Dark Phantasy began in 1997 as a series of idle doodles in Dustin Wilson’s school notebook and has since grown into a full-color online manga produced by three people. Now, as well as a work of fiction, Dark Phantasy is a work of passion, a tangible expression of our love for sequential art and storytelling.
Dustin Wilson was a freshman attending West Monroe High School in West Monroe, Louisiana when he first conceived the kernel of Dark Phantasy. The original idea was for a console-style role-playing game on a personal computer, and a manga. Having plenty of free time as a high school student, he spent his time improving his drawing skills and searching around the infant World Wide Web in search of a way to produce his RPG on his computer. He stumbled upon an RPG engine called VERGE.
The original version of VERGE was a simple RPG development engine without many capabilities—or indeed much promise—though a second version was released while development began on Dark Phantasy. The second iteration was significantly better, but made development too difficult to justify its use. Consequently many people on separate projects collaborating on each others’ games to try and decypher the new engine and make their games. It was during this time that Dustin met Niko Geyer, the artist for Fantasy Realms, and Jeff King, who now works on Dark Phantasy. Both projects’ histories are intertwined due to our cooperation throughout the years, though said cooperation was not to last. Ultimately VERGE 2 proved simply too difficult to work with and too limited.
Sphere was originally an RPG development engine programmed by Chad Austin. The engine allowed for 32-bit graphics and was considerably easier to use than VERGE, but development using this engine did not last long. We all grew tired of trying to develop games we knew never see fruition, so Fantasy Realms and Dark Phantasy both became mangas. This shift was in the end quite natural, as both teams had previously been producing large-scale illustrations to insert into their games for dramatic effect.
Dustin had always had a fascination with comic books since he was a child, reading American titles such as Uncanny X-Men and X-Men and Japanese titles such as Akira and Rurouni Kenshin. Comics have always been reserved as a childhood’s pasttime in America, but in Japan they are a mainstream reading media encompassing various genres, sometimes published as graphic novels—comics the size of novels. Thanks to recent advancements in communications technology and graphics software, publishing one’s own comic on the World Wide Web is increasingly easy—even more so for the technically-savvy. Dustin took up the challenge: Dark Phantasy is the result.
Jeff King — who started helping Dustin with writing the RPG while working on Fantasy Realms — began writing the manga. He coaxed a friend of his, Seung Park, into tackling the backstory and history of the world the manga takes place in. Together they steered the story in a completely different direction, improving upon its skeletal beginnings dramatically.
Dark Phantasy is produced in our free time; progress is slow, but we proceed with as much care and attention to quality as we can muster. This has become more than simply an attempt to improve the quality of Western comics, but instead a vehicle through which the three developers of the manga can improve upon their individual skills while doing something they enjoy. Pages will never be redone, nor will they be rushed: the evolution of our abilities is a necessary component of this manga, and to either hurry the process along to meet a deadline or go back and change something would be both dishonest and counterproductive.
