About Armageddonquest (or, What the Heck is Armageddonquest?!?)

About Armageddonquest (or, What the Heck is Armageddonquest?!?) | Armageddonquest

About

ARMAGEDDONQUEST is the story of Tazio, the good-guy Antichrist, destined to become that infamous Beast of the Book of Revelations. That’s right, yet another version of the Apocalypse, that well-worn dramatic showdown between Good and Evil at the End of the World, angels and Armageddonquest Cover devils battling it out, Christ as the Divine Warrior come to kill all the sinners (and probably you too!). It’s an often used theme, and why not? It’s a fun concept.

Some of you might have met Tazio before, I self-published the earliest chapters (Books) of AQ on a small scale, photocopies folded and stapled, mostly just to give to friends. AQ was published for real by Starhead Comics in Seattle, but only the first 4 chapters ever made it to print. I received fan mail from several readers who liked the start and were waiting for the rest of the story. Finally one of those letters was from a publisher, Sirius Entertainment in New Jersey, and the 20 Book 850-page entirety of AQ was published as a trilogy.

AQ was first conceived of as a novel, ended up becoming a comic book, and became so long and complex that it is once again a novel. It started out as a collection of Tazio short stories with a cast of characters I couldn’t quite visualize until I began to draw them, and as drawings they came alive, took off, took over, and kept me chasing the ending for 9 years, until more than 800 pages containing over 6000 drawings finally told the tale.

The drawing and lettering in the earlier books are pretty casual since I never really intended to go pro with it, it was just a hobby, so the first 8 books were drawn on typing paper. After I started getting positive feedback and an offer of publication from Michael Dowers of Starhead Comics in 1994, I switched to a larger format and began to use proper tools. The last 12 books look much better. Of course, the whole thing could be more polished if I took time to redraw and color it all by computer, but that would take me about 8 hours per page, and I just never had that much extra time. AQ is what it is: shaman folk art.

There are some people I want to thank for help along the way: like my friend Michael Dowers, who dedicated a lot of personal time and money to produce those Starhead issues; Jon Strongbow, who backed Michael up because he believed in AQ as art; Italian fan Graziano Montanini, who sent pages of Italian corrections: Robb Horan at Sirius Entertainment, who saw the Starhead issues and had a Revelation; Joe Michael Linsner, who offered to do the trilogy covers so that AQ would sell this time; and now my new buddy Dave Baxter, who got my attention by writing the most flattering review of AQ I’ve ever read. Dave must have believed his own hype, because now he’s running this “armageddonquest.com” website.

And there is one person to whom I am most grateful, one who helped me the most of all, believed in AQ–or rather, in me–who has worked beside me, correcting flaws and generating ideas, offering genuinely useful criticism, who allowed me time to draw, and provided the magic of a muse. She’s part of these pages too.

So I dedicate this book to my wife, that beautiful, smart, loveable Dane: Marianne Vibeke Jørgensen.