RISE

I've always thought my best strength as an artist was being a storyteller. I like to take an idea and expand it as far as I can, having as much fun as I can with it but I also including a message or purpose to the story. I've never been a big fan of my own artwork so I thought I would try to develop a story with me as the writer and bring in another artist. So last year I developed a pitch with my friend Scott Godlewski. It's basically my take on our planet that has 3 super-powered individuals. No superheroes, or villains really, just a small group of people with the ability to hold an entire word hostage if they chose to. The main character has been held in a military bunker and kept sedated for the last 5 years, since he went a little berserk. At the beginning of our book he is freed from his restraints and must take out his nemesis before an end-of-the-planet scenario occurs. It's an idea that has been done before as most have, but I also tried to infuse a lot of political and social ideas into the story. One guy is not good and the other is not bad, they just see things differently, all the while governments are trying to control them both. I pitched this around to a couple companies and essentially heard crickets back from them. The ones I did hear back from shied away because it was an indie superhero comic. I never thought of this book as a superhero book personally and was really bummed it never went anywhere. Scott and I both enjoyed working on it and would love to do it one day if we found the right publisher. He's pretty busy kicking ass over on some Boom-Studios books for the foreseeable future and rightly so. There's no telling when or if we'll ever be able to do this, but it's been laying around on my hard drive for a while so I thought I would post the pitch pages.

Written, colored, co-plotted & lettered: Ryan Cody
Black and White Artwork, co-plotted: Scott Godlweski
Cover pencils by Scott Godlewski, Inks and Colors by Ryan Cody
*click on images for larger view