Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk

Graphic Novel · Writing · Sequential Art · Character Design · Visual Development

Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk is an original graphic novel that brings mythological adventure into a contemporary world of monsters, heroes, and unexpected consequences. I developed the project from the initial story concept through writing, character and creature design, visual development, sequential art, and final publication.

At the center of the story is Suzy Samson, a modern descendant of the biblical strongman whose extraordinary strength places her within a much larger world of mythology. The graphic novel draws together figures and creatures from different traditions, including the Gorgon and the Basilisk, while building an original mythology around Suzy and her adventures.

The project became an important part of my development as both a writer and visual storyteller. Creating the book required me to move continually between story structure, character development, staging, drawing, and page design, using each part of the process to inform the others. Rather than treating writing and image-making as separate activities, I approached the graphic novel as an integrated form of visual storytelling in which character, composition, pacing, and sequential relationships all contribute to the narrative.

The Gorgon and the Basilisk was ultimately completed and published as a full-length graphic novel, while Suzy’s world has continued to develop through new stories, characters, and visual exploration.

Finding Suzy Samson

Suzy Samson began during a period when I was rebuilding both my personal life and my creative practice. Following my divorce, I returned to making comics and writing my own stories, work I had gradually pushed aside during my marriage. That return to visual storytelling became an important part of rediscovering who I was as an artist, and Suzy was the character who helped me begin writing for myself again.

My earliest conception of Suzy drew heavily from the larger-than-life heroines I remembered from childhood, particularly Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman. Initially, I imagined her within a much more overtly mythological framework: the daughter of Samson and Hippolyta, connecting Biblical and Greek mythology and placing her within a long lineage of legendary heroes. I developed stories involving monsters, superhuman threats, and generations of extraordinary figures while searching for the world that Suzy belonged in.

Over time, however, I became more interested in the woman underneath the lion skin. I had already spent years creating historical and period-based work, and I wanted Suzy to live in the present. More importantly, I wanted to explore something I understood personally: reaching middle age and realizing that the ambitions and creative desires you once set aside were not youthful indulgences you had outgrown. They were fundamental parts of who you were.

That realization transformed Suzy. Rather than an immortal heroine moving through history, she became a middle-aged woman confronting divorce, family, aging, disappointment, and the complicated process of rediscovering a part of herself she believed she had left behind. The superhero mythology remained, but it became a way of externalizing a much more personal story about identity, resilience, and beginning again.

The character continued to evolve through sketches, webcomics, story experiments, character designs, and several attempts at longer-form narratives. Some characters and situations survived into Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk; others changed substantially or disappeared altogether. That extended development process ultimately helped me understand that Suzy’s real story was not simply about becoming a hero again. It was about becoming Suzy again.

Building the Cast and World

As Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk developed into a full-length graphic novel, the story expanded beyond Suzy into an ensemble of family members, friends, investigators, adversaries, and mythological characters. Designing that cast became part of defining the larger world of the book. I wanted the contemporary characters to feel grounded and recognizable while allowing the fantastic elements to exist naturally alongside them.

Character development focused not only on appearance, but on relationships, personality, scale, and the practical demands of drawing the same characters repeatedly across a long-form narrative. Suzy’s family and supporting cast were developed as an ensemble, while characters such as Lilith required translating mythological ideas into the contemporary visual language of the story. My brother Jeremy Summey developed the turnaround for Lilith’s Gorgon form, which I then interpreted within the drawing style established for the graphic novel.

That same attention to continuity extended to the environments. I constructed a twelve-block section of the fictional city of Judea, Georgia, in SketchUp, assembling streets, sidewalks, buildings, vehicles, and major locations into a navigable three-dimensional environment. Additional models were created for recurring locations including Suzy’s apartment, Jane’s house, Abram’s dealership, and Hugh’s office.

These models were not intended as finished artwork. They functioned as spatial reference and previsualization tools, allowing me to explore camera placement, establish consistent geography and perspective, and return to locations from different viewpoints while drawing the finished pages. Building the world in three dimensions gave me the freedom to stage the story cinematically while maintaining continuity across a graphic novel of more than one hundred pages.

Developing the Story

The earliest Suzy Samson webcomics became a laboratory for discovering the larger story. Characters, locations, relationships, jokes, and pieces of mythology were introduced in short sequences that allowed me to test ideas without knowing exactly which ones would survive.

When I began developing The Gorgon and the Basilisk as a graphic novel, I returned to that material rather than simply adapting it. Some ideas carried forward almost intact. Others changed characters, context, or purpose. Sequences that had occupied only a few panels could expand when the story required more room, while material that no longer served the larger narrative could disappear altogether.

That process was particularly important in determining what Suzy Samson was actually about. The superhero mythology remained essential, but the longer form gave me room to place it alongside Suzy’s relationships, family, divorce, middle age, and the consequences of returning to a part of herself she had abandoned. The fantastic elements became increasingly intertwined with the emotional story rather than existing as a separate layer of superhero adventure.

