By Khalida Sarwari
Disturbed by the stories he was seeing in children’s films and comics that lacked strong female characters and parental influence, local college professor Nathan Peabody set out to create a comic of his own that challenged those norms. He didn’t have to look far for inspiration, having a role model of his own to base his characters on: his mother, former Saratoga mayor Ann Waltonsmith.
A physics professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Peabody only recently ventured into the world of comic book writing, teaming up with Italy-based artist Manuela Soriani to bring a vision he’d been carrying in his head for four years onto the page.
Together, they’ve completed the first of a six-part series and are now in the process of completing the second book. The central character of the “Boylord” series is Ettan, a 15-year-old “boylord” on Planet Vareenya, where he lives in a matriarchal society of “Pranans,” a highly advanced species of cat-like aliens who, Peabody says, are genetically, socially and spiritually superior to most humans.
The story incorporates positive parental figures who are as much a part of Ettan’s success as his high school classmates, Peabody said. Ettan, for example, comes from a household where he has two fathers and his mother is a Pranan priestess.
All is well in Ettan’s utopian world until he finds himself in trouble with Kazundal, a demon lord who lives in a castle in hell.
Peabody said he was inspired to write the comic after noticing a dearth in children’s fiction and movies of strong female characters and parental influence. Many stories seem to depict the main character’s parents as either deceased or evil, he said. What’s more, in most of the stories, violence is usually shown as the solution to conflict.
“My friends all have teenagers, and they’re all reading science fiction and comic books and everything, and I didn’t really like the books,” he said. Then a thought occurred to him: “What would someone do if they were from a society that didn’t come from violence but encountered violence? How would they deal with it?”
In a way, Peabody said, the story of Ettan’s descent into hell mirrors his own battle with ulcerative colitis, a disease from which he nearly bled to death in his early 20s. The condition, wherein patients’ immune systems attack their large intestines, forced Peabody to halt his studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and undergo surgery to remove his colon, followed by a yearlong recovery at his mother’s house. He credits his mother for nursing him back to health with a gluten-free and vegetable-heavy diet.
Similarly, in “Boylord,” it’s Ettan’s family that comes through for him and the comic explores what a family has to do to keep a child out of hell, said Peabody.
“The whole family and community has to organize and save that kid, and it really takes a huge effort to overcome that,” he said. “We read how this society deals with his predicament. They have to find a way to save him that doesn’t involve violence.”
From start to finish, it took Peabody and Soriani about a year to put together the first comic, using email and Skype to communicate their ideas back and forth.
“She’s nine hours ahead, so I have a three-hour window in the morning to directly communicate with Manuela,” he said. “Other than that, everything has been wonderful. Her artwork is so amazing that it’s really fun for me to watch another person interpret what’s in my head, because I’m not an artist.”
The process of creating the comic book entailed writing detailed descriptions of each character, the plot and settings and then putting it all together in the form of a script, much like one for a film. Peabody said he had to learn this part from scratch.
“You really have to think, ‘What’s the most important thing you want to say?’ You really have to fine tune what’s important and then you have to figure out how many of those things you can fit in a comic book,” he said.
After he communicated his vision to Soriani, she sent him three different drafts using Adobe Photoshop and a drawing tablet and solicited his input each step of the way.
The first comic is 44 pages, but subsequent books will be 23 pages, the standard size for comic books, Peabody said. He plans on making the series ongoing for years.
“My goal is to get a graphic novel which will be about 150 pages,” he said. “That will tell the first story arc where he goes to hell and gets rescued.”
For now, he is self-publishing the books and selling them at conventions and online. To get a copy of the first comic book, visit the young adult section at the Los Gatos Public Library and Saratoga Library.
The son of Waltonsmith, who served as Saratoga’s mayor in 2003 and 2007 and is now chairwoman of the Hakone Foundation, Peabody was raised in Washington, D.C., but spent many years in Saratoga visiting his mother and grandparents and briefly living there in the early 1990s. Today he lives in Palo Alto, and when he’s not teaching, he tutors and mentors high school kids in the College Track program, an after-school college readiness program that was cofounded by Steve Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell.
For information about purchasing Peabody’s book, visit boylord.com or email the author atdr.boylord@gmail.com.
