Omaha Perez has worked on some small press projects in the mid nineties with writers like Robert Hunter and Richard Hell, but has been silent of late. This year sees an end to that silence, with the release of his self published graphic novel BODHISATTVA.

The story has its origin in a picture Perez drew years ago of a many-eyed man, and after a friend told him the story of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, the story began to fall into place. Perez is also writing, drawing and publishing an anthology book titled PERIPHERY, which will debut this summer.

Discussing his recent absence from the small press scene, he explains, "The publishing gap was mostly about working full time and letting that sidetrack me. I'm not planning on letting it happen again, but then I was focusing more on my day job."

It was also about Perez having an idea, but being nervous about not having written before, which he attributes to a combination of laziness and insecurity. "I had this raw idea and I just didn't sit down and try to develop it myself. I knew some good writers and tried to talk them into developing it for me. They had some interest but they said you know what you want to do, what do you need me for?"

In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a being who has earned the right to enter Nirvana, but stays behind to help all creatures achieve enlightenment. In Perez's graphic novel, he posits that thousands of years ago a group of religious mendicants were visited by Hindu deities who transformed them. Two of those men resurface in present day San Francisco, where they interact with a number of people including a mental patient, an orderly, and a hospitalised man dealing with guilt over the death of his wife.

It's a complex story that tries to be realistic and mythic at the same time, and Perez is apologetic for being unable to really explain his intentions with the story and its structure, explaining that he has trouble verbalizing what's in the book.

"Part of my insecurity about the project led me to draw it without a full script. I thought it would be less work to just script it out once the pages were drawn, but in the end I had to add pages and change things. I learned that I never want to work without a full script again. I went to Richard Raleigh to polish the script in the end because he's an expert on Eastern mythology and religion, so he could fix a couple errors as far as names and a few inconsistencies."

Perez may have taken a few years off from making comics, but he's always been making them. "The first thing I had published was PREY FOR US SINNERS, which I had done in my free time when I was in school. At the time I really had more a plan of being a freelance illustrator and doing comics when I could, not monthly superhero books but the ones that interested me. I went through an illustration program and sadly as I was going through the program I saw that the industry was dying. A lot of my teachers were big in the seventies and eighties and the things that were true for them had changed because the marketplace is much tougher and there's a greater use of stock illustrations.

"I scraped by in my first year trying to do only illustrations and comics, but the money was really dismal. I ran into a guy at a comics convention who was a part of Alan Spiegel's group. He was working at Disney Interactive in LA and he invited me to submit some stuff. Off and on since 1995, I've been on staff somewhere except for some gaps of freelancing full time, but it's tough to turn down a good paying job."

One of his first comics projects was such a vicious experience, it made Perez never want to work on another anthology. "SHOCK THE MONKEY was the worst. Millennium Publications promised us a page rate and I was putting it together and it sank without a trace. The publisher didn't pay most of us including myself and I still feel bad that people I'd gotten involved weren't paid even though it wasn't my fault.

"RAW PERIPHERY was completely different. I was really proud that it looks like all the stories are illustrated by different people, but there was only one other artist beside myself. I don't really know if that's a good thing or bad thing. The other story was an excerpt of a project that Ann Nocenti and James Romberger developed for Vertigo and they were hoping to use the excerpt to shop it around.

"After art school I moved to New York City, and while I was there I tried to track down Richard Hell because he was one of my punk heroes. Still is. I sent him the first comic I did, PREY FOR US SINNERS, and a note saying that I would really like to illustrate something of his, and the next week I got a phone call. He ended up giving me a piece called 'Dear Reader', a free verse poem he did in the seventies. The Robert Hunter piece was one I came up with that he added lyrics over, and it worked really well. It was about the many eyed man, and was the genesis of BODHISATTVA."

Perez admits that self-publishing has downsides, foremost that it's his own money he's gambling with, but he prefers owning his own work, even though producing BODHISATTVA required some sacrifices from the start.

"When I started on it, I was working full time and I stopped doing freelance illustration because it was hard enough to work full time, and I decided to spend that time just doing my comic. At the time I had the idea of it being 3-4 issues and would do the first one or two and send to publishers, but it took me so long to do it that I didn't want to send it out and then be unable to finish it in a timely manner. So by the time I finished it, it was a year and a half later because I was working nine to five, which is really more like nine to nine in the industry.

"I finally finished and there was some interest from a few publishers, but in the end they all came back with verdict that they didn't think they could sell it, but I told myself that one way or another I was going to get it out. The internet has made things so much easier. The stuff I did in the nineties came and went because they were for small publishers without much marketing and as a recently graduated art student I didn't know about any of that so I couldn't help bring attention [to the books]."

Perez has a plateful of future projects, starting with the upcoming anthology book PERIPHERY. "Back when I working on anthologies, I always wanted to make a book that would be more for a general audience that has different writers but with mostly my own artwork.

"Steve Niles has two stories, a great vampire story he did with Brian Horton, which is some of Brian's best comic work, and a sci-fi comic that I drew. There's a story by Eli 5 Stone who took over The Tick when Ben Edlund left. We're previewing CENOZOIC by Mark Fearing who's a great cartoonist.

"If I'm known for anything it's for BODHISATTVA, but hopefully [PERIPHERY] will help and get out to places and people more than a graphic novel can, and $3.50 for a forty-eight-page book is reasonably cheap. I don't have a set schedule, but I'd like to do it several times a year and just solicit the book when it's complete."

If that weren't enough, Perez has already scripted his next big project, HOLMES, an irreverent take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is previewed in the back of BODHISATTVA. "It was planned to be finished this year, but that's looking unlikely. Things are moving at a snail's pace. My wife and I had a baby a few ago, so I'm going to serialize it a chapter at a time rather than wait to have to get it out."

Omaha Perez' website is at http://www.o-p-p.ws/.

Alex Dueben is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

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