For me, developing the graphic novel became an extended process of writing through drawing, testing an idea visually, living with it, revisiting it, and allowing the story to tell me what needed to remain and what needed to change.

From Layout to Finished Page

Each page of Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk moved through a structured process of staging, drawing, refinement, and color. For complex environments, I used the SketchUp models I had built as spatial reference, establishing camera position, perspective, and the placement of recurring architectural elements before drawing the characters into the scene.

The figures began as loose gestures over the modeled environment, allowing me to concentrate first on composition, action, and character performance. I then developed the page through finished pencils and inks before moving into color. The 3D environment provided a consistent spatial foundation, but the final composition, acting, anatomy, exaggeration, and visual emphasis were developed through drawing.

This process became especially useful in sequences that combined intimate character moments with supernatural action. In the page shown here, Suzy’s anger after Lilith’s death leaves her vulnerable to the Basilisk, transforming her into a Gorgon as it attempts to turn that anger toward Stu. Moving from spatial blocking through increasingly resolved drawing allowed me to build the transformation as both an action sequence and an emotional moment.

Across the 106-page story, this workflow gave me a practical way to manage the scale and continuity of a long-form graphic novel while keeping the emphasis on character, composition, and sequential storytelling.

Sequential Storytelling

A graphic novel is built not only from individual images, but from the relationship between images: how a reader moves through a page, where information is revealed, when a moment is allowed to linger, and when the composition accelerates the story.

Across Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk, I used changes in panel size, composition, pacing, character acting, and page structure to support very different kinds of storytelling. Large action sequences required clear staging and a strong sense of movement through space, while quieter scenes depended on gesture, expression, dialogue, and the relationships between characters. Humor created another kind of rhythm, with reactions and shifts in scale helping control the timing of a scene.

The transformation of Suzy into a Gorgon offered an opportunity to bring those approaches together. The sequence begins with an internal struggle as the Basilisk feeds upon Suzy’s anger over the collapse of her marriage. Her memories, emotions, and physical struggle become intertwined within the composition before carrying into the following page, where that emotional transformation becomes physical. The progression of panels slows the moment down before opening into the final transformed figure.

For me, this is at the center of sequential storytelling: designing the reader’s experience across panels and pages so that composition, pacing, acting, and page turns become part of the story itself.

Returning to the Laboratory: The Lost and the Mighty

Completing Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk did not end my interest in these characters or the world they inhabit. Instead, it gave me a body of work I could return to and reconsider. The Lost and the Mighty, a graphic novel currently in development, returns to Suzy and her family while shifting the focus toward questions of memory, representation, and the stories families tell about themselves.

The project grew through several attempts to find the right structure. Earlier versions explored some of the same characters and relationships through a more conventional continuation of Suzy’s story. Although that approach was ultimately set aside, portions of it helped identify the emotional material worth preserving. The relationship between Suzy’s parents, Ruth and Leo, for example, became a way to explore the complications of aging, caregiving, memory, and a heroic identity that cannot simply be left behind.

The current version expands those ideas into an investigation of the Samson family’s history. As Suzy examines the lives of the heroes who preceded her, the project moves through different generations and different periods of American popular culture. I am developing the flashbacks so that their visual language changes with the period being depicted, drawing upon the conventions, color, design, and storytelling vocabulary of comics from those eras. The goal is not simply to reproduce older styles, but to use those changing visual conventions to explore how heroes were represented, remembered, and understood by the cultures that created them.

For me, The Lost and the Mighty represents a return to the creative laboratory. Characters, pages, and even abandoned approaches become material for further experimentation. Rather than treating earlier decisions as fixed, I can revisit them, test new possibilities, and allow the project to evolve as both a story and an ongoing investigation into sequential art.

Storytelling as Creative Practice

Suzy Samson has never been a single finished object. It began as an idea, became a webcomic, grew into a graphic novel, and continues to develop through new stories, characters, and experiments. Each version has given me an opportunity to reconsider the work; not simply to redraw it, but to ask different questions about character, narrative, visual language, and the world surrounding them.

That process reflects how I think about creative practice. Storytelling is not separate from research; it is the method through which I investigate ideas. Writing, drawing, designing characters, constructing environments, staging sequences, and revisiting earlier material are all part of the same inquiry. Each decision leads to another question, and the work develops through making, evaluating, revising, and making again.

The long history of Suzy Samson has also allowed the project to change alongside me. Early promotional drawings, the completed graphic novel, and current work such as The Lost and the Mighty represent different moments in that development. Rather than treating those differences as inconsistencies to erase, I see them as evidence of an evolving practice—one in which earlier work can become material for new investigation.

Ultimately, the value of the project is not only the stories that result from it, but the sustained act of storytelling itself. Suzy Samson provides an ongoing laboratory for exploring how characters, images, and sequential narratives can carry ideas across time, and how returning to familiar material with new questions can lead somewhere unexpected.