Finally! Working on a NEW, ORIGINAL HARDBOILED, FANTASY, CYBERPUNK Graphic Novel!
As Jex and I finalize work on SuperHeroes After Dark 5 and move exclusively onto Neon Dreams 2, we’re also finally working on something we’ve been planning for the last few months.
JEX LOSING HIS DAMN MARBLES
So, months ago, Jex approached me with a crazy idea—which he often does—about something we could use for either a comic, tabletop game or whatever. We’ll call it TERROR DRONE as a working title. To summarize it, he described it as “What If Spawn Came to Westeros(Game of Thrones) or Hyboria(Conan)?”
Jex described it as a pastiche of Frankenstein, Doom, Mortal Kombat and Spawn, all set to a soundtrack by bands like Pentakill and further inspired by Metalocalypse; Demon knights, sexy succubi, hellish landscapes, swordsmen, sorcerers, dragons and everything in between. Hardcore heavy metal madness.
Below is a concept sketch of the hero of codename “Terror Drone”…
Jex’s pitch was interesting—very interesting—but he offers me so many ideas that we can’t really execute on yet, that I was disappointed to have to tell him “Add it to the pile, son.” because I alone have stockpiled close to a hundred ideas that we can exploit for future publications.
THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT
This time, I thought about it and felt that eventually we’ll need some kind of platform to deliver these disparate ideas to the marketplace in a way that doesn’t demand the time required for crowdfunding campaigns that center on a singular idea; We’d need a testbed publication to present multiple IPs simultaneously to customers.
The Japanese have mastered this with Manga where they have catalogs that show preview stories of proposed future titles and let customers vote on what they want to see more of.
FUTURE CAMPAIGN FOR NEW STORIES
I proposed the following: we take his Terror Drone idea, do a 36-40 page first issue(of a planned 120-140 page graphic novel), BUT we’ll also take 2-3 of our other stockpiled concepts and do 36-40 page first issues for those and then—in addition to offering those comics separately—we’d offer them combined in an anthology graphic novel.
This way, for the eventual crowdfunding/pre-order campaign, we’d be offering several options that would help boost overall funding. If you like Terror Drone and only that, you just get that. If you like two of the ideas, get those. If you like ALL of the comics associated with the campaign, just pre-order the collected anthology graphic novel. And so on.
THE PROBLEM WITH ORIGINALITY
I’m typically known for doing sexy superhero parodies, but I prefer to do original concepts. Problem with that is that whenever we’d do a crowdfunding campaign for a singular new concept, the ceiling for pre-order fundraising seems to be around $15,000.
For each of the following titles, we did individual campaigns:
Sinsationals
Surfer Girl
Dangerous Curves x MAVRIX
…and the most any of them raised was around $15,000. I figure that with this new testbed graphic novel concept, we can accept pre-orders for 3-4 stories per campaign rather than on one alone.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO CALL?
We’ve decided to call this graphic novel testbed by the name, “SINNERS”.
Volume 1 of SINNERS will compile the first issues of 3-4 original stories into one beefy graphic novel. After it’s crowdfunded, produced and published, we’ll then be able to market it on other online eCommerce platforms.
CONTENT RATING
Sinners would be the equivalent of a hard R-rated movie and not X or XXX like previous titles. Think 1980s R-rated movies and the content you’d get there. Violence, gore, language and artful nudity. Something that you could conceivably buy on Amazon.
WHAT WILL BE IN “SINNERS VOL. 1”?
“Terror Drone” will be among them, as well as the following:
“Cactus Jack": an adrenaline-fueled, balls-to-the-wall action story about a man who finds himself prey in the deadliest game; it will be one nearly-continuous action sequence with little to no dialogue focusing entirely on visual storytelling.
“Hard Drive”: a woman living in a dystopian future who spends her days and nights deeply ensconced in a virtual reality murder simulator begins to believe that players that she hunted in the game are trying to kill her for real.
“Candyland”: a streetwalker—who is fed up with a life on the streets of a futuristic city where robot and alien pimps use women like her as disposable entertainment—decides to take justice into her own hands and leads a gang of prostitutes in a war with their cybernetic and extraterrestrial abusers.
Stay tuned for more details as work continues!
Shade
sinrstudios.myshopify.com