I wanted a divine story.
I didn't use the words 'Greatest story of its time' lightly. How much do you value your life, and the lives of those around you? You will not be able to read this story without answering that question intimately. It takes you beyond entertainment and into the most important areas of your life, and that's divine, to me.
I've been building towards this series since 1986, over 20 years. It's seen two earlier incarnations under the title 'ICON DEVIL', and it has been accepted for publication 5 times by 3 different companies... yet I never followed through. Some part of me always knew it was a grand, even divine, story, and that I didn't have the life experience, writing and art chops, to pull it off the way it needed to be done. I wanted it to REACH people, really dig in and pull at something inside them. Yet I didn't want it to be smarmy, spiritual, religious, goody-goody, or full of my viewpoints or advice. I also didn't want it to be done by the numbers, just another comic book that's kind of neat but is basically done for the money and fame. It had to go much deeper than that. Through another non-comics project of mine, and through my own history, I've seen how people are changed through tough things in their lives they must endure, how they win and lose in different ways as a result, and I wanted to show that cause and effect, to the extreme, through my characters' lives in this story.
I wanted to take them to the darkest places, show how they cope differently according to what kind of person they are, show what they lose and what they win, and show, finally, how each of them - and each of you - can find full restoration to the purity you were born with.

I wanted divine art.
I think around 1996, during that murky transitional state early in the morning where I was waking up, still half asleep and half awake, I had an image/dream flash in my head for maybe 2 seconds. It was a dream of an illustration of a girl's face... but I had never seen anything drawn that way before. It had strange 'holes' all through it, twisting holes like Swiss cheese... but it wasn't ugly like it sounds when I'm describing it, it was the most beautiful and strange face I'd ever seen drawn... even if it was in a dream.
For a dozen years now I'm still shaping my art to look like that face. It didn't make any 'sense', the details didn't 'mean' anything, but they were divine. I would sketch a little once in awhile, sometimes not for months or years, but always get a little closer to what that face looked like. And each time, after a few minutes drawing, or a few pages over a week or two, my art would 'lose' this new wonderment and fall into the old patterns of my old style... and I'd stop drawing again, and would 'think' for awhile - like months - on how to get my art closer to that vision. I had to totally let go, and draw anything, any shape that came to mind, even if it didn't make sense, even if it was pure expression with no other point. I'd start drawing normal hair, and then I'd let that hair go into whatever strange shape I felt like. Eventually, after years, I learned the trick of not drawing ANYTHING 'normally'; people, clothing, hair, vehicles, animals, scenery, buildings, it all gets the 'treatment', it all looks strange... but beautiful. The most common comment I get when showing my art now to people is, "What the heck IS that? I don't get it. But yeah, it's beautiful!"
That's my art, now. You don't have to 'get' it, as long as you like something about it. Strange but beautiful.
Here's a picture I love, illustrating what I said about strange but beautiful shapes. Then scroll below to read the synopsis of this series.

A short SYNOPSIS of ONE LIFE ONE DEATH, a comic maxi-series and graphic novel:
The Earth's mass-suicide initiative has begun, the brainchild of one man who determined that overpopulation is the cause of every threat to our future existence. His idea? That every person decide for themselves how valuable their input is to the world... and if they think that they're not contributing much, nor think they ever will, then to voluntarily end their own lives, to 'kull' the human race of the weak and less useful, and make room for future generations to have enough resources to survive.
A person of uncommon foresight and conscience, he spearheads this movement and becomes the first to take his own life for the cause, in the hopes that a less-populated planet will provide a better chance for those to come, including his own young son.
But before he does this, he sets into motion events that will test the handful of beings he's gathered around him in his world-powerful corporation... to test THEIR values of their own lives and futures.
But something goes wrong with his martyr-like plan.
His suicide attempt is thwarted, reversed, through no power of his own, and he is forced to LIVE. To WANT to live.
He is forced to return to a world that now thinks he is a hypocrite, a coward and liar, once they see him still alive... yet they believe in his original movement and are dying in droves to follow that cause. And the 'tests' he set in motion thinking they would help those amazing beings he'd gathered around him, go wildly beyond any control.
The initiative he began has taken on its own life, though he is now considered a faker and false prophet who merely chanced upon a good idea. His old friends are being pushed to their limits, having their darkest days due to events he set into motion. His organization is crumbling, even his floating city-above-the-city comes crashing down...
And amid this chaos, he finds clarity, he finds the truth of his life and the falseness of his original motives, he finds the tools to bring understanding, forgiveness, and restitution to himself, to those around him, to a world that has crashed into confusion and despair.