Earlier tonight, Dark Horse Comics held a virtual panel on their Twitch channel featuring some of the creative forces behind their second Avatar based graphic novel, Avatar: The Next Shadow, where they revealed some elements of the book were derived from some details found in Pandora: The World of Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
What’s Happening:
- Earlier this evening, Dark Horse Comics held a virtual panel with some of the creative team behind one of their latest graphic novels, Avatar: The Next Shadow, based on the wildly popular film (and upcoming sequels) from Academy Award winning director James Cameron.
- The panel featured writer Jeremy Barlow, artist Josh Hood, and VP of Franchise development for Lightstorm (Cameron and Jon Landau’s production company), Joshua Izzo.
- While the panel discussed many elements of the previous book, Avatar: Tsu’Tey’s Path as well as Avatar: The Next Shadow, Izzo briefly mentioned that with all things Avatar, they take an “Ewa'' approach. Everything is connected, everything matters, and they treat all partnerships and projects the same way.
- Though only the first issue of the four-part miniseries is available now, with issue #2 due out in February, Izzo expanded on the “ewa” theory, saying that later in the series, readers will experience an environment once only previously seen aboard the Flight of Passage attraction at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
- The level of detail with all things Avatar also provided challenges for both writer Barlow and artist Hood, who had to work with specific environments and stick to the way things looked. Barlow specifically mentioned wanting to write up new creatures for the characters to encounter, but was tasked with using similar or rarely seen ones that already exist in the Avatar universe. Hood mentioned that the lack of eyebrows made it harder to “act” in the imagery he created, but also specified the individual stripe patterns of the Na’vi, as well as their intricate braiding as the most challenging part of working on the project.
What They’re Saying:
- Joshua Izzo: “There is one scene later in the series where the Na’vi and the humans have to work together to go to a new location that we’ve never seen before. Jeremy and I worked out how this can play out from a beat by beat storytelling perspective and where we wanted to send these characters to basically go on a fetch mission to drive the plot forward. It will all make sense once you’re gonna start reading these things. We leaned on some really amazing reference that we pulled from the Flight of Passage ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, at Pandora: The World of Avatar. We needed a location, and we had already built out something that had only been seen on that ride. That is officially part of our world, that ride, Flight of Passage, that’s canonical, so we said ‘let's marry these two universes’ and that reference was sent to [Josh Hood] and we kind of built this scene around something that was seen in one medium, and has been viewed on the big 4D screen and you go in the ride and you experience it but has never been seen cinematically in the Avatar movies, but now we’ve brought together in our story world.”
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