Once again, it is time to showcase a member of my intrepid and talented creative team. This time, it's Frank Cvetkovic's turn, whether he likes it or not.

In his own (criminally modest) words, Frank is a comic book letterer whose work has appeared in ARTFUL DAGGERS, THE BLACK WRAITH, FIRESIDE MAGAZINE, KUNG FU SKRATCH!, MOLLY DANGER, NENETL OF THE FORGOTTEN SPIRITS, and THE INSIDE. He is also the writer and creator of the original graphic novel PUNCH-UP. He currently lives in Cleveland, OH, where the home teams never win and the rivers occasionally catch fire.

Frank is also the letterer for Amiculus: A Secret History. He's the guy who makes my words look good on the page. From the responses I've been getting from the initial pages, he's doing a damn good job at it, as not a single person has noticed how barely passable my dialogue is.

In all seriousness, Frank is a true professional, and a gifted writer.  His webcomic, PUNCH-UP, is a wickedly sardonic story of a perennial loser who has made career for himself in the only profession he's been good at since high school: as a human punching-bag. Wherever there's a drunken bar fight, a jealous husband, or someone looking to put the hurt on someone else, this guy is there to take the beating if the money's right. Currently, the webcomic is on hiatus as Frank considers his own Kickstarter, but believe me, it is choice storytelling.

The next member of my creative team that I would like to feature is actually entirely new to comics. Pamela Kame is the graphic designer who created the amazing logo that graces the banner of my site, and is responsible for everything on the cover of my book that Giancarlo didn't draw. 

Pamela graduated from Ohio University with a B.F.A. in Photography, working in photo restoration and designing business cards and postcards after she graduated. She currently works in the journal graphics group at the American Chemical Society in Columbus, Ohio, where she also resides.

And she did THIS!  

I, for one, couldn't be more thrilled with her inaugural foray into graphic novel cover design.

I feel like I should acknowledge this, because there is a very specific reason that I only hint at in the series for why I chose to title my work "A Secret History."

The Secret History is the name of the most famous work by one of my main characters, the real-life historian Procopius of Caesarea. I  relied on another of his works, The Gothic Wars, as a primary source for events in Amiculus.

Procopius, however, had not written his Secret History at the point he appears in my series. The man featured here, who is in the process of writing The Gothic Wars, seems fervently patriotic, an idealistic believer in the cause for which the Eastern Romans are burning Italy to the ground. His patrons, the general Belisarius and the emperor Justinian, are saviors, reuniting the broken halves of the empire.

By the time of The Secret History, Procopius was a different man. The writer who had hailed Belisarius and Justinian as saviors now savaged them as ruinous villains, evil tyrants, cuckolds to scheming wives, even devils in human form. (My favorite part is a story of how Justinian made his head disappear and reappear several times during a meeting with the Senate!) Something had happened in the intervening years to made Procopius bitter, disillusioned and furious with his masters, in despair for the empire whose rebirth he believed was certain only a decade earlier.

I'd like to think Amiculus, and Romulus's (secret) history, could have been the catalyst for that.

"They've broken through the wall!"

"Noooooooo!"

"AAAAAAAAA!"

"Woop-woop-woop-AAAAOOOOOOGAAAAH!"

All of this (except for that last line) is dialogue that happens at some point in my series. It's quite dramatic exploding from a word bubble on a page, but feels silly as hell when you're screaming it into a microphone in an unventilated attic studio in a residential neighborhood on a hot June evening. This is what voice-over recording for the coming "Amiculus" trailer consisted of.

Fortunately, none of the neighbors called 911, the legions of planes zooming overhead and cars with bad mufflers eventually dwindled to a minimum, and we got some excellent takes from our group of immensely-talented, classically-trained voice actors. As silly (and sweaty) as it was recording, it's gonna sound killer with the animation. 

Look for the finished product within the next two weeks!

