Backstage Pass February: Jordan Kotzebue

Hurry Hurry Hurry! Slip Backstage and Meet The One And Only Jordan Kotzebue!

So Jordan, tell us about yourself?

I've been a professional artist/animator for the past fourteen years. I am currently working with PopCap Games as an art director on the critically acclaimed “Plants vs Zombies Heroes”. In addition to the day job, I've also done freelance. Most notably, work for DC Comics and Aspen Comics, doing pencils on the hit TV series “Heroes” online comic book. I started Hominids about six years ago when I realized how much I needed to make a comic that was all my own and wasn't beholden to someone else.

Main Projects

Hominids
http://hominidscomic.com/
https://www.facebook.com/hominidscomic/
https://twitter.com/HominidsComic
https://www.patreon.com/hominids

Other Hobbies, Guilty Pleasures and Obsessions

I love doing things outside whenever I can. It's especially important being from the northwest to take advantage of nice weather. I really love hiking, camping, trail running, and if I can find a nice watering hole, I'll even do some cliff diving. I also like to juggle, rock climb and do parkour. Admittedly, I don't get to do those last 3 as often as I'd like.

So, tell me about your early experience. How did you fall in love with telling stories in pictures?

My older brother, Travis and I would draw all the time. I remember distinctly as a kid, a really cool drawing of Colossus that he did. We were X-Men fans ever since. So I learned the power of storytelling in comics pretty early on. Then when the Batman: Animated Series debuted, I realized a good story could come from anywhere, even a Saturday morning cartoon. It was a snowball effect from there.

What media and programs do you work in to produce your project?

For comics, I like to pencil and ink traditionally. Any excuse to get away from the computer for a while. Then I pretty much stick with Photoshop from there.
Can you tell me about your typical day or strip-creation session? How does your work process flow from idea to finished page?
With a full-time job, I give myself a full week to do a page. I usually have the current issue all thumbnailed. Then I'll do the layout in Photoshop before printing it in blue line. I then have the freedom to pencil it wherever I like. Sometimes I'll sit in front of the television or go to a coffeeshop and noodle away at it. It sort of depends on the week. The largest chunk is done on the weekends. I like to have my page finished by Sunday night so I can post it early to my patrons at Patreon. Then my regular updates are on Tuesday.

What’s the most difficult part of your work?

Marketing and self promotion! Those do not come naturally to me.
There is an amazing amount of biological, ethnographic and anthropological research in your comic.

Can you tell us about your research process and your resources?

When the idea to do this comic first popped in my head, I was listening to a science podcast about Neanderthals. They talked about how Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. This didn't mean they were smart necessarily but it did mean they were not the big, dumb cavemen that we often think of. I thought it would be so cool to tell a story centered around them. So I read everything I could about them and any other hominid species I could. I get notifications on all the latest research and if I can, I'll try and fit it into the story. Neanderthals had red hair. Cool, I'll put that in the book. Humans have Neanderthal DNA in them which means they mated. Great! There's some clever ways to put some romance in the book. I don't really have any single source. In my email I just set up notifications for whenever certain keywords are mentioned on the internet. This helps keep me current with any prehistoric science.

What cultures inspired the races in your work?

I didn't want any one culture to inspire my characters. Partly because I'm dealing with other species, so I didn't want to be insensitive to anyone. Instead I pulled different things from different places where it might feel appropriate to jungle living. The Mosuo people of Southwest practice spend their lives with many lovers and the women in particular hold the majority of the power. This felt like the exact opposite of our culture that I thought it would be really interesting to explore that aspect of tribal life.

What inspired you about the historical groups you drew inspiration from?

Surviving and thriving in a world that wants to kill you at every turn. I love the fact that there was a time and a place on our planet where there were multiple advanced people fighting for the top of the food chain. It's like Lord of the Rings, but without the magic. And they really existed!
Can you tell me about your storytelling process? Do you prefer to script your stories, fly by the seat of your pants, or somewhere in between?
There's a bit of both. I have the story outlined and I know the flow all the way to the ending. I only write final scripts an issue ahead though. I don't like having everything finalized years in advance because I never know if a minor change will uproot the story. I want to learn from my characters as I write and draw them. Sometimes I'll draw an expression that I wasn't expecting but that I like much more and I'll go with it. That can means the characters is reacting differently for the entire scene! By the time I'm ready to write the next issue, I've learned some things and I come at it with a fresh perspective.

How much of a buffer do you like to keep?

I try my best for about 10 pages but that buffer usually whittles down pretty quick and I lose my buffer altogether. So I do some late nights to get my new page out on time.
If you could send a note back to yourself when you began working on your skillset, what would you say?
Don't be afraid to edit. Cut the stuff out you don't need. Think about your theme all the time.
Stick to doing new and exciting things with the things you are good at. The things you need to learn from scratch, like building a website and marketing yourself, stick to the basics. It's all new to you anyways.

What message do you hope readers take away from your work?

