Projects: Baeg Tobar

I am currently involved in a number of projects, some have ground to a halt, are on pause, or are moving right along. One of the things I'll be using the new blog/site for is to talk about some of these projects I'm involved in and I may make announcements about them over here from time to time. Either way, I'm going to be posting an introduction to each of my various projects here on the blog over the next several weeks.

First and foremost, anybody that knows me or about me has probably heard or probably knows a little bit about my massive online world building project called Baeg Tobar. And really, I use the term "my" loosely - there are many talented people that are involved and have helped form this project into what it now is. I contribute art, art direction, and help manage the various elements to keep things moving along.

So, how do I describe the world of Baeg Tobar? It is basically a massive fantasy setting with some steampunk elements. We created this expansive and detailed world as a place in which a variety of stories can be told through various media, such as novels, short stories, comics, flash fiction, and art. I believe the last I checked, our resource guide (basically the encyclopedia of the world) clocked in at over 150 pages of detailed information, including details about the world, creatures, and peoples. We even have details about the biology and geology of the world! It's really pretty insane.

To give you a bit of history on this project, it's been around since late 2004 or early 2005. Around that time I was getting out of school at the Kansas City Art Institute and I was looking around for some kind of project I could be putting some of my free time into working on. Something that would allow me to approach the project through any medium I wanted. I also wanted something collaborative that I could invite fellow artists and creatives to have fun with. I had several false starts with several groups of people until I started talking to a friend of mine, Jeffrey Vasquez. Something clicked and Baeg Tobar was born. Over the next year we not only met regularly to work on the project, but also invited a couple more people to help us develop the world - my long time friend Dustin Dade, to help with the web stuff, and Jeffrey's wife, Janell Vasquez, to help with the business side of things - though we all contributed to the creation of the world.

I think we managed to really create something interesting and unique and more than a little exciting to play in. We managed to recruit some pretty amazingly talented creatives (such as Scott Colby and Daniel Tyler Gooden - both steadfast and integral to what Baeg Tobar has become today) and we worked pretty hard to get the first incarnation of Baeg Tobar up and online.

Over the next several years, we went through a variety of incarnations of the site. Nothing really had any staying power and eventually, the original group that created the project decided to part ways, with my buying the IP rights from them. I managed to keep things rolling, more or less, but they slowed down a lot. I just didn't have the know how to really get this stuff out there right, or the business sense.

In 2007 I met Matt Jacobs through some work I was doing for Platinum Studios (more about that in a later post). Later that year, we met in person out at Wizard World Chicago and found that we had a lot of things in common. This friendship would later form into Outland Entertainment, but it began with our deciding to work together to publish Baeg Tobar. A lot of things changed when Matt came on board. He had the know how to really build a great website and had a lot of good connections to get us out there. We spent most of 2008 and 2009 reworking a lot of our material and building content. So much of what you see on the site now has happened over the last several years.

We relaunched Baeg Tobar in October of 2009. So far, we have had a few small hiccups, but we are currently updating the site weekly with new content. Right now we've been running a short comic story, A Gift of Life, written by William Ward and illustrated by Shannon Potratz, which updates every Monday, and we've been alternating every other Friday between Daniel Tyler Gooden's The Unmade Man novel and some short flash fiction. In a few weeks we'll be getting back to the main storyline, The Torn God, illustrated by Alan Gallo and colored/lettered by myself, written by Scott Colby and Daniel Gooden. This will alternate with a variety of short stories and excerpts from our resource guide.

I'll be adding the pages I've colored to the project page here on this site - I'm rather proud of the work!

Incidentally, The Unmade Man is also now available in full on the Kindle. Check it out and buy a couple copies, by all means.

From the website -

Baeg Tobar is an epic fantasy setting brought to life through a variety of media, including comics, short fiction, novels, and illustrations, focusing on several core themes:

- twin realms of mortality and immortality
- music-based magic
- young, expanding nations fighting for control of the land
- magic's place in an increasingly industrialized world
- the influence of the Aiemer, an invisible energy source that covers the planet like a second atmosphere

Writers and artists have been developing the world since 2002. As such, Baeg Tobar is huge. No one story or comic could hope to do it justice. On the other hand, telling the tale of Baeg Tobar using multiple stories and points-of-view could get very confusing very quickly. It leaves the reader with one very important question: Where do I start?

Luckily, we’ve got a simple answer: “The Torn God.” TTG, as it’s come to be called, is a web comic that serves as the reader’s entry point to the world, the feature story that will move everything else along. All of our other media relates to TTG in some way. For example, early pages of TTG depict our hero, Boruin, running through the streets of Mydess. Where is Mydess? Who lives there? What makes it important? How do the actions of our heroes affect life in the city? Answering all of these questions would severely restrict the speed of TTG’s narrative; hence, the reader can learn more about Mydess via Resource Guide entries and short stories (specifically, Alana Joli Abbott’s “No Matter How You Hide Her...”) released in parallel with those pages of TTG. Want to learn more about the heroes of TTG? Check out “The Unmade Man,” a novel by Daniel Tyler Gooden. All of these various snapshots combine to tell the story of Baeg Tobar, but they all stand on their own as complete experiences. And they’re all illustrated by our extremely talented team of artists!

I hope you enjoy the site as much as I've enjoyed working on it through the years!

Jer