Luis Peres Illustration.net
Childrens book art, imaginary worlds & all things fantasy since 1992.
"The Adventures of Prince Ziph" now renamed -Once Upon a Time on Mars- were created more than 25 years ago and have now gone through several diferent versions since i took them out of the drawer where they remained at the bottom for many, many years.
This comics work is now the 4th encarnation of this project for me.
It all started back in 1984 when at fourteen i read "The Hobbit" for the first time. Actually the book didn´t impressed me as much as "The Neverending Story" did, but i loved that it was also a book with a central character that was not human.
I decided then and there, that i wanted to see if i could create a fantasy story without any human characters, just to see how original I could be in developing my own universe.
Right from the begining i decided that it was going to be a fantasy story with humour, because another inspiration for my artwork has always been the european Asterix comics series and so i wanted to mix both styles. Fantasy and humour.
Project history.
1.The begining.
About my fantasy comics work.
"ONCE UPON A TIME ON MARS"
Project history.
2.Not Discworld but Asterix.
Another character i created for this fantasy comics work early in the story was "Death" herself as i love dark humour and satire.
At the time i thought i was doing something original and it was only about 15 years later that i discovered there was also an english author that had a humorous take on a death character too...Terry Pratchet with Discworld; which now may seem it was a inspiration for my own fantasy comics work or imaginary worlds but it was NOT. His books never reached Portugal until mid 90s and it was only because of the internet that i later found out there was someone else creating fantasy stories like mine with humor out there...and to big sucess...
Nevertheless i decided to keep my "death" character in the story because i loved to draw it and i had a bunch of jokes for her already.
The Hobbit mixed with Asterix (with a bit of Blake & Mortimer actually which does not show at first glance), were the real initial inspirations for "The Adventures of Prince Ziph - Once Upon a Time on Mars", the graphic novel. And of course, my favorite fantasy novel "The Neverending Story" by Michael Ende for the structure of the magic quest i use on my own adventure.
Let me take you back 65.000.000 million years
or into some sort of crazy timeframe like that
with lots of zeros in it just to impress people.
Have you ever wondered how was it like in those days,
when Mars had oceans on its surface?
And, what about martians? How green were they?
Who built the Face on Mars? What´s the meaning of life?
Is there life after death? How boring is it?
Who controls the universe anyway and does it have any weekends off? If not, why not?
These and lots of other stupid questions are answered
in 180 page graphic novel created over a period
of five years of work with color pencils,
watercolors and buckets of sweat.
If you like fantasy or science fiction stories with humour
or you´re looking for original comic book art
then come with me to ancient Mars and check it out.
It´s also a great paperweight if you buy the heavy
and thick hardcover edition.
If you preffer your readings lighter,
you can get this entire graphic novel
in 4 separate paperback
softcover issues.
Project history.
3.The first version.
I did the first comics version back in 1987, but left it half finished because i was still a kid and probably had other things to do.
It was in black and white (with some earlier attempts at coloring and of course, childish, amateur and very rough.
Check this original version. Click to enlarge.
Nevertheless over the years i kept coming back to it whenever i felt i wanted to draw comics because somehow this story and initial concept never left my imagination.
Old Rotring ink pen for architecture.
Old Rotring ink pen for architecture.
The first cover i did when i first put the world inside my imagination to paper. Old Rotring ink pen for architecture and amateur color pencils.
Old Rotring ink pen for architecture.
Project history.
6.New inspiration source.
In 2004 when i was already a professional artist for about a decade, i went back to this project. Actually it was a way of practising some traditional watercolor work for another thing, but then i got excited and continued to draw the story.
Initialy i was going to remake a color version of about 50 pages maximum, but i got carried away and this martian saga ended up having 180 pages of traditionaly done artwork by the time i reached 2009.
This last version storywise ended up transforming itself into more that i was expecting, because from the initial typical fantasy adventure i had in earlier versions, the fact that i read a lot of forbidden archeology and listened to thousands of Art Bell radio shows on paranormal and ancient mysteries took the plot of my comics in a much larger direction that i ever thought it would be.
