SIKU – Inuit Comic Character Concepts

Sometime in early 2008 I was doing a ton of work for Inhabit Media illustrating a variety of Inuit based folklore. I had already done a ton of story illustration and creature concepts when I was approached to color an actual Inuit comic for a gentleman who worked with Inhabit Media on occasion. I agreed, but the project never fully manifested and I continued to do some work for Inhabit Media.

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, the original illustrator for the comic eventually decided to leave the project and I was offered the full gig. I agreed with some trepidation.

You see, I love comics. I've tried unsuccessfully a number of times to do comics. What I have found is that I am just too damn slow to maintain any kind of regular pace doing the pencils/inks for a comic. It just doesn't work - I start out strong and as I progress, find myself more and more distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work involved in actually illustrating a comic. I've found I enjoy doing illustration work much more.

But, considering I was so familiar with the material and that there wasn't an overwhelming amount of characters that I would be expected to deal with, I thought I could could probably handle the project. So, I took it on. And to date, it's the biggest comic project I've ever penciled in full - I think we ended up with around 22 pages when all was said and done. And while there are some pages/panels I'd totally do differently now, I'm still pretty proud of the project as a whole.

I was also supposed to color the project, but the deadline snuck up on me and I was forced to find a bit of help from a friend of mine, Chris Summers. Chris was a huge help and I did end up tweaking all the pages a bit, adding some textures and overlays to the pages, but Chris did the majority of it.

This project was also where I cut my teeth on lettering. I ended up lettering the project in both Inuit and English and to date, the English version has never been released, which I'll most likely post here for everybody to see since the book itself has been published.

Anyway, I'll start with the character concepts and then we'll move on to the pages. I started these concepts while I was staying down in Austin with my good friend Kennon James. The characters are Idlout (the main character), his wife, the goddess Sedna, and the creature Qallupiluk. Hope you dig it!

Jer