In 2005, I pitched Amulet to Scholastic Creative Director David Saylor and Editor Janna Morishima at Scholastic’s new Graphix Books imprint. With two published books under my belt, I decided to return to Amulet and give it another try. Around this time, Scholastic sent me an email to inquire about new projects. They were both released to critical acclaim in 2004, while my webcomic Copper was growing in popularity online. Already several years out of college, time was of the essence and I was looking to gain storytelling experience, so I signed away the rights to the movie and left my job in animation to focus my efforts on graphic novels.Įarly efforts during this time included Daisy Kutter: The Last Train, a comic book mini-series published by Viper Comics, and the graphic novel anthology Flight, published by Image Comics (and later by Ballantine/Villard Books at Random House). Having done extensive research on films with long development processes, I had a pretty good sense I was not going to get a chance to direct this movie. I was brought on board as co-director and writer of the film. In 2003, I pitched an animated movie called Let’s Get Francis to Walt Disney Feature Animation and they optioned the rights to make it. Sketches and notes for Amulet slowly developed over the years while I worked as a graphic designer in architecture and later as a writer/director/3D animator for a small animation studio in Pasadena, California. Making Amulet was a personal goal, not a career ambition, so I set the project aside to focus on developing job skills. By the end of drawing these pages, I was already burned out, I felt the results were disappointing, and the prospect of drawing thousands more pages seemed an unacceptable amount of work for a hobby project. At the end of this series of pages, a few panels of Emily and Navin were drawn before they go on their journey to Alledia, and Miskit is seen as a regular stuffed animal. It depicts early versions of the characters Trellis (Trelly the Thief), Leon Redbeard (Leod the Cat), and a cat named Riley. The comic below represents my first attempt at writing and drawing the story. To me, these books represented some of the highest forms of literature- like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia but with the addition of worlds and characters fully illustrated by the authors- and the stories within the pages were told in the form of comics! I immediately knew I wanted to make something like these books, so I set a goal to create a graphic novel series that could deserve to stand on the bookshelf next to the works of these masters. Soon after, I read Bone by Jeff Smith and felt equally inspired.
I was a sophomore Film and Media Studies major at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997 when I read the graphic novel series Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki for the first time. Amulet is a project I have thought about since I was 19 years old.
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