On occasion, an artist enters their respective scene without the classical training of their forebears or the blooded innate talent of a child prodigy. Raymond Chandler, Laura Ingles Ingalls Wilder, and Claude Monet all started their crafts relatively late in their lives, and what drove them to it is often a key subject of their biographies.
All of the artists mentioned above started far later than Renton resident Charles Dobes, who has not only been writing stories in his spare time, but working extra hours at his day job to pay artists and other contributors at Essence Comics.
"I started in 2015, so I'm still a bit of a rookie when it comes to doing all the writing and whatnot," Dobes said of comic books in on a Zoom call.
Before his latest project, dubbed Essence: Destiny of the Twelve Warriors, Dobes had written narratives and settings of a much smaller scope. In 2021, he published the first volume of Krunk's Elf Adventures, a lighthearted urban fantasy series following Krunk the young skater elf, Carl the Gay genie, and Ragaylia the witch.
But Dobes doesn't just write. He tables at conventions, scopes out talent, and does whatever else needs doing for the Essence project to continue. If everything goes right, it will be a long time before he stops.
"I used to play Warcraft, Starcraft, and all those games back in the day, and I actually wanted to create my own video game, and my own system, and world," Dobes recalled.
Since then, Essence has "evolved a lot."
It went from an idea for a video game to one for a novel, but as the concept progressed, its focus on colors as a crucial element of the setting's cosmology drew Dobes to a more visual medium. Comics, he found, were also easier on a novice writer than heavy prose.
Characters and superpowers being color-coded is hardly new to speculative fiction; there's a good reason many young children refer to their favorite super-character in an ensemble cast as the "green one" or the ever-popular "red one."
Artists and game developers use our learned associations between colors and emotions to make the personalities of characters and scenes instantly more "readable." DC Comics' Green Lantern, LEGO's Bionicle, and Naughty Dog Games' Jak and Daxter come to mind.
Essence pulls a similar trick, but with a twist; the characters of the main cast each have their own chromatic flavor of superpower, with a matching outfit (which they use to battle a force of ravenous, evil aliens of course). But their abilities are usually summed up in a single word — like stockpile, regrowth, perception, or overload — whose openness to interpretation allows room for growth and discovery.
In fact, it was seeing his ideas rendered visually for the first time that convinced Dobes that his vision for the comic was worth pursuing.
"I know what I've created, I know what it's capable of doing," he said. "I just need to get it to that point where people start recognizing it."
Of course, that process hasn't been a cakewalk, for writing reasons and others.
"It's been a challenge because the abilities, and the ways the characters operate, and the ways everything kind of comes together — it's very complicated," he said. "It's really easy to get lost, even as a creator."
Characters in Essence not only have powers of their own, but can share them, according to the comic's website, which could create some very hyped-up action scenes, but also some mind-bending conundrums of visual and prose storytelling.
"I understand my world, but now I've gotta make sure the readers can understand it as well, without making any mistakes."
That being said, Dobes admitted that "I've made a lot of mistakes on the way." For the earliest rendition of Essence, he and an Italian artist (who has since gone on to work with Marvel Comics) created a little over 200 pages.
"But after people close to me had read it and stuff, they were like, 'This jumps way too fast,'" Dobes said. "I basically pulled an Eternals, where they introduced all the characters in one movie and it kinda backfired on them."
Dobes seemed especially grateful for the help of a certain frank and fastidious friend, editor John Carter, who has been eager to not only point out all the potential plot holes and other problems with the script, but give some sound advice on how to improve things.
Now, with colorist Fahriza Kamaputra and Indonesian artist Erfan Jafar, Dobes is gearing up to crowdfund the project on Kickstarter, and release the first two volumes of Essence, 300 pages total.
"It's exhausting doing all of it," Dobes said. "There were three paychecks in a row in a six six-week period. It was 110 hours, 120, 110 — still, on top of that, I was doing everything else."
"It doesn't leave a lot of time for anything."
What keeps Dobes motivated, in addition to his vision for the project, is the potential for having a positive impact for on Queer fans and artists in the comics industry. If Essence goes on to be popular enough, Dobes said, he has plans for expanding it into games and other media as well.
You can learn more about Essence, keep up with its Kickstarter countdown for July 14, and sign up for its mailing list at https://www.essencecomics.com/.