A Painting of Sarai

This post is gonna require some background so bear with me. Late last year, I held a Kickstarter fundraiser for the latest addition to my comic series The Ballad of Toby & Sara. Among the rewards offered were some commissions for original artwork. My friend Lori was lucky enough to pick up one, and she gave me free rein to come up with a painting.

I honestly had no idea what to do. But I did have an image in my head that I had been meaning to make, which also happened to be a character from the series that had not yet appeared. I made a drawing for Lori, and she gave me the green light to make the painting.

So, this is Sarai. If you've read Track 5, you know that the story has a double-sided nature to it, part of it taking place in present-day Omaha, the other part taking place in the ancient city of Nineveh in Mesopotamia. The connective thread between the two eras is the wandering archangel Raphael, who in the present story goes by the name Ray Azzarus. By the end of Track 5, we catch a brief glimpse of a young man named Tobiah who Raphael has been looking for in Nineveh, which coincides with his meeting of Toby Jasinski in Omaha.

This idea of counterparts is one of the key narrative hinges in the series, but it's taken time to establish. And so Sara Reynolds, the young woman that Toby has a crush on in Omaha, will have her own counterpart in the past in the person of Sarai, a young woman who bears similarities to Miss Reynolds, but has her own unique demons to fight (literally).

Confused? Yeah, it's a lot to understand. It's given me a lot of challenges as a writer and creator, and there are a lot of question marks still to fill in, one of these being where and how to introduce Sarai to the main narrative. But I at least wanted to give her a visual persona to inhabit, to at least bring her out into the world and give her some kind of existence in people's minds.

And one last thing: Sarai's dress was inspired by a number of artistic sources, most of them from Persia circa the 16th century C.E. This is a bit inaccurate since the Nineveh story takes place around 700 B.C.E., but the fashion fits with what I was trying to accomplish in the painting. At the very least, it's a place to start for the her design in the comic.

Sneak Peek: 'The Ballad of Toby & Sara: Meetings & Greetings'

I decided to post some of my in-progress pages for Track 5 of 'The Ballad of Toby & Sara: Meetings & Greetings.' It's been more than a year since I released Tracks 1-4, and while I can give you multiple excuses for the long delay, ultimately, I think it's been beneficial to the comic. It gave me a chance to really think about where the series should go in terms of storytelling, and how the artwork would be integrated with this. If this analogy helps, Tracks 1-4 set the chess board for the story, and Track 5 is where we see the first moves of the characters.

Overall, Track 5 centers on the former archangel Raphael, known to the people he meets as Ray Azzarus. He arrived in Omaha at the end of Track 3, and we discovered the first impressions of his true identity in Track 4. While the mystery surrounding him won't be completely solved in this chapter, the connection between his past and present situation will hopefully be more clear to the reader, and how his presence will prove fateful to both Toby and Sara.

Also, one of the challenges that I faced in this chapter was portraying the ancient city of Nineveh, which plays a part in Raphael's past. I didn't want to treat it as some uber-exotic Oriental land of wonders, but give the city some element of plausibility . I've made every effort in my research to present it with a degree of accuracy, but I've had to take imaginative and artistic liberties in some places. Any suggestions for sources would be helpful, if you have any.

And of course Toby and Sara play a large role in the chapter. I tried to enlarge their respective worlds while not distracting too much from the main narrative force of the story, which is the introduction of Raphael to both Toby and Sara.

So, when will this chapter be complete? I'm aiming to have the next book ready in time for the MoCCA Art Festival in April. When it's ready, I'll let the readers of this blog know, and the finished comic will be posted to my Web site. Stay tuned...