ATWOMIC
The Multiverse Comic by S K Moore & the Artists of the Twitterverse
Sequence 1
Atwomic The Multiverse Comic or ‘Twitterverse’ Comic
Q - Who or what is
A-
You decide.
Hero?
The Atwomic Experiment In the first weeks of 2011 I started work on a sample script for 2000AD, the British sci-fi anthology comic that was the starting point of some of the most highly regarded artists & writers in English language comics today.
My journey as an artist more or less began with comics, it was through comics that I became interested in art. Although I had seen great works of art as a boy, it was comics that inspired me to draw. As an adult I had comics & cartoons published, but I never fully explored or pursued the role of comic artist. So I decided earlier this year, in a moment of lunacy, that I should test myself and see if I could illustrate a real comic strip to my own satisfaction. I then downloaded a sample script to illustrate. I learned that this particular script had been drawn many times and examples were available online. In looking at them I saw a variety of interpretations. Over time I began to wonder if it would be possible to write a script that could harnass this diversity of thought to create entirely unique comics. If several artists drew the same script but were given several opportunites along the way to bring personal experiences, choices, fears & desires to the story - what unusual turns would the stories take? How would they diverge and where would they overlap? So I set up a Twitter page to test this idea & started writing. I wrote to Scott McCloud about this project & over-night developed quite a following thanks to his post on the subject. Forty two artists started work on the first ‘tweet’ but drawing comics is time intensive & only twenty six artists found the time to complete the first sequence of six pictures. Comics are demanding and that anyone found the time to complete the sequence was quite remarkable really. Nobody that took part was paid anything, keep that in mind as you look through the series.
Choices
The first thing the artists chose was the appearance of the protagonist. ‘Hero’ took many forms & was variously male, female & robot. The second choice was over an action - the outcome of throwing one object at another - what would happen? The third choice was a quote or personal thought to include in the last panel. There was something of a joke in the timing here as this sequence ended on the Saturday that Harold Camping, an American preacher, had claimed would be the end of the world. Many of the quotes chosen by the artists seemed to predict, with startling accuracy, very much the opposite.
The Multiverse
Atwomic probably would not have occurred to me if I had not been thinking about the idea that we live in a ‘multiverse’, an idea some astro-physicists think may be true. It’s a bizarre theory that seems more Alice in Wonderland than science. The theory holds that within a multiverse there are many worlds just like our own & there may even be other versions of ourselves on those worlds. In each case those ‘selves’ live out a similar but slightly different existence. This idea seems more the work of comic book writers than scientists. Of course it is only a theory and may be proved a nonsense, but what an interesting nonsense! And so it is with the following sequence, a kind of multiverse comic, in which we see a ‘Hero with 25 Faces’ experience the same events but with a multitude of outcomes... S K Moore, June 6th 2011
ATWOMIC The Multiverse Comic by S K Moore & Artists of the Twitterverse...
The Hero with 25 Faces •Apologies to @fmbray. Your page is included at the back of this collection as number 26. I discovered your complete set too late to be included in this grouping. When more artists complete the series I’ll include your set here.
“What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible self must wander on and on from death to death.” Katha Upanishad
“The cementing factor of this unity in multiplicity is Love.” Sri Sathya Sai Baba
@rtists Special thanks to all the artists who took part from the beginning. Thank you for taking the time & sharing your art & love of the medium of comics with people all over the world via Twitter.
In future I hope to include examples of some of the work that went unfinshed, there were wonderful things developing & they deserve to be seen. But, for now, I’ve only included the work of the 26 who finished the sequence.
Now follow Sequence 1 as each artist drew it...
Work in progress...
End of sequence 1, sequence 2 will follow soon...
Thanks again to all who took part and to Scott McCloud for introducing us in the Twitterverse. The story, titles and concept is copyright S K Moore 2011, but the images on these pages are copyright to the artists respectively, all of whom can be contacted via their own twitterfeed. All other enquiries for information on this project should be directed to S K Moore @Atwomic on Twitter or via Email at opipop@gmail.com For more information about my work please visit http://wineink.blogspot.com/