Anyone that has checked my blog before, might have noticed a few illustrations related to something called "Mia, Tales from the Lost Islands".
This is one of my personal projects, and hopefully my first foray into the creator owned world.
I started thinking about it more seriously a few years ago, when i got in touch with the "Popgun Anthology" editors with the goal of maybe being able to participate in one of it´s volumes. Unfortunately, it never came to pass, mainly due to me not being able to juggle the Marvel Comics work that was at my drawing table with extra work. But a spark had been lit, and all my dreams of doing an all ages, fun, adventure comic book channeling my childhood influences of "Future boy Conan", "The Mysterious Cities of Gold", and bits of Tintin, Spirou and many other childhood heroes were now fully in motion. I got in touch with my buddy João Lemos to flesh out what was a very vague concept, into something more, an actual project that could stand on it´s own.
So, along with the fleshing out of the story, i did a test run of of 5 pages to show the tone and look of what i was going for.
You can check that effort here:
http://nunoplati.blogspot.pt/2010/07/near-future.html
To make a long story short, i continued alongside João, developing the project. I did conceptual illustrations, to show some of the character designs, and the overall feel of the books, and also did a 5 page prologue to kickstart the actual pages from the first book.
The question now could be, why isn´t the project on the stands yet, since i started it a couple of years ago?
The answer is that, it is very, very hard to work on a creator owned book, especially if you don´t have a publisher. I did pitch the project at New York Comicon for the last couple of years, and we actually got a quite a few publishers interested in publishing it, going as far as discussing contracts and a publishing schedule with one of them.
The problem is that it is almost impossible to work on something like this full time, while not getting a page rate or anything for months and months, and then just hope for the best , and wish upon a star that people will like it and will support it, and in a way provide me with an income so the books would keep being published. But as everyone knows the comics market is very difficult, be it American or European, because besides the obvious question of whether the book has merit and quality to be published to begin with, there´s a lot of things Publishers have to ponder before investing on a new project.
Now that i´ve contextualized the work i´m posting the Concept Art and the never before seen Prologue, as well as a few pages of things to hopefully come.
I finish, by humbly asking for advice on what is the best way to move the project forward. I would welcome and really appreciate Editors, Publishers, fellow Artists, and non artists advice and input on what routes i should take to make Mia, a reality.
Contact me at nunoplati@gmail.com
Many thanks
Nuno
