FLIGHT 7 : Onere and Piccola

FLIGHT is the Eisner nominated, Harvey nominated, graphic novel anthology created and edited by the genius Kazu Kibuishi.

I was honored again to be included in the 7th volume in the series.

In Flight 6 my story was "Walters" a rambling, wordless 40 page story. It was a fantastical retelling of the true story about the man who flew his lawn chair with weather balloons. You can see the extensive "making of" posts here.

For Flight 7 I was challenged to develop a story beyond a wordless one. After some time I settled on "Onere and Piccola" an original myth of mine. I love mythology and I'll take any chance I can to try to write something archaic and sort of grand. Truthfully the story of Onere and Piccola is just a small facet of a larger mythology of a story that I hope to be able to show you all some day. It's just one of the stories told in the world of one of my stories. If that makes sense.

Well, I followed a pretty similar production for this story as do with most all of my work except in this case I made much more developed roughs.

From there it was a matter a drawing and painting.

Like many others I listen to music when I work. I can't when I'm writing or storyboarding or doing the roughs, but once it's time to draw and paint I'm all for it. I don't know how many other people are like this but I tend to gravitate towards a certain grouping of music/songs while involved in any given project.

For "Onere and Piccola" I listened to these three pieces of music in particular on repeat throughout the project. I hope they'll add to your experience reading the story.







Once I was done, I hand-lettered the text. Yes, it was a little tedious but the story is only 20 pages (actually 10 cleverly laid out spreads to speed the production time, drawing and painting went much faster) so it did take a little extra time to letter but in the end it really made things look that much better I thought. I'm very pleased with the way it all came together.

Like I mentioned earlier, with "Onere and Piccola" I wanted to write something kind of grand, a little archaic, and something with a little emotion. I hope you will enjoy it.

Here is a link to see a preview of the first 6 pages.

Ah, what the heck, I'll post them here too --

Flight 7 will be released at San Diego Comic-Con this year (in a week!) Stop by the booth #2235, I'll be there periodically throughout the day signing some books and hanging out.