In fact i blame Art Bell, Richard Hoagland and the classic Coast to Coast Am paranormal and conspiracy radio shows for all this.
When i imagined it back in the 80´s i never dreamed i was going to set it on an ancient Mars, but after listening to plenty of Art Bell and Coast to Coast Am shows featuring Richard Hoagland, Graham Hancock, Erik Von Danniken, Robert Beuval and many others, suddenly Cydonia and the Face on Mars, were part of my fantasy land too.
In fact, if you´re a Coast to Coast, or Art Bell listener, my fantasy comics is sort of a paranormal talk radio references treasure hunt , so see how many you can find while reading my martian graphic novel. You might even recognize some characters too.
It was then i realised that my fantasy world had just moved from a classic tolkien style magical mythical land into an imaginary Mars 65.000.000 years ago.
Project history
7.The hardcover books
Initially my comics were called "The Adventures of Prince Ziph" and i have this work self published in lulu.com on two other hardcover editions. One in English and the other in Portuguese. Actually the quality of the editions is trully professional as lulu.com does an incredible job with all their hardcover books.
Unfortunely due to shipping rates to europe it´s also very expensive for me to print an hardcover edition to distribute here and so i decided to create a more straighforward paperback edition which is the one you see on this website, and the one most english speaking readers wants as there´s no tradition of hardcover comics outside europe..
Since first publication i got a lot of emails by english speaking readers (also people wanting to buy the book), telling me that the english speaking comics reader does not buy hardcover comics (contrary to what happens in europe where we do preffer those), i realise it would be good to split my giant 180 page story into 4 separate issues and sell these as individual books, like a big graphic novel split into several issues.
Then i changed the name of the story to "Once Upon a time on Mars" as it was the title most voted on a poll and also because for search engines is a good tittle because of the word "mars" which is very popular.
English version looks the same. Hardcover edition contains the entire 180 page "Once Upon a Time on Mars - The Adventures of Prince Ziph" story in one single book. Click on the link to buy this special edition.
English version looks the same. Hardcover edition contains the entire 180 page "Once Upon a Time on Mars - The Adventures of Prince Ziph" story in one single book. Click on the link to buy this special edition.
English version looks the same. Hardcover edition contains the entire 180 page "Once Upon a Time on Mars - The Adventures of Prince Ziph" story in one single book. Click on the link to buy this special edition.
English version looks the same. Hardcover edition contains the entire 180 page "Once Upon a Time on Mars - The Adventures of Prince Ziph" story in one single book. Click on the link to buy this special edition.
Project history.
4.The first complete version.
In the late 80s i did the second version of this story , the first one i´ve completed and it took me about 48 pages to do it. Still in black and white. It was for a Portuguese comics competition where the page limit was suposed to be 5 pages and i sent 48 instead.
I wasn´t disqualified but the organizers had to create a special prize to award my persistence as nobody of my age at the time had done such a large fantasy story to enter a competition here in Portugal. That was fun.
In the early 90s the first color version was created. It was before i became a professional designer and illustrator and i used that version to get some skills in coloring artwork.
This version is now lost. In a time where there was no scanners to make good copies of our work, i had to send all the original pages to another comics competition. One that later on lost my entire original artwork before returning it to me.
Page 01
Page 02
Page 01
Amateur color pencils.
Amateur color pencils.
Amateur color pencils.
Amateur color pencils.
Project history.
5.About my comics style.
The american style super hero comics never appealed to me much because i grew up with the 70s european way of doing whats called comics in english but in fact is BD in europe (from the french "bande-desinée") and its a different style of visual narration than what america calls comics for exemple. This would take me a long time to explain now so i´ll probably will turn it into an article for my blog later one.
Anyway, my narration style has a lot of influence from the classic european comics ("Blake & Mortimer" and "Valerian", for example).
