The
spark that eventually burned up about 4 years of my life first came
to light in the course of a conversation with Grant Morrison. He was
visiting the studio with some black and white photocopies of the
first issue of Final Crisis for us to all “Ooh” and “Ah!” at.
Grant was talking about the opening and closing scenes of the book,
at least as he'd planned the at the time: he was starting with
Anthro, the first boy and was going to close the book with Kamandi,
the last boy. It didn't work out that way, which is I think a bit of
a shame.
Pre-history
had become something of an obsession with me and I mentioned to Grant
that almost every depiction of the dawn of mankind I found at once
far-fetched and unimaginative. I'd mis-pronounced “Anthro” and
“Afro”, and then jokingly covered up my mistake by saying that
the first boy would've been black anyway, not a white kid running around in
North America. I went on to wonder why there's never been a comic or
a movie that depicted early humanity as black.
I
reserved special annoyance for 2001. The proto-humans in that movie
were just offensive. As was the nudge from the Monolith that started
them towards becoming human. The hominid first use of technology was
to pick up a bone and hit someone over the head with it. This was
the primordial tool that eventually led to the craft that would
transport us into Space and the stars. Technology was a product of
violence. Hands were made to hold weapons and fashion more and
better weapons so that we could better kill each other.
I
disagreed.
So,
Grant listened to me slag off all early human fiction and then
quietly said, “Why don't you do something then? You could do a
comic about that.”
So
I did. It's taken a while and it's changed a lot since I first
started writing and drawing the story. I wrote it and re-wrote it,
started drawing it, only to realise it just wasn't right. So I broke
it down and built it up again, rethought everything, rewrote it again
and again and only when I thought it was good enough as a story did I
start drawing it again.
I'm still changing things, spotting things that are not quite right, redrawing panels, sometimes whole pages get dumped and redone.
But it's nearly ready now. Mind you, I was saying that three months ago and I'm still hammering away at this thing.
This is some of my really early Akay art...
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