It was Denver Comic Con 2015 that broke me into the convention world. The atmosphere of Comic Con was amazing with everyone in costume, taking pictures, and artists/writers selling their work. I also found plenty of enjoyment going into the workshop classes, which ranged from help on drawing, writing, breaking into comics, etc. I was certainly inspired and afterwards I told my friend, Luis Salcedo that I had a few ideas for some comics. I wound up writing about 10 potential comic ideas that we discussed and the one that sounded the most intriguing was called Graves.

The First Issue:

        Graves centered around two main characters — Arthur, a cop who retired a week prior and Miranda Dugant, an interior house designer. The first scene opens with the death of Arthur Dugant’s father and you meet Arthur and his wife Miranda entering the hospital. The Dugant’s  take over the graveyard and on the first night sleeping there, Arthur enters the spirit world called The Crossing. There he meets his father, who has lived on in spirit form with a memory that has been compromised and he tells him he doesn’t know how he was killed, but knows it was murder. They have to free the spirits from The Crossing back to the real world and his father gets killed again in spirit form, this time by an unknown spirit, just as Arthur opens the bridge to the real world. We conclude that issue with the tragic funeral of Arthur’s father.  

        The remaining parts of Graves centered on Arthur over the course taking over 3 cases, one involving a woman who was murdered by her boyfriend, his childhood friend who was murdered by his work employees, and then a case that tied everything together that began with a grave being robbed. Meanwhile, Miranda’s story throughout revolves around her dealing with the revelations of the spirits, looking to faith for answers. Then in issues 3-4, she solved the case of the blinking boy, a spirit boy that appeared during the day because he believed he wasn’t dead. Everything came to a head in the final 3 issues where Arthur and Miranda work together and discover a conspiracy involving a rival graveyard owner, an evil spirit, a priest, and grave robbers.

        Whew! That’s Graves in a nutshell. Graves was certainly a gigantic and ambitious project for me, it clocked in around 250 pages at 7 issues long. My logline for Graves was CSI meets The Sixth Sense. It was truly a police procedural comic with the supernatural element of spirits, all the while a big murder mystery unfolds. I won’t reveal the names of the art team, but I will say that I did the letters(yes, they aren’t the best!!) for it and I wrote it based off a story from myself and Luis Salcedo. Below I will leave you with a gallery of some of the pages from issue 1, along with the promo materials that we made. This was all done around October 2015 and we scrapped the project in February of 2016. I will explain the technical aspects and what I learned from the ultimate failure of Graves in my next blog post.

You can read my previous blog titled The Fantastic Tale of John Freeman thus far here. 

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My next blog post will be available next month. Thanks for reading!!