Posted in: Comics | Tagged: amelia skye, Gwynn Tavares, jermaine boyd, kickstarter

Drawing New Heroines for A New Apocalypse

Published Tue, 19 Feb 2019 14:33:48 -0600

Gwynn Tavares, artist of Amelia Sky, writes about the project (now on Kickstarter) for Bleeding Cool:

It's been two years since the apocalypse and still no one seems to really know how it happened. Governments are dissolved and have taken their last moments to not fight for the survival of the human race but to literally throw it to the mouth of an invading horror and for what reason, I do not know. Was it to save themselves? There is no evidence that any world powers "made it". The military complexes set up to save so few appear to be disturbingly shoddy in their construction. The escape pods seemed to have launched somewhere predetermined off planet but what could be up there obscured by the constant snow storm that rages?

This is the world of Amelia Sky. Welcome to A New Apocalypse.

I got hired to draw the first issue a few years ago by Jermaine M. Boyd, a writer who contacted me from across the US. I took the job eagerly, he told me it was a story about a girl that wakes up in a daze of amnesia, alone, in the ruins of Manhattan. At first the world seems as silent as the continuous snowfall but over the past two years this story is slowly being revealed to me. I have found out what her super power is but it is just as alien and strange as the monsters that seem to be drawn to her, lurking under bridges appearing hopefully humanoid as she wanders alone.

This story is brutal in that good friends die and the dregs of humanity that is left over is just that, dregs; all the worst people have survived. The world is Game of Thrones after the white walkers have reached to all corners of Westeros and everyone who could have done anything is dead. At first it seems predictable that a hero surfaces to save the day, but, after reading through the script of this last issue, I wonder this world is even worth saving?

And for that matter, save who? A bunch of degenerates holed up killing as many people as these invading monsters? I wonder sometimes at what this little girl, Amelia Sky, is going to do when she is faced with the choice of this worlds fate. If given the choice most of us would hit the proverbial big red button of destroy everything if we were stuck in this horrific world and that is because we are the good guys and that would be the right thing to do.

I see bits and pieces of Amelia Sky's powers seeping through. Calculated and careful and saving her life on occasion, she seems to ignore it completely. It's as if at some point someone lead her to believe that she is just a regular little girl, but why? She never once tries to harness that power and use it for the over the top, over powered, rolling all natural 20's, full-fledged arch angel of doom. It's like if a character showed up in the Walking Dead with that infinity gauntlet. Zombies, no problem. Baseball bat with barbwire? Hah, come at me bro.

This is what makes this character great. This is why she will save a world. She's nothing like us, she doesn't think like us and she should be just as impossible to write for as Superman. Flawless. Supreme. But it's like someone took that character trope and thought: "What if Superman had no idea he could lift entire buildings and bounce nuclear missiles off his chest because his mettle was never tested? What if the end of the world came and went and he had no idea he had the power to stop it in the tip of his finger and then, one day while stumbling around the obliterated surface of the earth through piles of dead bodies, he discovers he could have saved it all?".

Today, I am sitting down to start the extensive task of drawing a comic, drawing Amelia Sky. It is the third issue and I have no idea what is going to happen outside the end of these 20 odd pages that I will read at least 10 time through before I am finished. I draw violent death scenes, I draw piles of carnage in a sewer, my dead count is going to be huge by the end of this. In order to draw things accurately I have to Google stuff that makes my brain twitch; documentary style photos from some photographer who has managed to survive long enough in some horrific place to take photos that I can only describe as truly heart breaking. I've been faking drawing piles of dead bodies by searching pictures of "Person fainting" after one photo of a tsunami. My personal work that I do just for fun tends to be ridiculously happy and positive lately just to balance out my emotional state from drawing Amelia Sky.

If you are here reading this, you probably know what it is like to be driven with the need to be consumed by a story. You can't get it out of your head, and you get to know those characters better than your own friends. But in drawing those characters: I draw them getting injured, being betrayed, I have to draw their hope and the inevitable disappoint that follows. I make sure knives stab deep, the floors they die on are dirty and that the scavengers find them before those that love them do.

I know that this story is going to build, that it is going to get worse, that there are cults, rogue killers, aliens falling from the sky and broken remains of military that, like all good guys, are looking for that big red button. I wonder where it will all go. Who is going to turn traitor who is going to be the helpful sacrifice? I think, as long as I don't have to draw the dog dying, it'll be okay. And as I fret over all the details I only hope that I will good enough and that I will be the one who draws the last moments of these characters.

Amelia Sky Issue #3: The Monster Within Tells You is currently live on Kickstarter and ends on March 13th. Click the Link and Kickstart A New Apocalypse!