Q & A on the Manga

How a Bible Story I Gave Up On Turned Into a Manga?

I keep getting asked some version of "so what is your manga actually about?" and I keep giving a bad answer,
because the honest answer takes about an hour. So I sat down and did an interview with myself. Ten questions.
So here it is.

Where did this actually start?

It started with a story I quit.

Years ago I was deep into Bible stories, but not in a church way. I was coming at them archaeologically. Historically. Anthropologically. Reading them the same way you'd read any other ancient text out of any other culture, because that's what they are. The one I got obsessed with was Ehud.

If you don't know it, Ehud is a judge in the Hebrew Bible who kills King Eglon with a dagger he pulls off his right thigh. I built a whole thing around that. Gave Ehud a lover named Goel. Had Goel's death be the thing that drives the revenge. And I gave the assassination scene, the one in the private chamber, kind of a charge to it. Something uncomfortable and intimate, because that felt more true to me than just a clean action beat.

And then I quit.

Not because I ran out of story. I quit because I couldn't figure out how to get from that story to the next one. That was the wall. In a graphic novel, if you jump a thousand years between chapters, it feels like a mistake. Like you broke something. So I kept trying to build bridges between all these stories I wanted to tell, and every single bridge felt fake, and eventually I just lost interest and put it down. Then I went to Anime Expo, and I met a girl who was doing manga, and we got talking, and something clicked that I'm a little embarrassed took me that long.

Manga doesn't care. One Piece jumps. Dragon Ball Z jumps. Whole eras just vanish between panels and nobody writes in to complain about it. That permission is already built into the format in a way Western comics don't really hand you.

So the thing I couldn't do in a graphic novel, I could do in manga. Any story, any mythology, any millennium, and the format's fine with it. And the reason that mattered so much to me is that the thing I actually want to write about doesn't work unless you can see across all of them at the same time. So here's my thesis, plainly. Religion, as an institution, manipulates the gods. Not the other way around. The stories get shaped to build human control and human power, and most of the time that has very little to do with what those gods supposedly wanted in the first place.

The mythologies are kind of a tell. You can see the fingerprints. We can excavate now, we can cross-reference, we can date things, and when you line them all up next to each other you start noticing where the seams are. I don't think the people writing them down were being cynical about it. I don't think they even saw it. But we can.

That's the story I couldn't tell in one book about one dagger.

Why artifacts? Where did that come from?

Honestly? Probably from stories about Hitler hunting the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. Which I may
have absorbed partly through Indiana Jones, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But the idea stuck with me for a structural reason. If you're going to write across every mythology on Earth, you
need a thread. Something that travels.
So the artifacts travel. They change shape, they change names, they change what they look like as they move
across cultures and millennia. A thing that's a cup in one tradition is a bowl in another and a relic in a third, and
it's the same object.
And the reason they have power is the part I actually care about. It isn't that the gods made them and handed
them down. It's the reverse. Humans embedded the gods in them. Humans put spiritual power into objects, over
centuries, through belief and ritual and blood and story, and the objects kept it.
What they're used for varies. Control. Fortune. All kinds of abilities.
And some of them can destroy the gods that created them. Which, if you follow the logic back, is exactly what
you'd expect. If humans put the power in, humans can take it out.

Why manga and not a graphic novel?

Partly the timeline thing I already said. But the bigger reason is tonal.
Manga lets you change how something is drawn based on how it feels.
I can render a panel in hyper-detail, full cross-hatching, the stuff I came up doing, and then two panels later
drop into something loose and sketchy, and then go fully cute and bubbly for a gag. Chainsaw Man does this
constantly and nobody blinks. The art style becomes an emotional instrument instead of just a fixed level of
quality you have to maintain.
Coming from where I came from, that was a revelation. I used to think every emotion had to be earned through
rendering. More detail, more feeling. But that's slow, and it's also just not true. Sometimes four scratchy lines
land harder than a fully rendered face.

It's faster and it's more expressive. Both. That basically never happens.

Underneath the demons and the artifacts, what is this actually about?