That is why my comics Once Upon a Time on Mars, has all those characteristics of european works, lots of text when needed to set the story (even if it stalls the action a bit), short actions scenes but plenty of them scattered all over instead of pages and pages with detailed action sequences and a structure that does not depend on style but gives main focus to what the story needs instead of trying to look cool.
Project history
8.What´s next.
Im planning to go to crowdfunding soon to get some budget to do a digital remake of the story. Because i have a lot of ideas to do with this project yeat but also to correct weak points that i dont like in the current 2004-2009 version which suffers from being a work done over a period of five years where i naturally changed my style of painting as my skills evolved and that shows up a lot on some pages, as i personally can recognize which ones were done when as this story was not created sequentialy. I had ideas and i did pages, then i connected all the bits with other ideas and so this is why some recent styles of watercolor painting appear right at the begining but then the artwork seems to go back to older stages for a while.
8.1.Crowdfunding anyone ?...
So i still want to create a new version, particulary a more polished digital one and most of all i want to draw the sequel as i still have plenty of people emailing me asking for more adventures. And i have plenty of ideas and adventures prepared; particulary now that we have so many cool shows like "Ancient Aliens" on tv where i can get ideas from.
If you´ve already started to read those yellow columns on the right and below that speak about the generic history of this comics project, you might already think you have an idea of what this fantasy comics are all about, so let me tell you you might be wrong. Or perhaps not. It´s hard for me to describe the idea behind this story without spoiling the surprises in the plot, but let me just say that if you love, steampunk, "Ancient Aliens" the tv series, forbidden archeology is your thing and you particulary are interested in topics like "The Face on Mars", Cydonia or ancient astronauts theory and you never encountered a comics story based on that before well, you have found one !
Like i already wrote on the history sections scattered here, this comics project had many versions; from the original i did when i was a kid when these characters were first created, to subsequent others that i´ve been working on over the years and which matured the idea as the time went by and i created each new version.
This current one, was done over a períod of five years entirely in traditional techniques, like watercolor, color pencils, acrylics and ink and it was my night hobby as during the day i was heavily involved in boring graphic and serious graphic design projects as i was a software designer by day, martian artist by night. Hiker on weekends.
I only recently joined the digital world for my illustrations. Up until a couple years ago all my illustration work which gradually became a fulltime occupation once i got out of the software design thing, all was done in traditional mediums.
So this current new version of "Once Upon a Time on Mars" was probably the last thing i ever did as a hobby for me in traditional materials, with real water and real paints.
The first edition was self-published back in 2009 here in Portugal, (the PT original version) and got a really nice welcome from most of the press i´ve contacted altough nobody knew who i was before. I guess i can say it really sold surprisingly well (for a POD that is) until i kept marketing it and i think the only reason it didn´t go much further was because i only have the work printed as an hardcover book. And that is a very expensive book to ship from the united states to europe , so at some point i decided to stop marketing it as i still have plans for the original PT version in the future. I could have already have published in a regular publisher as i have offers to do it, but for now i still want to keep all this as a self publishing project, because i actually learned a lot about POD-Print on Demand doing this and nowadays i can still help my illustration clients if they want to sel-publish too, which is a plus in my trade creating illustration work for around the world these days.
So, what´s in this story ? Talking martian spiders as heros, wizards that float a lot, bad guys that are green with envy, lost magic books, steampunk cities, teleporting mirrors, lovely heavenly creatures, alien technologies and spaceships. What more do you want ?
Oh, there is life after...death too. Or death after life, when she can catch it, i guess. There´s cupids, celestial creatures and lots of clouds.
Also you can visit Cydonia, see the Face on Mars, travel to the City of Thieves, journey to the Rusting City and look at sheep. We have sheep in it. And sea serpents too.
Adventure, love and romance, magic quests, UFOS, grey aliens, Santa Claus, evil creatures, epic battles, time travel, and boiling pits of sewage. All in this graphic novel. And let´s not forget the nuns too.
Welcome to Mars 65.000.000 years ago.
