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Jon H. Jones is one of Xenith’s most longstanding contributors. He has been a member of the current forums since their conception in 2002.

Most Xenith readers have at least a passing familiarity with artist and writer Ken Krekeler through his webcomic My Nemesis. My Nemesis has been on hiatus for more than a year, however, and during that time Mr. Krekeler has been working a massive undertaking–the creation of a graphic novel called The Colodin Project tentatively scheduled to be published later this summer.

In this interview, Ken talks with us about the creative evolution of The Colodin Project, writing and his artistic inspirations.

The Colodin Project has existed in some form or another since you were a teenager. You’ve referred to it as your “magnum opus” in the past. Talk a little about its background and evolution. What was the original spark that seeded this idea in your mind and how has it changed over the years? I am especially interested on how this latest incarnation came to be. After ten years, what finally brought you to the point where the story just began to flow?

I’ve been into comics and sci-fi stuff since I was a kid. There was no single origin point for The Colodin Project; the story and characters evolved over time as I got older. But the first time I started writing notes for the plot was on a cruise ship. I was fourteen, stuck alone in my cabin for some reason, watching terrible movies on television, when I suddenly decided I was tired of following other people’s stories, and that I would invent my own. So I drew some designs, some of which made it, some that did not; and that was how it began.

The story has never “flowed.” It has undergone too many overhauls to recount. But there is a difference between a single story, with a beginning, middle and end… and an epic, which is made up of smaller, shorter stories. Over time, I’d gone over the plot, breaking it down, breaking it down, until I felt like things were right. Until the events made sense, the characters made sense, their choices made sense. But even after I’d gotten to that point, even after I liked what I had, it still felt contrived somehow. So I got the idea to create an objective character, a kind of third party, which evolved into Steven Richards, private investigator.

You are that rare breed of comic creator that is both writer and artist. Do you consider yourself more a writer or an artist or some indivisible fusion of the two? How does one skill set influence the other?

I consider myself a hybrid of the two, although it’s less common to be recognized for my writing, so I tend to value that side a little more. With comics, almost everybody sees the art first. Because if it LOOKS professional, it probably is. You flip through the pages, you skim, and if it seems up to par, you’ll give the first few lines a once-over to make sure there aren’t any typos. And then you buy it. Maybe.

But the writing always comes first. There’s a script. There are revisions. There’s editing. There’s logistical thinking. It’s only after I’m happy with a script that I move onto the thumbnail stage.

I try not to let my art be determined by my writing. That is to say, if I have an idea for a script in which a giant fish monster with robot legs attacks a fairy princess in an underwater battle, I won’t worry about how difficult that battle will be to illustrate. If the story works, then I move on to the next phase, crossing any future bridges when I come to them.

Let’s talk about your artistic process. You use photographs of live models and locations as the basis for your characters and scenery. How is this advantageous to your work and what happens next? You take it to Illustrator? Paint it in Photoshop?

I use Photoshop. Models are a vital part of my process now. With live models, I don’t have to worry about consistency, proportion, or extreme angles; all the information is already there. In addition, my photo shoots are usually pretty fun to do. My models are all friends and family, and working together on a project like this is very enlightening to the relationship.

Speaking of the artistic side of Colodin, your visual style is very cinematic. What media–movies, comic books, whatever–have particularly influenced that style and why? Returning to your writerly side, what authors, if any, have influenced your narrative style?

I think of comics as a written form of film. I choose my shots the same way a director would choose his angles with a camera. This isn’t as common as you might think. Many artists, especially up-and-comers, try and add as much drama to every panel as possible. You’ll have a scene where two people are drinking a cup of coffee, chatting about the weather, and you’ll have these extreme bird’s eye view of a character, or they’ll be popping out of the panels. This doesn’t make sense to me. It comes off corny and over-the-top. Save dramatic shots for dramatic scenes; use simple shots for simple ones.

Alan Moore is a big influence. If you look at his work (From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), you’ll notice his illustrators keep the panel layouts static, the shots straight-on, like storyboards rather than comic books. For dialogue, I draw a lot from Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man, Powers), who uses very realistic characters saying very realistic things. They don’t react with blatant exposition; they react the way a person would.

You began releasing The Colodin Project as 21(?) individual issues, but now you are, instead, releasing the first five chapters as a trade paperback. Why the change?

Single issues of independent books like mine are on their way out. Graphic novels are on the rise. You see, pretty much all comic books are distributed through Diamond Distribution. Everything from Superman to Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is listed in a catalog called Diamond Previews. If you don’t meet their minimum order requirements, you get cut from the catalog, and that’s it for your book.

Comic book readers know this. Even if they like your first couple of issues, even if it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever read, they’re well aware it’s very likely they’ll never get to read the end of your story. So now, with the decline of the economy, with the slow death of print coming to an end, it’s easier for people to get on board with completed stories like Watchmen. Even the big time guys, Marvel and DC, have begun periodically taking each story arc from their mainstream books and re-publishing them as graphic novels. And sales on the novels are good.

Learn more and read The Colodin Project‘s entire first volume for free at its website.

It is not yet clear whether the current economic disaster will produce anything like the profound transformation that shook the U.S. during the Great Depression. Our own crises of belief are likely just beginning. If we are fortunate, however, we will have a generation of artists and intellectuals like those of the 1930s to help us imagine our way past confusion.

