Legends of Welkin

He kept drawing Thamro for years — all the way through college — chasing a dream of drawing for Marvel Comics. He never actually submitted anything. He knew, even as his art kept improving through his twenties, that it wasn't Marvel-level yet; he'd been around people who were good enough, and he wasn't one of them. Life pulled him toward music and audio production instead, and Thamro sat untouched for years while Omar built real expertise in writing and recording.

The character resurfaced after Omar and longtime collaborator Ski-ter Jones finished GodMode, the first J. Spade Chronicles novel — a book whose sales didn't match what the two of them had hoped for. Looking for a way to build an audience, Omar took advice from indie author Blake Northcott: give away something you wouldn't mind giving away for free. Thamro, still sitting dormant since high school, was the obvious answer. Omar updated the character to work for a 2015 audience while keeping what made him him, and launched Thamro as an audio drama podcast — "a comic book for your ears," years before the format caught on widely. He was, by his own estimate, about five years too early.

The series grew out of the same kind of world-building Omar had been doing for years at the Dungeons & Dragons table, using voice actors he already worked with and characters whose voices and motivations he already knew cold. When it came time to turn those stories into books — using the same process that produced GodMode — Ski-ter Jones pushed for a bigger name than just the hero's. Welkin was already the name of the realm Omar had built these stories around; Ski-ter's instinct was that a title built around the world, not just one character, would tell readers instantly this was fantasy. Legends of Welkin was born. As Omar puts it, Ski-ter is the Bill Finger to his Bob Kane — the ideas were his, but Ski-ter is the one who made it all click.