Okay, this is the one where I sound insane. Stay with me. It's not really about archaeology. It's not really about teaching you the anthropology of how these religions developed, although that's in there and I care about getting it right. What I actually want to promote is something I call Prismatism. Prismatism is, I suppose, the ultimate truth of existence. Of humanity, of Earth, of galaxies and solar systems and the universe as a whole. And the core of it is this: the same structure repeats at every scale.
Go down. Atoms vibrate, electrons circle a nucleus, everything orbits something and everything is held by a pull.
Go up slightly. Microorganisms function as a smaller world inside a larger one. Blood cells, parasites, bacteria,
all of it operating as its own ecosystem inside a body that has no idea it's happening. Plants are connective
tissue for the Earth. The Earth itself behaves like a particle, orbiting the Sun, held by the same pull, doing the
same dance.

Everything circles something. Everything has gravity. Even black holes, which are pure consumption, have their
own gravity, and the material they consume exists on a scale we can't hold in our heads. Solar flares. Nebulas.
Structures the size of galaxies. And if everything expands outward from a centre point, then somewhere at the far reach of it, a million light years out, there might be a wall. Like the wall of a cell. Like the boundary of an atom.
And if that's true, our universe is a bubble inside another bubble, serving a function in something we will never
see the edges of. That's prismatism. Same pattern, every scale, in both directions, forever. So what does that have to do with demons?

Everything, because it's what the characters slowly walk into.
They go from religion to religion, and within each arc the same question surfaces: where does this one end, and
what did it mean? If the gods are a creation of our own emotional development, then what's the war actually for?
There's a spiritual side and a physical side and they fight, and the closer you look the less it matters.
Because even if the gods are real, a human death means nothing to something eternal. And if a god is eternal
without humans, what does it have? What is it for? What does it wake up for?

Which leads to the thing they eventually stop being able to avoid. The gods aren't real. Not really. They're
another dimension of human experience. They're manifestations of something we file under "spiritual" because
we don't have better language, but it isn't spiritual. It's not electrons and it's not neutrons, it's something we
simply haven't discovered yet, which does have real influence on our lives.
We called it gods and angels and demons because that's the vocabulary we had, early on, in the anthropological
development of culture. Through a scientific lens, it's just physics we haven't reached yet.
He only peeks his head out slowly across the books. It's not a speech somebody gives. And by the end, whenever
that is, the reader should arrive at it on their own. And I want that to land as the opposite of bleak. If nothing is eternal in the way we were promised, then the only thing carrying real weight is the experience you're having right now. That's what prismatism gives you. Not "nothing matters." More like: this matters, and it's the only thing that does.

Red is a placeholder name. What's going on there?

Less than you'd think, honestly. I use colours as placeholders because it's the fastest way to keep everyone
separate in my head while I'm building. Blue, Red, Orange, that's just scaffolding.
I do want her real name to mean something, and I want it to feel good to say. That's the actual bar. Catchy
enough that people enjoy saying it.
She's Korean and Indigenous North American, so the name carries the mix. The family name is Jung. For the
first name I went looking through Indigenous names, and I want to be careful here, because I'm not Indigenous
and there's a difference between honouring something and helping yourself to it. I deliberately steered away
from Japanese names for the same reason. Those are great, and I'd rather leave Japanese names to Japanese
creators. I'm from the United States. If I'm going to root her somewhere, root her here, and represent
Indigenous peoples properly while doing it.
Where I landed is Naye. Naye Jung.
And then the funny part. I was working out what her nickname would be, the thing her team calls her, and I
went round in circles on it for a while before realising the answer had been sitting in my notes for two years.
Red. Because she wears a lot of red.
The scaffolding was load-bearing the whole time and I hadn't noticed.
One more thing about her, since people keep asking why I'm opening with River instead of her. River is the one I
start with, and what happens to him shapes everything Naye becomes. His arc isn't a side story I'm indulging
before the real one begins. It's load-bearing too. You need to have loved him first for any of her choices later to
make sense.

What shaped this, and what are you avoiding?

Berserk, first. My natural drawing style is detailed and it was always going to pull that direction. Berserk is
detailed, dark, grotesque, and violent in a way that feels like it costs something. I want that weight.
Ghost in the Shell for the futuristic side. The dialogue, the way ideas get talked about directly, the cyberpunk
texture. There's so much fun to be had there.
And then Dandadan, which I'm reading now, for the comedy. It's playful and stupid in the best way, and I
genuinely think comedy is the best tool for keeping people on their toes. You can't scare somebody who's
braced.
So I'm trying to merge a Game of Thrones and Berserk darkness with Dandadan's sarcastic, goofy whiplash.
Hard to thread. Worth trying.
What I'm steering away from is the endless serial. Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, huge respect, enormous lore, and they
feel like they never stop.
I want each cultural and religious set to actually end. If you pick up the Semitic arc, that's maybe fifteen
volumes and then it's done. Complete story, beginning to end. You never have to touch the Greek arc if you don't
want to. Different mythology, different rules, different books, its own ending.