I’m a little behind on my perusing, as clearly illustrated by the date on this article, however I thought it especially pertinent, and perhaps now more than February, as this is the time when things bloom. This time is perfect for opportunity: from crisis almost always comes a cavalcade of art. Feed your ideas: give them water and light and speak to them softly, let them grow ripe and rich; and come fall, when it’s time to shut yourself inside, pick them from the tree and bite slowly and savor.

However if you’re in the southern hemisphere you may be behind on the times. Or possibly very far ahead, je ne sais pas.

| Hope |

When I looked around me today, all I saw was death, decay and icy endings, and I wondered what the hell God was thinking when he bothered to create something that couldn’t last.  The perfect being, self-contained and self-sustaining – why suddenly turn his hand to the needy world of temporality?  When you are a being of light and music and air [and in these things so far beyond their ideas we can only bring them as the palest comparison], why put your hand into a pit of dust?

And so I got to thinking, I suppose, about creation, and about artistry.

An artist is a creator, and a creator is someone who understands that a sandcastle is no less a work of art than a famous statue because it will not last beyond the next tide, or because there have been a million castles like it.  Is impermanence an argument against art?  Of course not!  All the works of men pass away – so too, if they are any kind of creation, will the works of God.  And similarity?  Repetitiveness?  It can be the work of the academic community to watch footnotes and pour avidly through the database and archives of their collective paranoid traditions for the slightest hint of plagiarism, of ‘intellectual theft’.  Is the artist so entirely base as to believe that dreams can be stolen?

For therein is the seed of a creator’s ideas: dreams.  Just as surely as it is the child’s dream they put into sandcastles and shapes of clay, so too it is the poet’s dream in the sonnet, or the painter’s on the canvas.  ‘Here is how the world might be’, they say: if some part of the vision exists in reality, all the better for the creator; if the dream is an impossible one, so be it; even if the dream is a nightmare, better that it is spoken aloud that left unsaid.  For this is the true genius of creation in all its myriad forms – not that it says ‘look at what I have created for its own sake’ but that it says ‘look what I have created because… look what my creation says in relation to the rest of creation.’  And it is from this knowledge that the cry but it’s not Art! springs.  Not from indignation at the form of the creation – from this comes genuine constructive criticism – but from the intent of it, from that which says ‘I am because I am’ and not ‘I am because…’  Humanity is that question to God’s creation, just as the artist’s creation is to everything around it: it need not always even be answered, but there must still always be an answer.

The sun here has been incredibly beautiful lately – a rarity for Manchester! – and it’s been a joy to be able to walk home from work late in the day and still feel the sunset shimmering around the city. From the elevated trainline I entrust my life to every morning and evening, the whole city seems bathed in yellow and crimson: it’s like the end of time, or the dying worlds of C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew – stunning and sad. “Headlights racing against inescapable dark,” I think one supremely talented man put it. Mind you, I always make it home before the sun sets, so perhaps I should consider it a gift of sorts, a fleeting glimpse of the despair I am insulated against by some measure of faith and hope.

If there are any gifts given to us by God, I think they come in this form: moments that we don’t expect, people that are here and then gone, dreams and memories that you can hardly remember. Our lives are so fragile, and so tenuously balanced between a darkness we cannot survive and a light we haven’t yet learned to live with – what the divine places directly into them cannot remain. It would undo us.

Nonetheless, we are given moments of transcendence, I think: perhaps to help us understand what we are missing? Perhaps just to keep us interested in what goes on behind Heaven’s windows when the curtains are drawn. Either way, they are illusory, they are transitory, they happen in the strangest of places and at the oddest of times, and tend to leave you blinking and surprised.

A couple of days ago, working the late shift and with the shop nearly empty, I had what could possibly be one of those moments. How to describe it? The simple fact was that, as I stood at one end of the shop, the late-evening sun reflecting off the mountain of glass outside formed a glowing, blood-red halo around the girl sitting at a table by the window, writing dreamily in her notebook. These are the facts: they could quite easily have arranged themselves without any kind of help from on high, but nonetheless. Nonetheless, I think I have rarely seen something so perfect and so beautiful, and I doubt I could ever write a description half as meaningful as the moment itself.

At some point later it occurred to be that it probably would have made a good picture, but somehow the idea just seemed subtly wrong. I wonder sometimes if we, artists and writers, photographers, filmmakers, if we aren’t the biggest heretics of all: daring to catch rainbows in our jar, put down in permanent form what is by nature transitory and illusory. But then again, it occurs also that often the heretics are the most devout of High Priests: perhaps it takes one to know one, takes an artists to grasp the work of an artist – “Fellow creators, the creator seeks,” Nietzsche writes, “those who write new values on new tablets. Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.” God is, at some level, a personal and relational being: I can certainly attest to exactly how tailor-made, how bespoke the moment felt to me.

I’m not under the impression that this will change my life, or that I’ve been given something other people lack. But it is heartening, at the least, to be given what you need. And right then, from where I was standing, a vision of remote, untouchable, sun-washed beauty was like a gasping breath taken after a long, hard cry. “This too, shall pass,” but for now, it will suffice.