Just had notice from Rebellion that the Leviathan collection is due out in October; it will include the additional "Tales of the Leviathan" stories. I'm digging out my original design sketches to include in the back of the book; given that Ian and I first planned the story in 1994 (9 years before if it was published) some of the original concepts are strikingly different from what finally saw print...
6 comments:
That's one for the Amazon advance order list! I'll look forward to it.
Out of curiosity, Matt, was it always a 2KAD pitch or did it start as an OGN?
It started as an OGN... between 1994 and 1999, Ian must have pitched it to everyone you could imagine in the USA (I seem to remember NBM nearly taking it in 1995). In 2000, Coolbeans took it as the follow up project to Scarlet Traces, but of course they folded before Scarlet Traces was finished. When Alan Barnes at the Megazine took Scarlet Traces as a reprint, we went down to the Rebellion offices to sign off on the deal. Alan and Tharg-in-residence Matt Smith were sharing a tiny office, so when we met Alan he was there as well; Ian had primed me to have the sketches for Leviathan ready just in case, and on the strength of those and the work we'd done of Scarlet Traces, Matt more or less signed us up on the spot.
Thanks Matt, that's fascinating stuff. It's been one of my favorite things 2KAD has run in ages and I think you absolutely nailed the art on it - totally fresh and different.
Did Ian have to kick it around much to slot it into the tyranny of the 5 page segment? It was a cracking serial but I can imagine it being a more significant piece of work as an OGN. (and I'd have thought it would have been right up NBM's street...)
The only real problem was overall length... because we only had ten episodes (55 pages against the 64-page GN Ian had originally plotted), we had to leave out a load of stuff we wanted to do about life in steerage. Ideally there should be at least two extra episodes between the hero, Lament, arriving in steerage and heading on further into the bowels of the ship.
The annoying thing is, since then, they've given us fifteen extra pages in the form of "Tales of the Leviathan" stories, but since those have to stand alone, we can't do the episodes we'd still like to add to the original story.
We also ended up leaving out a running joke about all the meat on the Leviathan coming from the ship's zoo. That was as much to do with the tone of the strip as space considerations.
Shame you can't do an 'Extended Director's version with additional scenes'...
Thanks Matt, that's been really interesting.
Interesting reading all the background dealings. Leviathan was a great strip well deserving of a fancy pants collection.
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