Published on December 9th, 2015 | by Richard Boom
AZURE — creator-owned one-shot by Pat Shand & Nei Ruffino
Azure is a creator-owned one-shot comic, written by Pat Shand (Robyn Hood, Charmed: Season Ten) and created/illustrated by Nei Ruffino (Red Sonja, The Secret Life of Crows, Star Wars covers with J. Scott Campbell, etc etc).
Azure be released through the convention circuit and online.
Azure is about the physical weight of depression. How the flickering, golden moments of a day can make you feel like you’re flying, and how the darkness can manifest into a nightmarish monster.
As Pat Shand says: “Azure was conceived by Nei, who was inspired by dreams, music, and her life. We’d wanted to work on something together — something different, something new, something that she wrote was a “story beyond a story” — and this was the result. I listened to a lot of Rilo Kiley while we worked on this. I was dealing with the devastation that was settling in after ending my engagement. I was watching Nei live stream her art a lot, and finding inspiration in her process. I wanted to sort of take down (or at least look through) the veil of where writer/artist separate, especially in my work which was then and is now mostly work-for-hire rather than creator-owned. ”
But besides all that, at its most basic, Azure is about a girl flying through the clouds and coming home.