Boy has strange dreams.
Boy meets mysterious old man.
Boy turns 18.
Boy grows a single wing.
Boy goes on an adventure.
Sound familiar? Well, if you wanted to summarize Fortune’s Wing as briefly as possible, that’s a great way to start. But there’s more to Fortune’s Wing than those short sentences I mentioned above.
Fortune’s Wing was inspired by a few things. During my middle school and high school years I was REALLY into anime, and began drawing characters I saw in anime series and manga series (or graphic novels, if you prefer). I created my own characters, and one of them was Fortune Oyama. I was also inspired by books I was forced to read in school, such as Where The Red Fern Grows. At that time there were many adventure stories about young boys and their dogs. I thought, what if there was a story about a boy going on an adventure, but a different kind of adventure? What if he needed to decide what was going to happen to the world and all of the people in it? Would he save the world? End it? Change it? And what if he had an eclectic group of friends who accompanied him? Thus, Fortune’s Wing was born.
Why have Fortune decide the fate of the world? Couldn’t he just go on a quest to find the other Wing and complete the set? Sure. But that’s where the anime influence kicked in. Most anime deals with man’s relationship with nature or the Earth to some degree. In Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon and the Sailor Soldiers fight to protect Earth. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the pilots of the Eva’s fight the creatures known as angels and later the military arm of the SEELE organization in order to prevent the world from ending. For me, just having Fortune find the other Wing wasn’t enough. He needed a reason to complete the set; the Wings needed to have a purpose beyond granting the bearer the ability to fly.
When I wrote the original Fortune’s Wing, I wrote it because I knew I could write a book faster than I could draw a graphic novel. That was what I really wanted to do: draw a graphic novel. I even got started by drawing the draft of the first pages of book one in the series. But I just wanted to get the story down, so I decided to go with a book instead. Sometime in the future, there will be a graphic novel, when I have more time on my hands.
It’s sort of funny that I wrote this fantasy series, because growing up I didn’t read a lot of fantasy or science fiction. I was into both genres and watched a lot of movies and anime, but I just couldn’t get into the books (I never read a single Harry Potter book. There. I said it). I didn’t even think of Fortune’s Wing as fantasy when I wrote it, it was just a story. I have thought about writing a book of alternate endings to my published works, including a version of Fortune in which he makes an entirely different decision concerning the fate of the world. I also made plans for a more mature version of the books, since the current versions are for older middle school age readers and up.
Until any of those books come to be, you have The Omnibus: the book that brings all three books together along with a previously unpublished fourth book. If you’ve never read the series, this is an excellent book to grab. You can read all about the boy and his adventure, and what happened after.
All of the Fortune’s Wing books are available on Amazon.
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