FUTURE OCCUPATIONS, Book I: WAR HOG

     War Hog is the first book in the Future Occupations series, written by Storm Luck. While the Official Website is still in development and offers only vague and esoteric information as far as the actual subject matter and story, a simpler explanation might be that it’s intended to be a collection of philosophical ideas revolving around individualism, using a political satire (parodying the “War on Terror” of the past decade) as the delivery.



     As the overall writing and story are fairly non-linear, this project has posed a number of challenges and required a lot of advance planning as far as character design, style, selection of moments to illustrate, and placement of imagery into the text. After what’s seemed like months of brainstorming and experimentation, we’ve chosen to keep the full-color images in their own pages (or sections of pages), and insert black-and-white comic-style panels into the writing itself, even taking the place of some writing by including the exchange of dialogue. The result should be something like an illustrated novel with a bit of a graphic novel approach.



     I felt a lot of parallels with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in the tone of the content, and though I feel compelled to flesh out some kind of Klimpt-influenced dystopian nightmare, the overall tone of the art will inevitably be somewhat less ominous and ornate than either of those things as I want to exaggerate some of the absurdity over the darkness of atmosphere. For the time being, this is on hold until I complete the Paper Dolls video, but we’re anticipating completion and release by second quarter of 2010. I’ll be posting samples and trial images as I get to them, but until then some of the preliminary and concept work is already available on the Future Occupations Website as well as in my own Illustration Gallery