“There’s a lot of things you can do with time and space that sort of led me in thinking about how I could tell a number of stories simultaneously and have them read on more than one axis, if that makes sense. “There are a lot strengths that comics have that not a lot of people were focusing on,” he says. These are radical thoughts when many works days seem to be judged by how quickly they can be adapted into a movie. They signed on to Fawkes’ new project and now hail it as “the most ambitious project they have ever published.”įawkes, a Toronto writer and artist who has previously created Possessions, Mnemovore and The Apocalipstix, says the idea for One Soul came from thinking very deeply about comics and what they can do better than other forms of medium. “įawkes had completed 50 pages of the book at that point, so when the guys at Oni Press - who he had worked with previously and are best known for publishing the Scott Pilgrim series - saw some of his work at a convention, they asked what he was working on. I was setting the budget aside to self-publish the book, with maybe 200 copies and sell it as a convention curiosity. “I became convinced nobody was going to be interested. “I would talk to people and draw diagrams and people would say, ‘Well, that’s very interesting, but I don’t know if it would actually read well,’” Fawkes says. Part of the idea was to simultaneously tell the stories of several different characters throughout history, one panel at a time.

When Ray Fawkes started pitching his ambitious new graphic novel, One Soul, to publishers a few years ago, he had a hard time getting them to understand exactly what he wanted to do.

One Soul by Ray Fawkes