Oculama

With the introduction of Death Matches in the Comics Wizard as well as the conclusion of The Black Diamond, now seems like an excellent time for us to give a small retrospective on the tournament itself. The Black Diamond of 2023 was very successful, having produced some very strong comics and opened up Oculama's first full year with a bang. All participants came out strong, but only one took the crown in the end - The Null Haunt by Molo.  We were curious what Molo had done that helped them stand out and if any lessons they had learned could be imparted to the community as a whole. To that end, we at Oculama decided to pull back the curtain some on the Black Diamond as well as its winner. We caught up with Molo and shot a few questions their way, so that we could better understand the process they took to achieve victory.

Tell us about yourself! How long have you been doing comics? How'd your comic history lead you to Oculama?

I have been doing comics in some form or another for close to (or maybe more than) 30 years! I'm old! But I really only started taking comics "seriously" and producing a lot of them around 2018. Which coincidentally is around when I joined my first OCT, the Kill Six Billion Demons Ring of Power. I had such great fun doing that and made so many cool friends, it really kickstarted my drive to do more comics. Then I of course joined the infamous War for Rayuba after that, which was an even crazier time with even more good memories and new friends. I did a comic every round save the last one, had more deathmatch kills than any other artist, and had the profound honor of participating in the final team clash. So when I heard through the grapevine about Oculama, I signed up right away!

Who is the Null Haunt? Is this a new creation, or a character you’ve had for a while?

I came up with The Null Haunt specifically for Oculama, and more specifically for the Black Diamond Death Tournament, because I LOVE deathmatches most of all. And so I wanted to do a character geared for that type of match. Naturally, a cross between Jason Voorhees and the Predator immediately came to mind. A pure slasher villain! I looked through the Scholarly Lore posts and the existing Oculama comics, because I wanted some sort of hook into the broader universe that was already slowly being established by all the wonderful and creative artists here. The idea of the Null Space, the emptiness that separates the shards of the multiverse, was a perfect black hole from whence such a shadowy evil killer could be spawned.

The Black Diamond Death tourney had a tight deadline! Share with us how you managed your workload? Any advice?

The deadline was as BRUTAL as the stakes! My process as I went along was fairly consistent - I gave myself only a day or two to complete the script and the layouts. I knew I would need the maximum time to devote to the drawings. When scripting for this tourney I started with the end - it's a death tournament, so a satisfying KILL is paramount! Then I worked backwards to produce the absolute MINIMUM amount of story beats, depicted in the simplest possible way, to make sure the audience understands, believes, and enjoys that final moment of my opponent's OC. And I always make sure to show my opponent's OC Doing Their Thing - OCTs are like pro-wrestling. No one likes a one-sided match! You have to give the shine to your opponent, let them get their stuff in on your OC. Finding a style of 'finished' page that looks good but doesn't take too long was also key. And working diligently in stages: layouts, then all pencils, all inks, all finishing touches, so at any moment in case of emergency I could upload the complete story in some form or another. I was extremely fortunate for the entire tourney to NOT have any major life emergencies, and I was even blessed in round 1 with a week long ice storm that kept me entirely homebound with no day job for the full run so really I put in a solid week of ~14 hour days on that one (sorry Camel!)

Did you go into the Black Diamond Tournament with a gameplan, or just rolled with the punches?

I try not to have too much of a gameplan - my experience in RoP (Ring of Power) and W4R (War for Rayuba) taught me that you never can predict who your opponent is, or where their story might have gone when you do finally meet them! For example any plan I made for Bliss would have had to change to adapt to how her story was going at any given round where we matched up. Part of my plan with the Null Haunt was knowing that I could always tell a basic Predator/Jason type horror slasher story with it. Both myself and audiences are well familiar with those tropes, so they are fairly easy to adapt to any scenario. I got thrown some curveballs with characters like the Starspawned Mimic though!

Any experiments or edits you decided to scrap?

For the most part, there just wasn't time to experiment with multiple scripts - I very often went with my first ideas and just committed to them. For the Queen of Hurts, It was almost set in a prison rather than a convent. Tembel's story was an exception: I actually did complete layouts for an alternate story that I ended up scrapping in favor of what I submitted. The original Tembel story was about Tembel guarding a character called The Aristocrat, who was a rich scumbag who used his wealth to hide from the Null Haunt, who was after him. He sacrificed people like pawns, and Tembel was forced to be his guardian angel. Chirp and Charlie were recruited to serve on The Aristocrats anti-Null Haunt ship (and be human shields in the end of course). The finale was much the same with Tembel sacrificing himself and The Aristocrat to save Chirp and Charlie and be rewarded with a spot in Super Heaven. It was way too long! My friend Plaid helped me come up with the alternate story of finding Chirp and Charlie at the Last Place in the Universe, hiding from the Null Haunt themselves. I also very briefly toyed with the idea of a character called The Null Hunter, someone who was specifically empowered by Junction to hunt down the Null Haunt once and for all! Perhaps such a character will show up eventually... The Null Haunt is still out there somewhere...

To find out more about Molo, check out https://emfieldsart.com/  and Twitter @EMFields_Art