Review -- SIVOA

Sivoa
Written by Heather Scott
Pencils by Heather Scott
Indie
A half year into writing comic reviews, most from indie creators, I have already become a huge fan of those who have the creative drive to continue their ideas.
The indie field is littered with Issue #1s, comics people dreamed would catch attention, and when the reality of indie sales hit home, interest in putting forth the effort to see future issues created wanes and the creators go back to be accountants or bank tellers, or whatever.
So when you get to review a book like Sivoa from Heather Scott you just tip your hat and say great job when you read through Issue #1, then #2, #3 and on to the current Issue #6. That makes the title a winner without even reading a page.
Of course for Scott the genesis of the book was a long one.
“I guess that if I had to pick an absolute starting point for this, it would have been shortly after the video game Mortal Combat 2 came out,” she said. “This is actually very important because the boys that I hung out with when I was little wanted to make the next game in the series. I loved the idea and started churning out character after character for this until Mortal Combat 3 and the game franchise exploded.
“Due to being totally distracted by the Mortal Combat games, movie, and TV series, we ended up abandoning the characters we created. This was, until the second Mortal Combat movie came out and we realized that we were bored with the re-hashed material that we were constantly being fed. It was at this point that we decided to do something totally different with the ideas that we had already came up with.
“Not having been fully-introduced to the idea of table-top or live-action role-playing games, we ended up creating rough character sheets that revised some of our characters (or created whole news ones) and developed back-stories for each of them. We then created a rough idea of the world that would house them and from there we would act them out much in the way that children play pretend.
“That didn’t really carry on to much further than part-way through middle school, when we all had to go our different ways. I kept my character Dragonira in mind on through high-school because I had fun drawing her and revising her story constantly gave me a mental distraction from lessons that I probably should have paid attention to.”
Scott said from that point real life came to influence the fictional fantasy story’s development.
“It was also during this point that the story started taking on darker overtones as I began to discover that my friends led significantly less happy lives than I did. I won't go into any detail regarding that, but my only way to understand even remotely what they were going through was for me to have my main character go through some of it too,” she said. “This ended up depressing me and so I dropped the whole thing myself for a good long while.
“It wasn’t until after I graduated and was already about a year into college before I looked at Sivoa again ... and this is because my friend Sarah had gone through all of my sketchbooks and asked me an almost never-ending string of questions about the characters that she saw within. After finding myself spending hours answering each of her questions, I decided to draw it out as a comic for her.”
So we dive into the story.
You learn pretty quickly that Scott had a long range vision for the story. At times creators have a narrow view, one that gets them through a book, or two, then the story sputters. For the most part Scott exhibits a pretty solid understanding of story pacing. She has the ebb and flow of a good tale here, with moments of tension, countered with the sort of backbeat readers need to take a breath.
The story is a fantasy setting, with Scott’s take on the elf and mixing in cat people. Nothing startlingly original, but they work for the story.
In terms of art Scott uses black and white. The book could be bolstered with colour, but an indie book has to deal with cost realities, so accept the black and white world.
Scott won’t become a household name as an artist based on Sivoa, although the lines do sharpen from Issue #1 to #6, and that’s a good sign.
The work has just a hint of Japanese manga, at times, in a few of the faces. At times Scott is bang on in terms of facial emotions, and at other times seems just a bit off, yet in the end the overall look works pretty well for the title.
Scott talked about the B&W choice in her interview.
“When I first got started with the print comic venture, I realized that printing in colour for the quantities that I needed would have been out of our budget,” she said. “Because of this I opted to go with black and white interiors for the comic.
“With that in mind, I experimented with a number of different styles and techniques including ink washes, tones, markers, etc., and eventually opted to go with a style oriented around hatching.”
Sivoa might not immediately catch your attention if it was in a pile of comic titles, but it is nevertheless a pretty satisfying effort that you have to credit Scott with pursuing.
And, there is more to come.
“Well, the first thing would be to finish the seventh issue in the series so that it's available towards the beginning of next year (2010),” said Scott.
“From there I've been working on revising some of the comic’s pages and organizing the seven issues into a paper-back trade. In addition to that I’ve been tinkering with assembling a sort of notebook showcasing some of the things that were developed for Sivoa, but were ultimately cast aside. I don’t have a definitive date for when either of these are coming out though.
There is a simple archive of the comics online at http://sivoa.dragonmun.com for those that wish to keep up with the comic there. This site does not feature many of the extra materials that are provided in the printed issues, but those can be ordered from there as well.
— CALVIN DANIELS

-- Appeared on Yorkton This Week WebXtra