Despite starting his career in animation, Kazu Kibuishi dreamed of creating a science fiction/fantasy graphic novel that could stand beside epic works like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki and Bone by Jeff Smith. He admired the way these works were able to build incredibly rich and detailed fantasy worlds in the manner of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, but with added illustrations that helped to enhance details and nuance. Kibuishi’s first attempts at rendering the world of the Amulet series did not meet his lofty expectations, so he put the project aside to focus his attention on developing skills more relevant to his career in animation.

However, he could not shake off his desire to write, and after a few years, he quit his job as an animator to focus on graphic novels. Before returning to the world of Amulet—which was his initial idea—Kibuishi published several other successful projects. Both Daisy Kutter: The Last Train (a comic book mini-series) and Flight (a graphic novel anthology) were released to critical acclaim in 2004. This gave him the experience and confidence to return to Amulet, which he began working on in 2005.