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| WIZARD UNIVERSE WEEKLY FEATURES |  | [IMAGE SPOTLIGHT] AQUA LEUNG | | Aqua Leung leaves the Seven Seas and ventures out to local comic shops | | | By Kevin Mahadeo | | Posted 4/8/08 | |  | | ![[IMAGE SPOTLIGHT] AQUA LEUNG](http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/wizarduniverse_2015_67718751)
Go for a splash with Aqua Leung, a brand new original graphic novel by Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury.
Follow Aqua as he journeys from landlubber to underwater dweller fighting for control of Atlantis. The 208-page graphic novel, written by Mark Andrew Smith and drawn by Paul Maybury, swims into stores this week, so we talked with Smith and Maybury about the novel and what it's like living under the sea—where the seaweed isn't always greener. And be sure the check out the Preview Pages after the interview!
Tell us a little about the story behind Aqua Leung—who is he and what’s the story about?
PM: Mark, you want to take that one?
MS: Sure. It’s the story about a boy named Aqua Leung, whose father was this brave conquer of the Seven Seas that was prophesized to be ruler of all the kingdoms, but everyone conspired against him and snuffed him out. So, it’s up to the kid to come back and set things right and take on this huge weight of revenge.
PM: It’s kind of a very traditional story, and we used that as a foundation for it, but we go off in all kinds of weird directions after that. We get the origin stuff out of the way fairly quickly—we devote a good quarter of the book to it—after that the entire series is boy-coming-and-learning-how-to-fight stage, and it’s a new book after that.
Did you guys know each other before hand?
MS: A little bit.
PM: Yeah. We were hooked up by Sean Galloway—or Cheeks, as he goes by. [Laughs] We were both mutual friends with him. Mark and I think we met each other briefly once in San Diego, but we can’t confirm it.
MS: Yeah. I’m pretty sure…
PM: [Laughs]
How’d you guys come up with the idea for this story?
MS: Basically, I just wanted to do an underwater book—it just sounded like a fun challenge to do. So, we started brainstorming ideas back and forth and coming up with the story more and more. Aqua Leung just grew out of that.
PM: It was Mark’s original idea, and we were going to work on another book together called Victorian Space Tales. He showed me three concepts he was working on, and one of them was named Aqua Leung, and I asked him questions about it. We started brainstorming on what it should be and I eventually just kind of dropped the other book and went with Aqua Leung.
What’s Aqua like as a character?
PM: At the beginning of the book, he’s very naive. He’s more of an average kid and asks a lot of questions. He doesn’t really understand what’s going on, but he throws himself into it. It’s like if a kid today who grew up watching “Lord of the Rings,” and then he was actually in one. He knows the lingo and knows how he should act, but he breaks character a lot. As the book progresses you seem him face the bigger challenges. He either makes good decision or bad decisions, depending on what the situation is. But you see his character evolve into more of an antihero than a regular hero.
MS: That pretty much sums it up. It’s a kid who is a product of TV and the environment, and learning how to fit into really big shoes. When he grows up, he’s going to be completely evil and brooding and nefarious, but you’re finding out how he gets there.
| |  How did you guys come up with the character design? How’d you flesh out what he was going to look like?
MS: Well, I started off doodling, and then I mailed my doodles to Paul, and I think Paul stuck them in a drawer and then started the design. [Laughs] They came out pretty similar, though.
PM: Yeah. I misplaced them. [Laughed] No, we more or less had the same idea going on. Everybody says I draw all my characters looking exactly like me anyways. I think, as my hair grew longer, the character’s hair grew longer. So, you’ll see the character in the book changing from the very first page to the last page accordingly. [Laughs]
MS: For me, the idea is based on a nephew of mine, and he kind of has dark circles under his eyes and looks kind of pissed off. [Laughs] That’s a little bit where it spawned off from.
You know, in one of the pages online, there’s a scene where Aqua gets beat up pretty badly. Are you going to show that to your nephew and say, “Hey, I based this character getting beat up off you”?
MS: Well, it was just the dark circles, I really didn’t think about my nephew getting beat up or anything.
