On the verge of mental and physical collapse, a lone mercenary accepts one more mission and teams up with unlikely allies and an old enemy; but when his team has to combat global fascist forces, Karib must break from the role assigned to him by his...
The materials below contain some possible spoilers. Nothing about the current story and how it unfolds, but it presents some of the characters into their proto-forms, as they were imagined before I wrote Due South. You will also find visuals from when Karib was a comic book character.
All this information may influence your perception of the characters as the book's story unfolds and modify your overall reader experience.
You have been warned :)
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World and Characters creation
Karib's world-building dates back to the early 2000s when I was a comic book artist presenting various projects to French publishers. I had some success as a visual artist, and I was now trying to sell my solo projects: driving both the stories and the visuals.
As for anyone selling their creative production, it was a long sinuous road. During these couple of years, I presented different styles of stories and graphics. I made a lot of interesting connections and faced rejections ranging from silence, mean criticism and active support for improvement.
One character that came out of this endeavour was Karib.
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He was more of a projection of myself: urban, violent, lonely and handicapped. Karib did not have an origin story, except for the accident that made him handicapped. He was also defined by the communication medium: comic books.
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In parallel, I was searching for different artistic and narrative challenges, and the Karib stories were defined with these criteria:
1- Karib is deaf and does not speak.
2- The reader follows Karib's stream of consciousness (but not from other characters).
3- The reader also has access to what characters discuss around Karib, but he does not. The first story was completely from Karib's point of view; the next ones moved toward a semi-omniscient narration with the reader being invited to follow parallel actions from which Karib is absent.
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I eventually found the success I was looking for with another comic book: La Fille de L'Empereur (the Emperor's daughter). Once my childhood dream of being a recognised author was achieved, I closed my artistic activities to focus on the film industry and later on moved to my current corporate career.
Push forward to last year when I felt the urge to tell stories again. I initially looked into picking-up comic book creation again, but juggling between work and family life did not leave enough time for a satisfying rhythm of page creation—a single page will take an average of 9 hours to be drawn, and that is after the story writing part.
I was drawn back to the Karib stories and decided to move the narration into the purely written medium.
With more freedom of format—chapters vs pages, whole book vs 46 pages format and descriptions vs drawings— I could expand Karib's universe, navigate his past, and bring in new characters and new locations. I could take more time to bring a whole life into our protagonist.
The world around Karib is no longer the one from the comic book, and the written medium brings in new rules:
1- Karib is younger, he has not gone through the worst part of his life, and he is discovering himself during the stories.
2- The reader still follows Karib's stream of consciousness and has only access to his point of view.
3- Karib is not handicapped so the reader and he both share the knowledge of the information exchanged around him.
4- The action is in the present tense, except when the reader follows Karib's memories.
The characters are created from the same moulds but will not share the same events or evolution. The book and the comic book stories have become two alternative timelines from alternative universes that are not meant ever to cross paths.
