ORIGINAL 1988 version.
First pages ever sketched.
These images were the first ever to be created, a long time ago...back in late 1987, early 1988 when i was seventeen years old.
I had just read The Hobbit back then, and i wanted to try to do a fantasy story with characters other than humans. So this was my attempt in creating some non-human looking characters with a humorous twist.
My idea back then was to do the Fantasy Portuguese equivalent of the Asterix adventures (by Gosciny & Uderzo). A character you may well know if you´re into European graphic novels.
I always loved the humor and style of those albuns, and i wanted to try to bring that style of humor into my own fantasy world. A world very much inspired by The Hobbit (Tolkien), by The Wizard of EarthSea (Ursula Le Guin) and specialy by The Neverending Story novel (Michael Ende).
And so i started to draw this story, just as a test, not only to my limited art skills, but also to see if i could create a unique world enviroment and original looking non-human characters to go along with it.
This being a test, i decided to learn how to color these comics stuff too, so i bought the cheapest pencils i could find and afford at the time and i tried to color the second page, with the end result you see displayed on "Pic 02".
By this time, i was starting to have an idea for the story, but i still needed a main character, and so thus was born PRINCE ZIPH right on "Pic 03".
What you see are the first ever images of the character. My idea was to create a rebel not-so-teen guy wich was basicaly everything that a Prince shouldn´t be. I always liked anti-heros and i wanted to have one in my story but with humor and personality and off course not human at all.
And i thought that good idea was to create a character (and a race) based on spiders. Most people hate spiders so, what better look for an anti-hero ? I thought it would be a good challenge to have a character like that and have people relate to him despite his spider-looking characteristics.
Initialy these spider characters were suposed to have eight legs, but soon i found out that would be chaos to draw, useless for any plot and time consuming. So Prince Ziph ended up with only four legs.
Later on i had the idea of teaming him up with the wizard you see in "Pic 01" and so the characters of Ziph and the Wiz were born.
This first version was never completed but i made about 25 pages more, wich you can see now by clicking on the little cover bellow.
Continue to read PART 2
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