PM: [Laughs] No, he beats his nephew. It’s alright.
[Laughs] Well, what can you tell us about the other characters in the book?
PM: For people that read our first collaboration, Put The Book Back On The Shelf, we did a story called Ninja No! There’s actually a character in there named Timmy who is in Aqua Leung. He ends up being Aqua’s best friend before he goes back to Atlantis. He’s going to appear more in the series, probably in Volume 2, but he’s in Volume 1. And Mark has his character Ragged Tooth, who we’re going to develop more in Volume 2, but you seem him in the second half of Volume 1.
MS: There’s Sonny the Fighting Fish. He’s Aqua’s mentor in the first volume and teaches him everything. There’s Tiberious the lobster fighter, who is the pure brawns for the group, and his sidekick Ringo—this cute little octopus that helps him out.
It looks like, from the sounds of it, the last half of the book will have a lot of fighting and a lot of action?
MS: Yeah. A ton of fighting and a ton of action.
PM: Originally, our idea was to do four issues. We were just going to do it like a regular series. We were already doing 32-page issues in our minds, but we ended up doubling it in the last issue, which is pretty much one big fight scene.
MS: It really added out to five issues, if you can really call it that. [Laughs] The last issue is a giant fight scene of an issue.
PM: We drag it out because we can.
You said you’re already planning a second volume for the series. How many volumes are you planning in total?
MS: We planned out three volumes.
PM: Yeah. We agreed to do three volumes before we kill ourselves. I mean, there’s a lot of ground to cover, and these are pretty big books. This book is 208 pages. So, we’ll be able to wrap up the story in three volumes. And we’ll probably have Aqua Leung pop up in anthologies here and there—like we did with the first volume of Popgun.
MS: Three volumes is the perfect amount. It’s still a lot of work, but it keeps it contained enough to where we won’t get bored with it, and we’ll really try to throw as many punches in it as we can and hit all our marks as we’re going through the story.
PM: Yeah, we don’t want to be Star Wars.
MS: I think we can survive two more of these before we get like a heart attack.
PM: Or just die from being broke.
| |  So, are you guys water people? I mean, do you own pet fish or anything?
PM: I kill fish, which I guess goes with the character. But, I can’t swim. I hate boats. [Laughs]
MS: I like swimming. I like boats and all that. And I like Discovery Channel. I’m a huge shark nut, so when Shark Week comes on, I’m there. The ocean is just a cool place. They’re always finding something new that’s freaking amazing and really awesome. I think as a template it’s really rich for pulling ideas and concepts. I’m an underwater geek, I guess. A little bit—I don’t own an aquarium or anything.
Paul, what appealed to you about the book when it comes to the art?
PM: Mostly the idea of it. When I saw it, it was almost like a quick plot outline, but just the idea of what Mark was saying [drew me]. I loved Aquaman and all those characters and kooky science fiction. But I never felt like those were really done the way I would like them. They were all really, really light-hearted and nothing really terrible happens, as far as I read. I wanted to do something with teeth, I guess. But masked with something that could be a children’s book. People compare some of the character designs to Spongebob. It’s kind of cartoony, which I always enjoyed when I was a kid. I watched “Wizard,” and they’re kind of cartoony characters but then they start shooting each other and going crazy. It kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to do something that was reminiscent of that. So, I felt like this was a genre that always been soft and light-hearted that we can take and bring in that direction.
So, you’re making an R-rated kid show?
PM: [Laughs] A little. I mean, it’s not too extreme, but we’ll go there if we want to. We’re publishing with Image, and we can do whatever we want. We have the freedom. It’s not Aqua Leung with a syringe in his arm and he’s got hookers and is killing people.
MS: [Laughs]
PM: It’s still a pretty light-hearted story, but when the action is there, we don’t hold back.
You mentioned earlier that Aqua likes fantasy films. Will there be any pop culture references to the effect?
PM: There will be, but it’s going to come out more in Volume 2. We had a scene in Volume 1 that I really wanted to do but we just didn’t have the time. One of the scenes that [I wrote that we had to cut] had Aqua and Timmy watching “Beastmaster”—being obsessed with that movie and quoting it all the time. We’re going to flashback to that in Volume 2 when we make Timmy’s character more prominent. Unfortunately, we had to cut a lot of scenes.
