Father Zamora: Why I Made a 100-Year-Old Filipino Priest the Hero of My Horror Story
Why would I make a 100-year-old Filipino priest the hero of my horror story?
“You don't always discover your world before you start drawing it. Sometimes you draw your way into discovering it. One sketch becomes a character. A character becomes a story. A story becomes mythology. And eventually, the mythology becomes a world.”
It's probably not the first character you'd expect to see fighting demons, monsters, and eldritch gods.
But that's exactly why I liked the idea.
When I first started developing Zamora, I knew I wanted to make a horror story rooted in Filipino mythology and culture.
I wanted demons.
I wanted monsters.
I wanted old gods.
I wanted things that would make you question whether humanity was really supposed to know what was hiding beyond our reality.
But I didn't want to start with another generic monster hunter.
I wanted the hero to have history.
A lot of history.
So I went back to one of the most recognizable stories in Philippine history:
Gomburza.
Fathers Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora.
Three Filipino priests executed during the Spanish colonial period.
And I started asking myself a completely ridiculous question:
What if Father Zamora didn't die?
What if he survived?
What if he kept living?
And what if, throughout all those decades, he wasn't simply watching history happen?
What if he was secretly fighting something underneath it?
That's where the character started becoming interesting to me.
And then I threw in a little influence from one of the games that completely changed how I think about horror:
Bloodborne.
The idea that the hero isn't necessarily a shining knight who walks into darkness and comes out victorious.
Sometimes the hero is already damaged.
Sometimes the hero is cursed.
Sometimes the more they learn about the world, the worse things become.
And sometimes the things they're fighting are so enormous that defeating them may not even be possible.
Put those ideas together and eventually:
Father Zamora was born.
A 100-year-old Filipino priest.
An exorcist.
A survivor.
A man who has spent decades fighting things most people don't even know exist.
And possibly someone who has already seen too much.
That's much more interesting than:
“Here's my character design.”
Father Zamora sketch circa 2018 Father Gomez sketch circa 2018 Father Zamora sketch circa 2018 Father Zamora sketch circa 2018 Father Zamora sketch circa 2018
The Problem With Designing Characters
One thing I've learned from making comics is that it's very easy to fall into the trap of designing characters because they look cool.
I've done it.
You draw the costume.
You design the weapon.
You give the character scars.
Maybe you give him a really big coat because, let's be honest, big coats make almost everything look cooler.
Then you stand back and think:
Okay. Cool character.
But then comes the harder question.
Why does this character exist?
That's the question I try to ask now.
Not:
What does he look like?
But:
What happened to him?
What does he believe?
What has he lost?
What is he afraid of?
Why is he still fighting?
Those questions create a character.
The drawing comes afterward.
And Father Zamora gave me a particularly interesting problem.
If this man has lived for 100 years, then he has experienced an entire century of history.
He's seen people come and go.
He's seen cities change.
He's watched technology change.
He's watched beliefs change.
He's watched wars happen.
And through all of it, the supernatural world never stopped.
If anything, it kept getting worse.
That gives the character something I couldn't get from simply designing a cool-looking exorcist.
History.
And history creates weight.
Then I Realized the World Had to Be Bigger Than Zamora
This is where the project started getting out of hand.
In a good way.
I started with one priest.
Then I needed demons.
Then I needed rules for those demons.
Then I needed to figure out what happens when someone gets possessed.
Then I needed to figure out who was behind them.
Then I started asking what happens if Hell isn't the only supernatural power involved.
And suddenly the world became much bigger than one character.
That's one of the strange things about creating your own IP.
You start with one idea.
Then the idea starts asking you questions.
And if you keep answering them, eventually you don't just have a character anymore.
You have a world.
The Yawa
One of the first major pieces of that world is the Yawa.
The Yawa are denizens of Hell.
They're essentially the foot soldiers of the infernal hierarchy.
They enter our world by possessing human beings.
And here's where I wanted to make possession more terrifying.
Because in a lot of horror stories, you can simply remove the demon and everything goes back to normal.
I wanted there to be a point where you can't.
