Who is Saengard?

 

Saengard ~ 

I'm not sure if it will come as a surprise, but Saengard is indeed a pen name. I have elected to use a pen name to hopefully create a degree of anonymity for myself out in the public square. In this day and age, any kind of buffer between the strange world of the internet and the real world is a blessing. I fully recognize that I haven't separated my real information from this persona diligently enough and it is likely not too difficult to find me. That said, I wish to remain in the shadows as best I can.

I did not select a pen name to hide from my family. They all know about the pseudonym. I have no reason to hide from them, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't admit to it.

But even though I wish to have an arm's length of distance between you and I, I feel I still owe you something. People connect with people. We all want to know what oddity is hiding behind the curtain. The more someone protests, the more we want to push to find out. Often, what you find is a huge let down. Sometimes, you find the hidden gem.

All I can do, is to be open and honest with you, as much as I'm willing to, and let you decide.

So here goes...

I was once 15 years old. I had grown up in every corner of Greenville, South Carolina. My parents moved like clockwork, every two years or so. They were artistic and encouraged it in their children. I had a love for drawing and comics. At the time, my only exposure to them were the Sunday Funnies, as we called them; the newspaper comic strips that were not at all funny. I memorized them all. I absorbed them into my psyche.

My grandparents would stash piles of the comic sections from the daily papers, waiting for me when we visited, which was very often in my early years and waned as I got older. I would stare at them for hours, laying on my belly with my legs kicked up on their plush vanilla colored carpet that smelled like hand soap - the little shaped ones that all old people had in their bathrooms.

By 15, those visits were few and far between. At that age, I'd found a closeknit group of high school friends (myself and two other guys) and we created our own comics. Not the newspaper strip kind. We'd discovered the real deal - Marvel and DC.

We obsessed over improving our art, improving our story telling, and eventually we got pretty good at it. We printed a few experimental comics around the time high school ended. After a while, I roomed with one of the guys and we worked during the day to pay the rent, and drew all night, continuing those worlds and stories that we obsessed over in high school. The third guy in our trio actually went to an Art Design school in Florida. We were so jealous!

Time came and went. We all went our separate ways for a spell. Then a few years later, we decided to give this art thing a real honest go. The Art school guy had actually dropped out - not because he'd found it too difficult, but because he'd found it too limiting, too boring. He was never one for being told what to do anyway!

So the Three Amigos saddled up, taking residence in his condo in Florida and set about to create a comic book that would be handed out for free to the masses. This was in 1999, after the high-water mark of the comic book scene was already steadily crashing. It had only taken five or six years to completely destroy the foundation of what made comics so much fun. The companies had taken the books out of gas stations and pharmacies. The prices increased. The gimmicks were obvious cash grabs, and comics were now exclusively kept in the most inconvenient places - comic shops. During this time, the most talented artists in Marvel had formed their own company... and honestly, kind of took the wind out of everything. Their Image comics brand started off strong, but couldn't sustain itself.

Our plan, was to rejuvenate the comic scene by making it accessible in the places that used to hold spinner racks full of monthly comics for dirt cheap. By making it free, other kids, like we once were, would maybe be inspired to continue the lost art. We weren't made out of money, so to give them out for free, we had to find a way to make the printing and distribution pay for itself. We'd decided to try and place ads in the comic book, but that took space - space better suited for our stories and art. So we developed an approach to use a tabloid size booklet, with a comic book inset in the center of it. This would allow us to have margins around the comic book for ads, that could be easily cut out - revealing a traditional comic book, free of pesky ads.

We were college kids, so of course the material we created was angled to college kids. The only problem was, we weren't really in a college town. If we had been, I think the whole idea would've taken off.

As you might have guessed by now, my earliest and still my true love, is for comics. The interplay between art and story is something that just ignites my imagination. But the sad truth is, art takes time to make.

The salad days of guerilla comics had to come to an end. Life started lifing. I got married, had children and joined the military (not exactly in that order). I had to put down the artwork, resigned to doodle in the edges of technical manuals and on small pocket-sized sketch books that I carried everywhere. I didn't have time to focus on completing a full-sized comic book page anymore. I didn't have a desk to work at either - it has been perpetually in storage for the last 20 years.

From 2000 to 2017, the only way to draw in a professional way, was the tried-and-true pen on paper. But around 2017, the price and availability of touch screen laptops with stylus pens had finally reached a point where I could dip my toes into trying out making digital art. Let me tell you, that was not an easy transition. The entire feel is different. The response of pen on screen, the lack of immediate control of the brush size, everything is just unnatural.

So, what I found myself doing more often, was focusing on writing. Those stories that I could see in panels... see in movies floating around behind my eyeballs, they had characters, plots, motivations... action.

I wrote much more frequently than I drew. For most of that time, I plotted. I built up the world that those comics existed in. The world grew. The story grew. The obsession grew.

I've written the whole story, from beginning to end, and have released out into the wild web, back in 2017. There were several free-to-read websites that have since shutdown. It's a good thing though. That first attempt was too much all at once. I told the story of events that happened, but I didn't tell the story of the characters. It was passable, but it wasn't good.

So, I kept at it. I kept looking at this massive tale that has been burning in me since I was 15, back in the days with my high school chums, drooling over Jim Lee's artwork and dreaming of the day when I could finally share my story with the world. I kept refining the world and the characters until I felt like maybe, just maybe, I'd put it down on paper well enough for others to see.

The stories that I told my children when they were young, are now finally coming out - now that they are old enough to start having children of their own. It's kind of a shame that I couldn't have had the talent or insight to put it all together when they were young. I would've loved to have been able to read these tales to them as they drifted off to sleep. But maybe one day... their kids can come over to their grandparent's house, stretch out over the plush carpet in our living room, and look over the pile of comic books and novels that I've kept for them my whole life.