MS: We were under the gun to finish.
I noticed a while ago that it seems Aqua has his own MySpace Page.
PM: [Laughs] Yeah, we set that up years ago, I think, in anticipation of maybe doing the book one day. Mark maintains it, I think.
MS: I check it maybe once every two or three months. [Laughs] It’s very funny—his little profile.
Well, you’ll have to be checking it a little more often as we’ll be linking it in this interview. So, you might get some new friend requests.
PM: We’ll welcome the non-porn friends.
MS: Yeah, I think that’s the problem with MySpace—there’s too many the porn bots.
PM: Unless you really like looking at her 18-year-old pics or whatever she’s trying to advertise.
Is there anything else you guys are working on?
MS: We’re doing more Aqua Leung, and then Paul and I are teaming up for something new called Warrior Returns. It’s a self-contained graphic novel, which will probably come out in spring, I think.
PM: It’s mostly going to be a break from Aqua a little bit. I drew 64 pages in December, and it nearly killed me. So, I’m going to do something with this—a departure stylistically as well—and have fun with it. It’s definitely going to look a lot different.
| |  I can only imagine after drawing so much underwater stuff, you must have been like, “Alright, this going to take place in the air. There’s not going to be any fish-like creatures. There will be birds…
Both: [Laughs]
PM: Well, there’s other book I draw, Party Bear, which is an urban city drama. And Mark is writing Amazing Joy Buzzards, which is like people walking around on Earth with a guitar. We both have our outlets for getting off Aqua Leung.
Party Bear is an online comic?
PM: It [can be found at] http://community.livejournal.com/act_i_vate/. I’m currently looking to find a publisher and finish it up and solicit it sometimes. I’m taking my time on it because it’s all me—written by me, drawn by me, lettered, colored. It’s a little more of a longer process, but I think it will be worth it because I’m not rushing it.
Can you tell a little about the comic, so when people click on the link they’ll know what to expect?
PM: It’s about a boy that doesn’t have a father. It’s a throwback to those ‘90s urban dramas. He finds a bear that starts living with him and becomes a father figure for him. It’s a large cast, but the whole trick of the book is that everybody interacts with Party Bear, yet the bear doesn’t actually talk or do anything. He just kind of stands there and everybody interprets his silence as meaning something else. So, he’s the main character of the book without ever saying anything or interacting.
Mark, the first trade of Amazing Joy Buzzards hits in May. Are you going to have more?
MS: Yeah. I planned it for three volumes. The first one is like a masterpiece George Lucas edition of all the continuity stuff we’ve done to date because with the first series, we were kicking ass on it and getting momentum on it, but we feel behind schedule. This new volume is 300 pages of pure continuity and full story. We get to go back and package it in nice Sin City format and do it how we always wanted to do. Then in September, we’re going to have Monster Love come out, which is an all-original Amazing Joy Buzzards graphic novel. And then probably follow that up in a year with a final installment. We’ll probably do two specials here and there and more Popgun and Amazing Joy Buzzards and like a prequel adventure. So, yeah, there’s a ton of Joy Buzzards stuff I’m working on. Too much. [Laughs]
PM: That’s the nice thing about publishing with Image—Mark can repackage his stuff whenever he has the time. And it’s their call to put out a master edition or whatever they want to do. I mean the tradeoff is obviously we’re poor, but it’s nice to have that freedom. [Laughs]
You mentioned earlier that Aqua likes fantasy films. Will there be any pop culture references to the effect?
PM: There will be, but it’s going to come out more in Volume 2. We had a scene in Volume 1 that I really wanted to do but we just didn’t have the time. One of the scenes that [I wrote that we had to cut] had Aqua and Timmy watching “Beastmaster”—being obsessed with that movie and quoting it all the time. We’re going to flashback to that in Volume 2 when we make Timmy’s character more prominent. Unfortunately, we had to cut a lot of scenes.
MS: We were under the gun to finish.
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