If a person remains possessed for more than seven days, the Yawa eventually transforms the human body into something else.
An Ungo.
And by then, the person is no longer simply possessed.
The transformation is irreversible.
The human soul has been consumed.
The body becomes a mutated soldier of Hell.
Superhuman strength.
Speed.
Agility.
Almost no humanity left.
That gave me another storytelling rule:
The longer you wait, the worse it gets.
And suddenly possession isn't just a monster problem.
It's a ticking clock.
That kind of rule is useful to me as an artist because it creates story possibilities.
A monster isn't interesting just because it looks scary.
It's interesting because of what it does to the story.
And Then There Are the Old Gods
Of course, I couldn't leave it there.
Because once you start asking questions about Hell, eventually you start asking:
What existed before Hell?
And that's where the Old Gods come in.
These are ancient entities that existed before the universe as we understand it.
Their influence still reaches into the present.
They are connected to the shaping of reality itself, including the forces that eventually became concepts like Heaven and Hell.
And that's where the scale of Zamora starts changing.
At first, you're dealing with a demon possessing somebody.
Then you're dealing with an army.
Then Hell.
Then Heaven.
And eventually you're asking whether these things are even the oldest powers in existence.
That's the kind of escalation I love in horror.
You think you've discovered the monster.
Then you discover that the monster is afraid of something else.
And Then There's Bakunawa
I also wanted to bring Filipino mythology into the larger mythology of Zamora.
One of the biggest examples is Bakunawa.
The giant serpent.
The moon eater.
But I didn't want to simply take a familiar mythological creature and put it into a comic because it looks cool.
I wanted to ask:
What happens when something from that mythology actually exists in this world?
In Zamora, Bakunawa is a colossal serpent demigod.
A celestial devourer.
And its awakening is connected to an act of selflessness by one of the exorcists.
But the problem is:
Bakunawa doesn't exactly care that someone meant well.
Its return threatens the material realm.
And suddenly a story about one old priest fighting demons has expanded into something much larger.
Because that's what I want Zamora to feel like.
The characters may understand one small part of the world.
But the world itself is much bigger than they are.
And All of This Happens in Cagayan de Oro
This part is important to me.
I didn't want Zamora to happen in some fictional city that could be anywhere.
I wanted it to happen here.
Cagayan de Oro.
The City of Golden Friendship.
My city.
A real place with real streets, real history, real churches, real caves, real neighborhoods, and real people.
Then I started asking:
What if there was another Cagayan de Oro underneath the one we know?
What if the city was also a doorway?
What if the caves contained things people weren't supposed to discover?
What if there were places beneath the city that had existed long before the modern world?
What if the supernatural wasn't somewhere far away?
What if it was underneath us?
That's when Cagayan de Oro stopped being just a setting.
It became part of the mythology.
The Makahambus Caves become more than caves.
The underground becomes more than underground.
And even the unexplored places start becoming opportunities for stories.
There are regions of this world that the characters haven't even fully explored yet.
And that's intentional.
Because if I know everything about the world already, sometimes it stops feeling like a world.
It starts feeling like a database.
I want Zamora to still have places that surprise even me.
Volume 1 Is Only the Door
And this is probably the biggest lesson I've learned while making Zamora.
You don't have to explain your entire universe in the first book.
I used to think I needed to explain everything.
The mythology.
The characters.
The demons.
The history.
The organizations.
The gods.
The rules.
Everything.
But the more I worked on the project, the more I realized:
Mystery is part of the experience.
You don't need to show the entire monster.
Sometimes you just need to show its footprint.
You don't need to explain every god.
Sometimes you just need to show the symbol somebody found on a wall.
You don't need to explain the entire history of Cagayan de Oro.
You just need to make the reader wonder:
“What the hell is underneath this city?”
That's enough.
Give people a doorway.
Let them decide whether they want to walk through it.
For me, that's what Zamora Vol. 1 is.
The door.
The Artist's Lesson: Build the World Around the Story
This has also changed the way I work as an artist.
When you're making a comic by yourself, it's easy to think every drawing has to become a finished comic page.
It doesn't.