Here is the latest development in the ongoing tweaking of my cover logo  for Volume 1. I'll be offering a more detailed list later, but this will be offered as an incentive in my Kickstarter in multiple media forms. It will appear as one of two selectable options for the book cover, as well as a wall poster. What do you think? 

"In A.D. 475, the Roman general Flavius Orestes overthrew the Western Roman emperor Julius Nepos and placed his 12-year-old son Romulus on the throne. A year later, Orestes’s partner, the German chieftain Odoacer, turned against him, and the two went to war. Odoacer destroyed the Roman army, executed Orestes, and forced Romulus to surrender his crown, ending the empire in the West. Romulus was exiled and soon disappeared from history."

And that's about it.

Look for "Romulus Augustulus" in Procopius, Jordanes, Edward Gibbon or the Anonymus Valesianus and you will find little more than a version of the above paragraph (except for Gibbon, who, in addition to having compiled other historian's accounts, can be a little long-winded.) At the time, the event of Rome's fall in A.D. 476 was largely met with a shrug. This is partly due to the fact that 1) only the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476; the Eastern half survived for another 1000 years; 2) Rome had long since ceased to be important as a capital; 3) Romulus himself was a complete nobody, a pawn, and an illegitimate pawn at that. The few descriptions of him are entirely derogatory. He is referred to by the cruel nickname Momyllus Augustulus, "the disgraceful little emperor," for the shameful end to which he (through no fault of his own) brought the long, proud line of Western emperors.

There's a tragedy, I think, to the fact that Romulus never had a say in any of this. History has deprived him not only of a voice, but of any identity at all.  To that degree, the boy-emperor is a literary tabula rasa, left to the imagination of the writer to fill him in. To some degree, I have done this in Amiculus. Still, in setting this as his own history, I'd like to think he would like the story I have chosen for him.

I'd like to take the opportunity, before launching in any further, to pay homage to the amazing talent that is Signor Caracuzzo. It is an understatement to say this man knows his way around a comic page. No matter the subject - space battles with xenocidal aliens, a wild romp across a tropical paradise with zombies literally nipping at your heels, or the quasi-mythological epic of an Egyptian queen - Giancarlo brings it bursting from the page with the urgent, frenetic vibrancy and dazzling color that is his signature style, the same style with which he has blessed my book.  Simply seeing Amiculus brought to life on the page would have been thrilling enough; in his hands, I can imagine the furthest, most epic limits of its potential.

Here are a few of his books I'd highly recommend: Marvel's Formic Wars duology, adapted from Orson Scott Card's prequels to Ender's Game; IDW's The Last Resort, that zombie romp in paradise I mentioned. I'd also like to recommend checking out an upcoming project of his, currently featured triumphantly on Kickstarter: Weapon of God, a collaboration with writer Jimmy Palmiotti.  

(That's what the Latin on my home page means.)

Welcome to the debut of Amiculus: A Secret History. I've made most of my introductions for this aspiring book on my home page and bio, but there is still a lot to tell.  I look forward to sharing this with you, and I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I will.

As I said in my bio, this idea started as a ten-page play about a young boy in a crown, on a throne, locked in a room, forbidden to speak, or move, or make anyone aware of his presence, as the world outside the room rapidly fell apart.  Not a very interesting play, I would think, but the idea had merit enough to remain stored at the back of my brain, prodding it regularly, until I finally realized the medium it was meant for nearly a decade later. What started as just a planned one-shot, 32-page book that I would produce as a test run for an ongoing series I had in mind (still prodding the back of my brain as we speak!) ended up taking on a life of its own, becoming the epic 3-part series I desire to bring to you today.

This space will be updated regularly with news, artwork debuts, colleagues' projects, behind-the-scenes information about the history, production and research that went into the book, and, of course, profiles of the production team, starting with the incomparable Giancarlo Caracuzzo.

For now, I will leave you with the above picture, a painting of the Roman Emperor Honorius by Jean-Paul Laurens (1880). This painting captures for me the ludicrous and tragic irony of the boy-king in the locked room, feet barely touching the floor, made to watch helplessly as his empire collapses.