Culture is learned behavior. We can always change ourselves to make us better without disrespecting that culture.

What keeps you devoted to telling the story you’re telling?

The ending. Gotta tell that ending. Otherwise, I'll never get it out of my head.

Saturday Revue March 11: Hominids

For A Swingin' Good Time, Look No Further Than

Imagine Avatar re-written in an intelligent, soul searching manner. Imagine Tarzan with a brain. That, dear readers, is Hominids. Created by Jordan Kotzebue, this is the adventure tale you always wanted and never got. All the adventure, all the beauty, all the raw living power of the jungle is here, but this time there's a heart and mind to match. This story will steal your heart and entrance your eyes. Prepare yourself for a trek into a tale.

The Rating

A True Tale Spinning Feat.

The Raves

This rave must begin with the art. Gods, the ART! Lush, rich, vibrant and viridian, the artwork of Hominids is stunning. The creator is truly a master of their craft, capturing body language, expression, lighting and atmosphere with a breathtakingly deft hand. The color of a flower, the light on a leaf, the gleam on a blade all draw the reader eyes-first into a living breathing ecosystem. You can almost smell the loam and leaves, breathe the humid fragrances of strange flowers and sweat and feel the grass between your toes. This art is exemplary.

But beautiful artwork is only the first strand of the web. Onto the storytelling, which is more than a match for the art!

Hominids is aptly named, for it is, in effect, a story about people: their loves, their hopes, their dreams, their motivations, and what circumstances and culture can make them into. Angel or monster, heathen or heretic or high priest, it has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with who your culture THINKS you are. The best people can be twisted into beasts by a culture with a domineering mentality. And the angriest people can be eased by a culture that focuses on peace and cooperation. Hominids is a parable about interacting cultures on one level: what has in other places been called 'the dance of the givers and the takers' is portrayed here. Cultural interaction between cultures with entirely different priorities can very quickly get problematic.

On a creative level, you can't help but be impressed by the creative worldbuilding and scientific dedication that went into this work. For instance, the ecosystem is based on and in some cases drawn directly from anthropological research on what various branches of the human family tree might have been like, and exploring a time when we coexisted is FASCINATING. The subtle attention to plant and animal species appropriate to the setting really impressed me (being a horticulturist in my professional life, people who get plants right make me happy!) and there are many deft and subtle bits of ecological and evolutionary design: for instance, the tree dwellers are perfectly designed for their forest home. They even have dappled patterns on their skin that aids them in concealment. THAT impressed me. This creator did their homework!

 On another level, this is a story about the interaction between individuals and the moral code of their culture. In Hominids, people ask eternal questions: do I believe what I was taught? Was I brought up with the right beliefs? What if there's another way? As the characters ask themselves, we're all encouraged to ask these questions along with them, and we all grow stronger for it.

But wait, there are still more layers! There is a spicing of sci-fi hidden under the fantasy of this tale, a hint of an older and far more technological civilization hidden under the vines and creepers, metal under the jungle loam. Now what happened here, the reader must ask. What indeed...

But that hint will remain, for now, just a hint. This vibrant ecosystem of story works holistically: none of these elements jar or push out the others. It's part of what makes such a complex story work.
 Another key element is extremely strong writing. The dialogue is crisp, clean and believable, the story moves along at a perfect pace, and there's just the right amount of pleasant, sweet and amusing banter mixed in to keep the story upbeat in the face of deep, difficult and complex themes.

In a true master stroke, every single character is well-rounded, strong and believable in their motivations: serious homework having been done is evident again in the careful use of psychological motivators, but this story reads as a STORY, not as a text book, and that's what takes it from good to great. You can understand and sympathize with every single character, even the ones you despise. And that is true greatness in storytelling.

The Razzes

There's not a lot to be said against this comic: it's stunning. But a few little areas could use some polishing up.

First off, dearest creator, when you've made something as AMAZING as this it doesn't deserve the rookie mistake of missing a page favicon. I'd add one as soon as possible. As a reader I noticed this little detail when, flipping through the tabs on my taskbar, I couldn't find the one for Hominids at first. Because it had a blank favicon that looks like any other neglected waif of a page. Let's fix that!
Simply put this code into the header of your site's HTML: 

<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2005/10/profile">
<link rel="icon" 
      type="image/png" 
      href="http://example.com/myicon.png">

and replace 'example' with the url where you store your image. Done and dusted. Your icon should be 160 by 160 and say something about your page....for Hominids, might I suggest a leaf?
The only other thing I might suggest is a little work on tangent lines and dialogue layout. Occasionally the reader's eye is confused about the direction of speech in a conversation. The creator has color coded the speech, which helps enormously, but careful attention to word bubble placement is still essential.
Always remember that English readers read up to down, left to right. Throw that off even a little and you have confused eyeballs.

The Revue

A wonderous and enchanting MUST READ. Fern Gulley for adults, Avatar for intellectuals. Enjoy!