Tomo book #1 and #2 covers
Anime and Manga are so far removed from anything we've ever done, but we rarely shy away from pushing the envelope and try something new. Zondervan approached us several months back and wanted to know if we had any original properties that would fit into their new publishing venture of creating a line of Christian "Manga" titles. Tomo came immediately to mind and so we began to revamp the original pitch to conform to Zondevan's criteria. The original concept for Tomo started as a collaboration during our Disney days between our good friend Andrew Simmons, Tom and myself. Once we all felt like we had something solid we self-published a 6 page promo comic for the San Diego Comicon a couple of years ago. Our thinking was to use the comic approach as a way to show some story content and provide preliminary artwork for potential interest in the property.
When Zondervan read through our original pitch they loved the concept, but asked us to re-work the story before they could commit. We went through several enjoyable and sometimes painful story senarios until finally arriving at the story we now have.
Zondervan commited to 8 -150 pg. books for Tomo that we are currently writing and producing here at Funnypages. We were able to find an excellent artist in the Philippians named Ariel Padilla. He has done a great job of taking our preliminary character designs and making them more Manga in style and his work on the comics has been outstanding. Writing credit for book #1 goes to Andrew Simmons and myself and book #2 has been written by non other than our friend Jim Krueger! Jim has also requested to write book #3 as well. If your familiar with Jim's work as a writer/story teller he really brings everything to a whole new level and has been a tremendous help in fleshing out Tomo.
Look for Tomo Book #1 and #2 in stores early next year with the remaining 6 issues to follow.
The covers were colored by our friend Josh Ray.