Ahoy Mythopoeians! Hard to believe, but Mythworks is quickly approaching our ten year anniversary. Ten Years! Can you believe it? It really has flown by like a flash. In today’s post I thought I’d like to reminisce about the first year of Mythworks and how everything started. 

Where It All Began

I met Vince at New York University in the summer of 2008. We were both recent film major transfers at the school, and just about the best thing the university did was to put all of us transfers in the same few classes with one another that summer. I took a TV Studio class while Vince took a writing class, where he was classmates with none other than fellow comic writer James Tynion IV.

dBlacking out windows on set on our first 'real' film shoot.

Vince and I were part of the same crew in film school, working on multiple projects together in various capacities. I oftentimes found myself as a producer or assistant director, and Vince frequently worked camera and lighting. 

Vince’s thesis film, Sword and the Shadow, was a shoot that none of the cast and crew will forget. Twenty five of us traveled to the forests of upstate New York for four days to film an epic samurai tale of love and betrayal. 

We were challenged in ways that none of us could have foreseen. It makes for a great story now, but there were genuine portions of the shoot where we were all at our breaking point. Good times! 

Writing Buddies

After film school, we found ourselves separated by thousands of miles: Vince moved to London, on account of not being a US Citizen, and I moved back home to Los Angeles after a big potential project fell through.

The age of 23 - the best of times, the worst of times. During this period, Vince and I truly began collaborating, sending scripts and ideas back and forth via Facebook Messenger. That eventually coalesced in a reality TV show idea we had called The Warrior Within - a show in which regular people would battle it out against retired special forces operators in an epic airsoft battle. 

Maybe someday we’ll revisit the idea. Who knows! 

The Skies of Fire 

In 2013, Vince finished the first draft of Skies of Fire and sent it to me for feedback. After a couple of rounds of notes, I asked him if I could do a complete pass of the script. He agreed, and back and forth we went for several drafts through the fall and winter of that year. When it was all said and done, we had 6 full revisions of the script and a draft we both felt proud of. 

But - what to do with it? I came up with the idea to turn it into a comic, as the story’s epic nature seemed to be perfectly suited for that type of visual storytelling. We went about looking for artists, found both Pablo and Bryan, and subsequently created the first five pages. In the spring of 2014  we launched the first Kickstarter, which in turn officially launched Mythopoeia in 2014. 

New York Comic Con 2014

The original Skies of Fire #1 campaign was successful enough for us to attend our first show: New York Comic Con 2014. That immediately gave us a deadline to aim for and a very narrow window to reach it! 

Luckily, we made it just in time, receiving the printed books the Monday the week of the show. The next day I was off in a plane to New York, and by Thursday we had made our debut to the world. 

We didn’t know what was to come next, but we knew that we wanted to keep making original stories and worlds, and that if we did so, people would support our work. Thus began the company that would eventually become known as Mythworks.

Year One - one that we’ll never forget! 

- Ray