Welcome!
Little Gods: a Matthias Brand Mystery. Written and illustrated by Micah Champion.
From Visual Artist to Storyteller
Explore the artist's journey, right here, as I write and illustrate Little Gods. I’ll share my challenges, triumphs, and joys translating my perspective into this compelling visual story. I’ll give members the first look at my process here, offering up notes, scripts, concept work, roughs, sketches, and anything else I’m able to think might illuminate my thinking behind Little Gods.
I’m a storyteller at heart, but never very confident as a writer, so I’ve worked with a handful of very talented writers that wished to tell their stories through the visual medium of comics. I enjoyed the collaboritive process that took place between us to produce the work. I’ve been encouraged to find my ideas well recieved and folded into projects over the years. Now I hope to make my own path, instead of aiding others, and tell the stories I’d enjoy that I haven’t read.
Influences and Inspiration
Before I tell you the answer to my own question, let me tell you about my influences and inspiration.
First and foremost, I’m an avid fan and reader of noir, and, in particular, the hardboiled detective fiction of Dashell Hammitt, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald. I’m always delighted delving into the life of the hardened private investigator, rugged and unyielding, bearing the scars of a society riddled with greed and corruption. I savor the stripped, gritty dialogue, written with wry prose, reflecting the pulse of a world driven by moral ambiguity. I lose myself in mazes of duplicity, chasing after femme fatales who wield charm as their deadliest weapon. These tales tell stories of human creatures living in a landscape of moral decay, offering a reflection of a society grappling with its own fractured morality. What’s not to love?!
Also, I enjoy supernatural, speculative, mystery, and adventure fiction stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and, above all, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These authors make the mundane extraordinary and mysterious. They create a sense of unease and creeping atmosphere as they flip the readers perspective upside-down and rightside-up again. Are these complex character driven by fate or do their choices unmoor them? They all write stories of a child-like quality, whether wonderful or adventurous. Everything is possible.
Those are my influences. My inspiration comes from the movie “the Highlander” and the immortal Connor MacLeod relationship with Rachel Ellenstein. In an extended cut of the film, the audience learns Rachel, as a small child, is witness Connor being gunned down by a Nazi soldier while attempting to escape with her. Of course, he comes back to life and she asks, “Why didn’t you die?” to which he replies, “It’s a special kind of magic.” Throug the rest of the film a strange paternal relationship seems to flip from Connor to Rachel as their apparent ages reverse. I wondered how that relationship would take shape over the course of decades as she realizes she will grow old and die while her surrogate father, though living with omnipresent danger, will never growing frail.
How would that impair his maturity? How would that limit hers? Does she wonder if her death will hurt him? Or, will he eventually lose his memory of her? Is he afraid of forgeting her when she means so much to him now? These and many more questions rattled around in my head until I decided to record them on paper. Matthias and this first story slowly emerged from primitive ethers of my imagination.
And now, after a lot of work, I bring you along as I create that story.
