Ever since the release of Odoric “The Wall Of Doom” back in 1996, most of my free time has been absorbed entirely by painting CD-covers for Metal bands. But all that time Odoric kept wandering in the back of my head, yearning to return one day. My idea was to combine my two passions: illustration and music by creating a soundtrack for the next Odoric comic with the help of various metal musicians. Over the years there were a number of people who wanted to help me out with this project. Belgian bands The Darkening, Axamenta and Dagorlad showed interest to work on the soundtrack and even composed quite a few tracks. However, I never found enough time to complete the story entirely. 10 years went by and looking back at the first pages of the story, it became clear to me that my drawing style had changed too much to complete this book.

I had almost given up on Odoric entirely when I learned about the soundtrack compositions of Arkadius Antonik of Suidakra. I was absolutely amazed and inspired by his tracks and after having worked with Suidakra for more than a decade and even writing their concept stories and lyrics for the last three albums, I got the idea that this could be the ideal opportunity to bring back the Odoric soundtrack project.
I presented Arkadius with my thoughts and to my surprise he was very enthusiastic. He had even wanted to ask me about doing illustrations for his soundtrack compositions but was afraid that I would be too busy. But after 20 years of doing mainly CD-covers, I felt like working on something personal again. I decided to accept a lot less cover art commissions and focus on Odoric again.

So this page marks the start of a new project to resurrect Odoric, starting with the rediscovery of the geography, history and mythology of the Realms of Odoric. Arkadius will compose the soundtrack and I will be illustrating and writing with the help of Filip Keunen who wrote “The Wall Of Doom”. Hopefully this will be a fun project in which we all will draw inspiration from each other’s works. Progress will be posted on this page regularly so everyone can keep up!

Kris Verwimp
May 2013 Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.