Some drawings exist to discover the character.
Some exist to discover the monster.
Some exist to figure out the mythology.
Some exist because you had a weird idea at two in the morning and needed to draw it before you forgot.
And some drawings never become anything.
That's okay.
They're still doing a job.
They're helping you figure out what the hell you're making.
I've learned to stop judging every sketch by whether it ends up in the final book.
Instead, I ask:
Did this teach me something?
Did it teach me how the character moves?
Did it teach me what the monster looks like?
Did it reveal something about the world?
Did it give me an idea for a future story?
If it did, then it wasn't wasted.
It was development.
And that is one of the biggest advantages of creating your own IP.
You aren't just producing pages.
You're building a world around those pages.
The Story and the Evidence
This is actually where the idea for the Zamora Archives came from.
I had accumulated all this material.
Old sketches.
Monster designs.
Notes.
Rejected ideas.
Mythology.
Character concepts.
Things that never made it into Volume 1.
And I realized:
What if these aren't just leftovers?
What if they're evidence?
That's when the distinction became clear.
Zamora Vol. 1 is the story.
The Zamora Archives are the evidence.
Volume 1 tells you what happened.
The Archives show you pieces of everything happening around it.
A monster report.
A C.A.D.E. document.
A strange photograph.
A damaged field note.
A symbol nobody can translate.
An old sketch that supposedly came from an exorcist's desk.
Something redacted.
Something that shouldn't exist.
Suddenly, the artwork isn't just artwork anymore.
You're investigating it.
And that's exactly how I want people to experience the world I'm building.
The Bigger the World Gets, the More Questions I Have
That's probably my favorite part of making Zamora.
I started with:
What if Father Zamora survived?
Now I'm asking:
What exactly is Hell?
What existed before it?
What are the Old Gods?
Why are the Yawa here?
What happens to a human after seven days of possession?
What is happening beneath Cagayan de Oro?
What does C.A.D.E. actually know?
What don't they know?
What happens when Heaven and Hell aren't the biggest threats anymore?
And what happens to Father Zamora when he finally discovers the answer?
I don't have to answer all of those questions right now.
And neither does the reader.
That's the fun.
Before and After
When I started:
I had a character.
Now:
I have a universe.
When I started:
I had a priest inspired by a piece of Philippine history.
Now:
I have a 100-year-old exorcist carrying a century of history into a war against Hell.
When I started:
I wanted to draw monsters.
Now:
I have rules, mythology, factions, gods, and creatures that can generate stories of their own.
When I started:
I wanted to make a graphic novel.
Now:
I'm building an original universe that can eventually exist across comics, animation, games, and whatever else I can figure out.
And maybe that's the biggest lesson I've learned from making Zamora.
You don't always discover your world before you start drawing it.
Sometimes you draw your way into discovering it.
One sketch becomes a character.
A character creates a story.
A story creates mythology.
Mythology creates a world.
And eventually that world starts asking you questions you never planned to answer.
That's when you know you've got something.
Enter the World of Zamora
And that's where I am now.
Zamora Vol. 1 is the story.
It is the first doorway into this world.
A 100-year-old exorcist priest stands between humanity and forces that are far older and more powerful than he is.
Hell has its soldiers.
Heaven has its own agenda.
Ancient entities are beginning to stir.
And somewhere beneath the familiar streets of Cagayan de Oro, there are things that should probably remain undiscovered.
But Volume 1 is only the beginning.
Because around that story is everything else.
The monsters.
The mythology.
The sketches.
The reports.
The rejected ideas.
The things C.A.D.E. knows.
The things C.A.D.E. doesn't know.
And the things nobody was supposed to find.
That's what the Zamora Archives are for.
The story is in the book.
The evidence is in the Archives.
And I'm going to keep opening those doors one at a time.
Because I don't just want to make a comic people read.
I want to build a world people want to keep exploring.
And if you're curious enough to step inside,
welcome to Zamora.
Just be careful what you uncover.
Zamora Vol. 1 and the Zamora Archives are available in limited quantities from the first print run.
If you've been following this project, this is your chance to enter the world from the beginning.
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