Hello all,
I remember reading this verse in Revelations as a small child during Sunday sermons. I never could sit still and just listen to the sermon like everyone else around me seemed to be able to. I would scribble on the pamphlets and offering envelopes or pretend to read the hymnals. Sometimes I would get especially bored and grab a bible from the back of the pew and flip through Songs of Solomon or Revelations (the most salacious books I could find), and I would reread the words until they made some kind of sense. I don't know why this verse ingrained itself in my head, I don't even really know how I picked this one for the comic, I think it just kind of appeared. My Nena (who wasn't actually my grandmother but an elderly family friend who took care of me from the time I was an infant until middle school), was the lady who would drag me to church and she would tell me to flip the bible to any page that "felt right" and the "holy spirit" would give me whatever verse I needed most. For someone vehemently opposed to anything that hinted of witchcraft–she didn't even like me reading Harry Potter–this kind of intuition based bibliomancy felt like walking a boundary between something good and evil. That's probably how I came up with Revelations 9. When I started sketching out this three page prelude, many things came together so seamlessly it felt positively spooky.
I didn't always plan for Jason to die by suicide. Originally, I imagined him eaten by his own pet python. I have sketches of Jojo poisoning his dinner. When I first started Muck, Jason was where I put all my frustrations and anger towards all the exes I had who were emotionally and verbally abusive to me. He was a manipulative narcissistic jerk who was very one-dimensionally cruel–just another obstacle that shaded Jojo's path. This past few years, he's become someone entirely different, complex and nuanced. My own experiences with mental and physical health issues which have been completely debilitating at times have informed my direction with Jason and I feel like I've started understanding myself more through him.
Adrien and Jojo are both pretty go with the flow characters, although they are very motivated by their loyalties to their friends and found families, without someone like Jason who is all drive and ambition, they never would've formed a band or found each other in the first place. Muck the Band was his dream, and he put his entire being into it. Then when they finally got their break, it cost him the life of his best friend. Forever guilty that he wasn't the one to save his own girlfriend, and that he was so focused on the music to even notice what was going on in the first place, he was an easy target for the minor demons that slowly brought him lower and lower until they drug him straight to hell leaving Jojo alone to deal with all the pain they left behind.
But if those who seek death and can't find it even by taking their own lives, what becomes of them once they leave their bodies? Unfortunately you will have to wait until the third saga, the Book of Jason to answer such questions and we aren't even halfway through issue one of the Book of Jo.
I'm slowly putting together the pages into a .pdf that will eventually be printable and thus distributable. I'm going through the process of remastering the first five pages I initially made over a year ago, now! My process is pretty streamlined now and its incredibly satisfying to see how much I've grown as an artist just this year alone. Hopefully by this time next year I'll have an entire issue of this thing ready. The remastering process is going fairly quickly, so I think I'll keep moving along with the issue and intersperse it with the remastering work. Until then, here's some sketches of Jason through the years until I came up with a pretty solid character design.
