an interesting lead into Rains, but I’ll leave that in case I decide to touch on it at all...
What do you enjoy developing the most – characters, plot, or your world – and why: I think I get the most excited building worlds, writing lore and fleshing out maps. It’s why I love the fantasy genre in novels, and why I am slow cooking a fantasy world in the background that I have a story for. Since lore and worldbuilding is largely in the background and wont be focused on, you have the power of saying “this happened which lead to this and this…” and build the narrative you want, allowing imagination and myth to fill in the blanks. You get to tell a story without all the nitty gritty for once.
While worldbuilding is more quickly rewarding, getting to tell a long narrative and give payoffs to long plot arcs is more substantial and gratifying.
Book price and where it can be found: The book is $4.99 + $2.75 shipping, only through me at the moment so the supply of print books is incredibly limited, nearly out. Outside of print you can buy a digital copy from me for $1.00 and get a downloadable PDF. I plan to get it on Amazon in the near future. I am reachable at my email: colanders97@gmail.com or my twitter: @CThomasAnderso1
What’s your next project: My next project is much bigger in scale. It is a graphic novel that will be released in its entirety when its done. It is an approximately 500 page fantasy epic, with a very specific world built up for it. While I can’t say too much, the world is one where Hydrogen power was mastered and normalized, airships are the primary vessel, and storms persists and ravage the earth, turning most lands to swamps and bogs. Our character’s live in a small valley recess that has a rain shadow protecting them from the storms. The story is called The Song of the Rising Valley, written by Ryan Meronk illustrated and supervised by C. Thomas Anderson (me!)
Contact information (twitter, blog, facebook, etc.):
Email: colanders97@gmail.com
Twitter: @CThomasAnderso1
Comments
Post a Comment