Tommy Lee Edwards Talks New Game And Comic Atmos: Exordium

Creating New Worlds

Tommy Lee Edwards is a comic artist and illustrator who has also worked in film and games. His latest project for Atmos is a shared universe that crosses into comics and video games. Here he filled us in on his involvement in it…

“I was considering slowing down. I was working on the Jupiter’s Legacy project with Mark Millar and while I was working on that I was getting really burnt out. I really liked working on that stuff but especially like about a year ago when John Paul Leon passed away, it really hit me hard. Then with the previous couple of years with the pandemic as well, I was having a hard time working by myself in the studio anymore. So that ultimately led to me doing this stuff with these people at Atmos,” Lee Edwards explained to us when we spoke to him via Zoom recently.

The genesis of the series came about because a number of other projects that Edwards was working on came to an early stop, he revealed.

“It was funny because I was considering doing more collaborative stuff like that series I did with Edgar Wright called Brandon Generator. These are my favourite kinds of projects especially the older I get, the more experience I have and the more I enjoy working with others. I had sold a show to Fox that I created and I also wrote and directed the pilot of an animated show. But we didn’t go into series. So there was that and another animated series that I sold to google and they were going to do that on their short-lived YouTube premium google channel and that died too. Then when Covid hit, I was working as a production designer for a movie for Kerry Conran, who directed that movie Sky Captain. Then that got shut down and that was the stuff that led to me doing Jupiter’s Legacy.”

Edwards was going to wrap up working on creative projects and focus on his other interests:

“This is not what I wanted to be doing but I have been spending a lot of time on the weekends working at the garage on cars. So over the past five years, I have been into that. Part of it is that I love going and being with that group of guys every weekend and having that outlet of working together on either a group project or helping each other on our own project. So I was going to quit doing Jupiter’s Legacy and focus on doing covers and small things like commissions and work at the garage. Honestly I was so burnt out and then Dylan Bushnell, who’s the game designer  at Atmos, had contacted me about the project. At first since I get emails like that from people I don’t know fairly often wanting to do something,  I wasn’t sure. I thought:’I don’t know this guy’. So I was immediately standoffish but he was very persistent. He started to tell me about this thing that he and a few other people wanted to do that were all very creative, that they wanted to make a game but also a comic and also a whole online experience. This was stuff that we’ve all heard before in different ways. But especially as I didn’t want to do another comic so I didn’t know.”

However the artist changed his mind the more he thought about it and once he spoke to them, he admitted:

“It seemed like they really needed something for someone to take all the things they wanted to do and unify them. And the other part of it was that I’d be able to put together a team of people I knew who could deliver so I liked the idea that the comic wasn’t just an adaptation of the game. They all relied on each other so it’s a really interesting project where we’re doing all of it simultaneously where even though they’re all different mediums, they’re all influencing each other which I thought that was super cool. So we’re doing animation, we’re making our first playable demo of the game now which is a racing game. But there’s going to be lots of different games and it’s a very broad landscape and hopefully eventually there’s going to be tons of stuff in this whole online experience. You’ll also have the comics and all these other things that support it. So the comics are a way to help build the lore,” Edwards revealed sounding genuinely excited.

Currently the comics material is just online but there are plans to bring them to print as well, he tells us, albeit in the early stages.

“Right now there’s three different versions of the comic planned or three different mediums for the comic. One of them is the Digital collectors version which is the NFT kind of thing where there’s only 2500 of those and those sold out within the weekend when we released it. Then there’s the comixology standard digital version that we can all look at on our kindle or whatever reader we like to use and that came out on Monday 17 October.Then my thoughts are that this is a nine issue series altogether so the thing to do is that we are talking with a couple of different publishers about a publisher rather than self publishing. We are looking at teaming up with people I have worked with in the past either IDW, Dark Horse or one of those kinds of places. The plan is  to publish a 64 or 96 page collection, somewhere around that length, that could be the print versions. We could include a lot of making of stuff in there because we have so much of it as we’re designing the characters, the ships, the costumes and the planet too.”

Edwards has gathered quite an impressive team to put this together, he tells us as we wrap up our chat, with each artist bringing something unique to the table:

“It’s me and a whole team so there are some people I am lucky enough to work with. There was a handful of people here already who had had been designing these exo suits. I posted an animated video on Facebook last month, which was something that we made to promote the series and the comic which is called Atmos Exordium. We would actually like to do lots of different comics. So with the comic, the game and the animation it’s more about me putting together a team and working with Dylan and Kevin [Beauregard] who’s our CEO. Kevin’s gone out and been the leader on raising the money and getting people interested in it. He’s got a sports background: He was a professional hockey player and then he was an engineer for Hulu. So we all come from different places but we’re all really into sci-fi and comics and games. I have been figuring out how best to build a team so let’s say that there’s a lot of space ships that need to be made or gear, so my old friend John Van Fleet is building loads of 3D stuff that’s not only in the game but also in the comic and everything else. The comic is being drawn by Andrea Cucchi who’s an Italian artist who I met through Matteo Scalera and when Matteo recommends someone I know: “Okay, I’d better take it seriously’’ so I went and got to know Andrea a bit and his work is awesome. Also Andrea was really familiar with my work and since I knew that I wanted to art direct the comic as I can’t do everything myself obviously, since we’re all so spread out, I wanted to curate and lead the team with us all working together to deliver all of these things. We’ve got Andrea, and Giovanna Nero on the colour. She coloured a bit of my Grendel Kentucky series and that was the first time I’d used another colourist on my work besides myself since Melissa a million years ago. Of course John Workman lettered it too. But on the conceptual side beyond John Van Fleet, we have David Lafuente on board so he’s designing everything from technology to costumes and right now he’s designing how thrusters look. So with the stuff that David and I work on, once we’ve designed it, it then moves onto the 3D department. It’s a racing game and our first game is called EXO GP so everyone wears these Exo suits. So we designed the suits and part of it is that all the suits have been built and made in 3D. There’s several different kinds of suits and each suit is made of completely modular pieces like the helmets, the gauntlets and the jetpack. All of these things are completely modular so that the people who play the game get to own all these things and customise them. Even all the pieces on the pieces are modular. So I could take this part off helmet A and combine it with helmet J and the possibilities are almost endless. We have more of that coming. The way that we are building the world is very much like a real place so we figure out who made these suits and why are they here. There’s a whole backstory and that’s basically how Dylan and Kevin got me on board was because they had thought about all of this backstory stuff and I love all of that world building.”

Atmos Exordium is out now

visit them online

https://atmos.xyz/exordium/