Many thanks to Will Kallif at Storm the Castle.com for his help with the english revision in the current english version of "Once Upon a Time on Mars - The Adventures of Prince Ziph". Thank you for supporting my fantasy adventure and for the work you did with my words because i couldn´t have published the english version properly without your guidance. Folks, do not forget to pay Will a visit too at:
This comics has another particulary thing that i think makes his origin stand out from the rest of the fantasy offers out there.
It was not planned.
And with this i want to say, that i have a chaotic way of creating stories. I never plan anything. I don´t do much test sketches either. I have an idea, i imagine everything in my head and then when i have all the visuals in my mind i go to the canvas and draw everything as the final version already. So what you see on my images is really what you get. I´m definetely not one of those comics authors that plan each page, create hundreds of planning sketches and think every detail to the last.
Me, i don´t even know what´s is going to happen in the next scene in the page, might alone on the nexp page.
I have no clue.
The way i do my stories (and my artwork), is, i have an idea of where to begin, i know generally what happens in the middle and i have more or less figured out what happens in the end. And nothing more.
Those topics took control of my imagination in the last ten years or so and altough i´ve been following the Cydonia controversy for more than twenty years now and i always wanted to create a fantasy story around these themes, i was never able to imagine an original setting to put my ideas in. I didn´t wanted to create the typical serious hard-core sci-fi exploration cliché plot and so when i discovered the Art Bell talk radio show and particulary the work of Richard Hoagland that was like the key to unlock what was inside my imagination the answer to what type of imaginative story i wanted to tell. I already knew i was going to do a fantasy with no human characters in it and it was going to be a funny light adventure. The ancient aliens angle became the piece that was missing and came just at the right time for me to put my Once Upon a Time Mars comics project togheter.
So this "Once Upon a Time on Mars" was no different. I already had a template from what i did in the old versions, but once the Art Bell and the now popular, Ancient Aliens type stuff entered the picture my imagination took total control and i totally let go to see where i would end up. Fortunely it worked once again and i ended up with a story. The only thing was that i was suposed to have created a 50 page graphic-novel to print as a typical european hardcover book but instead when i stopped and completed the comics, i had already 180 pages of illustrations done !
But it was fun. And i had to stop. In fact i still have material stored in my imagination for at least two new sequels to this first adventure and if i wanted i could have gone drawing the original story for a couple years without stopping. But i had to stop and so i ended up with the fantasy adventure you can now read and hopefully enjoy.
The time i imagine a story and i have it completed inside my mind i don´t even bother to put it to paper as for me that is like repeating an already completed piece. What i like to do is get inspired, and then see where each pic or each comics story takes me second by second.
I absolutely do not like to plan my art or my stories and everytime i try to do that i get so frustrated and bored that the end result is always a poor job.
And for now, i think this is it, i hope you enjoy this current version of my fantasy martian graphic novel, comics, (banda desenhada in Portugal), or whatever you call it in your country.
If you spend a couple of hours with my characters and have fun with my imaginary worlds i´ll be very happy.
You can contact me any time by email.
If you have questions on how to publish with print on demand POD, i´ll be happy to give you some tips if you ask for them.
If you are a potential illustration client, do not forget to take a look at my generic illustration portfolio at the main page of this website and i´m always available to discuss future work, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
Take a look at this graphic novel.
download the low res version here for free.
If you like it, you can also download for free the first two e-books in high-res PDF from my lulu.com storefront of which you can find more links below. Just create an account, add the free itesm to your cart, checkout and proceed to download the books for free. Really.
If you like my story please consider purchasing the remaining Pdfs of the two books that complete the saga in the e-book format.
And if like me, you love real books, consider buying the printed version too in those 4 separate softcover issues below
or click here for the special luxury edition in hardcover.
Support independent comics creators as we really do this for fun but it feels real good when we see a person paying a little fee to read our work also, as you can imagine. If you do this, thank you in advance and stay tune as there is plenty more to come of this saga in the future.
