About the Author
Hello, my name is Sage Panter and I’m the writer and illustrator of Faith in the West (FITW). Thank you for your interest in my story!
General Background
I’m American but I’ve been living and working in Hiroshima, Japan since 2018.
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I live with my husband and our cat, Loki, in a little house on top of a hill in Hiroshima city. At the moment, I’m an instructor at Shudo University where I teach ESL and International Studies courses. I also work part time as a tour guide around Hiroshima city. I work on FITW in my free time.
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I have been interested in drawing and story telling for as long as I can remember but I don’t have any formal education in the art or writing fields. My background is in international studies. I went to Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, U.S.A for my bachelors where I focused on Chinese and Japanese language, history, and literature. And I went to Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, U.S.A for my masters where I focused on “escalating conflict”, why countries go to war and how events like mass atrocities and genocides happen. I’ve always been fascinated by travel and history and how societies and individuals get themselves in and out of difficult times.
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My background in Japan and conflict studies is what brought me to Hiroshima. A lot of what I do here is connected to Hiroshima’s past with WWII and the atomic bomb. But, more than that, I think Hiroshima is a beautiful, easy to live in city with great food and wonderful people. It has quickly become home.
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Drawing, for me, has always been a hobby but a constant and serious one. Throughout my life I’ve gone through phases where I’ve drawn more or less but I’m always drawing something, even if it’s confined to the corners of my notebooks. Some of the earliest presents I can remember receiving were art supplies. I’ve literally spent thousands of hours of my life drawing anything and everything.
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An early influence for my art was definitely my mother who is also an artist. You can see her work here at annmbeck.com . She makes earrings and she paints. So, I grew up with her constantly working on projects and experimenting with new ideas. She, of course, has always been very supportive of my art endeavors.
Another influence was animated movies. Even though I didn’t end up pursuing animation, the idea that the worlds within these movies were created by illustrations (essentially) was incredible to me (and still is). Growing up I loved animated Disney films like Lion King and Mulan, and Ghibli films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. I’ve also always loved fantasy, epic adventure stories in any medium. For example, Nickelodeon’s Avatar the Last Air Bender and J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are life-long loves of mine. As a teenager I discovered anime and manga, especially manga. For example, I really loved Takahashi Rumiko's Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha, Takaya Natsuki's Fruits Basket, and Arakawa Hiromu's Full Metal Alchemist. Shortly after discovering manga, I started to try and make my own. It was fun to draw out stories. It started on computer paper with number 2 pencils and grew to what I’m doing now.
Faith in the West Background
I’ve been working on this version of Faith in the West (FITW) since 2022 but the story has gone through several versions. Arguably, the first version was started somewhere around 2006-07, as one of those early attempts at making my own manga as a teenager. That “first version” would be unrecognizable compared to the current except for one theme (which I will keep secret for now). I started another version in 2015, which would be more recognizable, and another in 2020, which was my first attempt to share the story with a wider audience. Hopefully this 4th version will be the final one.
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The story in general has been influenced by places I have been in the U.S.A, Japan, New Zealand, China, Bosnia Herzegovina, the U.K etc. and several of the books and religious philosophies I was exposed to in school. Especially, Wu Chengen’s Journey to the West which has become the backbone of my plot.
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FITW is definitely an epic journey story with a lot of characters and world building so it will be long. I think there will be 6 or 7 “parts” and several chapters per part. This is a project that will take years to finish but I am determined to! I think the process will be fun (it already has been) and I hope to have opportunities to devote more time to it in the future.
About the Process
I am doing FITW entirely digitally on a Wacom tablet using Clip Studio Paint. For those of you who don’t know, I draw directly on the tablet so the act of drawing itself is the same as on real paper but because I’m using a computer I can delete, copy and paste, and do so many things that would be impossible or much more difficult physically. Never the less it’s still a great deal of work and very time consuming.
I’ve written the entire story out but I’m always updating it as I come up with better ideas or discover plot holes. So, it’s still a work in progress. Because it would take too much time to draw the entire story before I upload it onto the website, I make one chapter at a time. I write a detailed script for the chapter before I draw anything and then I do a rough sketch to make sure everything flows well. After several edits it’s finally ready to be “inked” and colored. After which it goes through more edits.
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I have more information about my process and also character designs and early access to new pages on my Patreon page.
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