Crafting a 304-page graphic novel isn't easy. Conceiving, researching, writing, and illustrating The Golden Vine was an intricate and all-consuming undertaking, lasting nearly five years. Here are some of the steps it took to bring our alternate history to life.

Author Jai Sen is having a bout of insomnia in his New York apartment, channel surfing late at night. He happens to tune in to a cable-access broadcast of late mythologist Joseph Campbell's lectures at the City College of New York, on the similarities of hero myths between cultures.

Campbell mentions Alexander the Great, referring to Alexander's time in India as the first real philosophical collision between East and West (he specifically describes an incident that Alexander witnessed in which an Indian sage immolated himself, and speculates as to what Alexander and his men must have thought of such a thing).

Wheels start turning and Sen wonders how other cultural encounters might have transformed Alexander and influenced the outcome of history. Several books and hours of Internet surfing later, the character of Alexander begins to come through. All the sources agree: Alexander could have conquered the world. Puzzlingly, no one seems to have thought of the shape his united empire might take or what it would mean to human society, only how Alexander might have pulled it off.

Sen begins to research Alexander in earnest, availing himself to every book he can find on the subject and consulting a Macedonian friend about the concept. The sources conflict on many points, and Sen learns that the most trusted source of information about Alexander was written three hundred years after the conqueror's death, and many posthumous revisions of the facts took place. This only deepens the mystery and adds to the enjoyment of conceiving an alternate history.

Sen uses Mary Renault's The Nature of Alexander (and her fictional Alexander trilogy, Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games), Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon, and Robin Lane Fox's The Search for Alexander as his primary sources.

This material is supplemented by various other historical and fictional works, books ordered from the Iran Society, thousands of web images, Renaissance paintings, and even a coin from Alexander's reign.

After he creates a rough outline of what Alexander's "alternate" route may have been, Sen does some research on world cultures of Alexander's time. He then outlines Alexander's early life and determines (with the help of historians) that the destruction of Persepolis is considered a turning point in Alexander's campaigns, the point at which things started to spiral out of control.

It's a quick jump for Sen, who by this time has a fairly good gauge of Alexander's personality, to figure out what might have prevented Alexander's downfall.

Sen also catches passing references in Renault's The Nature of Alexander and Green's Alexander of Macedon to Alexander IV, Alexander's mysterious half-Persian heir born after Alexander's death and murdered at the age of 13 by rivals to the throne. Alexander IV proves to be the perfect character to send on a quest for answers about his enigmatic father.

The Golden Vine becomes a chronicle of the prince's quest to understand his father's secret legacy, and learn the means by which Alexander discovered and united all the cultures of the world into a complete empire. It also becomes a story of how a unified world might contain unexpected dangers.

To maintain the strength of the prince's character and mitigate his father's strong personality, Sen decides that Alexander will appear in the story only by means of letters re-read after his death and through Hephaestion's recollections.

Sen writes a synopsis.

With the synopsis in hand and most of the plot set down, Sen begins his own quest for artists in New York. Some initial contacts receive the project with a little humor, wondering why a (so far) unpublished writer wants to start with such an ambitious project.

At the same time, Sen, who has been a fan of Japanese animation since "Akira," wonders about the possibility of using a team of Japanese artists for the project. He makes the decision to relocate to Tokyo, and begins a comprehensive search.

Initially, there are few leads. The second and third months prove to be more fruitful, and Sen gets a number of interested inquiries regarding the project. He begins to review portfolios of prospective artists.

Then a fax arrives from Professor Itoi, the head of the comics illustration program at Tokyo's Chiyoda Gakuen, a top animation, design, and illustration school. Professor Itoi arranges a meeting with Sen and two other Chiyoda professors (Professors Tsukamoto and Tanaka), who reveal that they keep portfolios of all their graduates for just such occasions, and a fresh round of portfolio reviews is begun. Ten artists are chosen from the 100+ work samples presented by the professors.

Of these, Sen selects the portfolios of illustrator Seijuro Mizu, animator Umeka Asayuki, and manga artist Shino Yotsumoto. The perfect team is in place at last. The search process has lasted a total of five months.

Meanwhile, to hone his writing skills, Sen writes Garlands of Moonlight (Shoto Press, May 2002), a long-intended novelization of a Malay folktale he heard about while living in Indonesia. His search for the appropriate illustrator leads him to the Jakarta-based ArtSpot, a group of comics artists of which Garlands illustrator Rizky Wasisto Edi is a member.

Professors Itoi, Tsukamoto, and Tanaka continue to guide the process and help to develop a schedule for the project. It is decided that the first month will be reserved for concept development, visual research reviews, and story meetings to ensure that all three primary artists understand the material and have adequate time to undertake character designs.

During this time, Sen holds intensive meetings with the artists to discuss the story, characters, time period, and all the visual research. The artists continually surprise him with the depth of their understanding and interest in the material, and their general aptitude for the project. A number of character and location drawings for each visual style are executed, and characters and locations that overlap between visual styles are carefully worked out.

Concept development also sees a period of intense research and discussion about several long-vanished cities. Chief among these is Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Persian Empire destroyed by the historical Alexander and the primary setting for the story of Alexander IV in The Golden Vine. Sen is delighted as the artists embark on a number of independent research projects, supplementing his historical and visual research with material from Japanese sources.

Meanwhile, Sen puts the finishing touches on the plot and provides the artists with a translated scene guide coded by visual style, which breaks down the action and designates a page count for each scene of the story. A script format (a hybrid of American and Japanese comics script formats, with a few new innovations specifically for The Golden Vine) is agreed upon, and Sen begins to write the scripts for the story, delivering them to a translator scene by scene. A project web site is put in place for easy transfer of scripts and visual research to the artists.

(In the midst of concept development for The Golden Vine, Sen is stunned to receive a Xeric award for Garlands of Moonlight, which garners a number of favorable reviews.)

Now that the work has begun, it proceeds in an orderly fashion. The steps for creating each scene are as follows:

1. Sen writes a script, which is handed off for translation. Dialogue and captions are written to fully convey the characters' intent and so that translation is clearer; both will be edited and rewritten for style and length during the layout process. The translated script is posted on the project web site for the artists to download.
   
   
2. The artist does a rough layout sketch of the page, blocking out panels and character positions. Sketches are either given to Sen to review at story meetings or sent by fax. The layout sketch is reviewed at the following story meeting. Since Japanese comics read back-to-front, all the layouts are the reverse of what they will look like in the final book, to be flipped later on in the process.
   
   
3. The sketch is refined to include background elements, approximate positions for speech and captions, and incorporates whatever revisions have been requested. This pencil sketch is reviewed.
   
   
4. Once the pencil sketch is approved, the final artwork is executed.
   
   
5. The final artwork is uploaded to the project web site for the colorists to download, along with a coloring guide. The three primary artists all used different methods of specifying color; a primary colorist from ArtSpot was assigned to each artist.
   
   
6. A colored version of the page is uploaded to the project web site for Sen's review.
   
   

Once colored pages are available, layout on the book can begin. Shoto Press designers use Adobe software (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign) to compose and letter the pages. Sen rewrites captions and dialogue as the pages go through layout.

Finally, digital files are sent to the printer, who is located in India. Physical books are delivered to Shoto Press headquarters in upstate New York, ready for pre-orders.