Do you write toward a known ending, or discover it?

Toward. Always toward.
Each mythology gets a thematic destination and I write backwards from it. For the Semitic set, the pantheon of
Yahweh and Baal and Astarte and everyone else you can find in there, the core theme is greed. Almost a seven
deadly sins framing, and I'll be taking on more of those themes as the sets go on.
The goal for that arc specifically is the idea that the gods aren't actually all good, even when the religion
presents them as good.
That's the destination, and having it fixed is exactly what stops the thing sprawling. I'm not going to tell you how
it gets there.

What's hardest to draw?

Environments. Not close.
And it's not the drawing, it's the research. I refuse to throw up random buildings that don't fit their cultural
moment. Every arc means learning an entire architectural vocabulary, sometimes ancient and futuristic at the
same time, and getting it wrong is the kind of thing that quietly tells a reader you didn't care.
The problem is that the research often isn't there. A huge amount of archaeological material has never been
digitised. It's in site reports and museum catalogues and journals nobody scanned. The internet does not have
the archaeological record, whatever you may have been told. To actually get it, you have to go to the country
and stand in the museum.

Which, conveniently, I was going to do anyway. I'm a travelling man. I love going around the world and
discovering things and I've already made it to quite a few of these countries, so I've got some feel for the culture
and the technological development on the ground, plus whatever I can get access to from here.
The travel didn't get bolted on for the manga. The manga grew out of the travel.

You have a newborn and almost no time. How do you build something this big?

It crushes me. That's the truthful answer. It hurts every day not to sit down and draw.
Here's my actual week. My daughter sleeps about an hour at a time. She wakes up fussy, I get her back down,
she's out for an hour, and that runs all night. So I'm either awake all night, then handling her through the
morning, then at work in the afternoon, hoping for fifteen minutes of quiet to record something. Or I don't get it.
This entire week I produced one drawing. Maybe fifteen minutes of work, maybe an hour. One pose. Naye,
holding the dagger. No posts, no video, nothing else.
I'm a zombie most days, and you can't draw as a zombie. You can't even think of what to draw.
So what I do instead is the earpiece. Phone in, headphones on, talking it out while my hands are doing
something else. Working through it. Watching videos, learning, developing. Fixing plot holes, anchoring
character arcs, building the structure out loud.
If I can't draw it, I can at least develop it.
Someone will read that and think it sounds unprofessional. I've thought it myself. But I've landed somewhere
else on it: unprofessional would be promising people pages and disappearing. I'm in the most physically
punishing stretch a person gets, and the thing is still getting built, just in the only medium currently available to
me. And it'll get easier. She'll sleep longer. That's just how it goes. It might take longer than I thought, and I've
made my peace with that.
Also, for what it's worth: of every image I could have drawn with the one scrap of energy I had this week, the
exhausted version of me reached for Naye holding the dagger. The image the whole story hangs on. I'll take that
as a sign that something in there knows what it's doing.

What would make this a success?

The small honest version: two or three people who love it. Not just the art, the story. Someone who says "I'm
going to read all of your stuff" and means it. That's it. That would genuinely do it.
But the real version is bigger, and I might as well say it since I've already told you about the bubbles.
When I die, hopefully old, hopefully having watched my daughter grow up, I'd want to go knowing she was taken
care of, and knowing she understood what I was trying to do.
Which was to plant the prismatism mentality in someone. Preferably someone young. Something that leaves
them unafraid of death, and not subject to whatever religion their culture was going to indoctrinate them with
by default. Something that lets them hold science and a kind of faith at the same time, faith that whatever's
running this universe is something you can be grateful for. That it serves humanity well. That the right response
to other people is to treat them as brother and sister, and to take each day as a gift.
If one person came out of it like that, my life would be complete.
That's the whole thing. That's what the demons are for.
Still drawing it, fifteen minutes at a time. Follow along if you like.

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