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Posted by:

risekraken

Date:

September 25th, 2007 6:51 AM

Header:

RK Production Diary #1: The Pitch

Bulletin:

Where it all began:
Rise, Kraken! is being published by Ape Entertainment next fall, but before the production diary gets underway, a few words about the creative team and how the comic got started. I know a lot of online comic folks want to get into print, so the pitch process (starting with this, the pre-pitch) might be interesting.

I'm Matt Shepherd. I write Man-Man, an online super-hero satire strip -- it's about eight years old now, and still going strong with a few thousand readers.

But while Man-Man is a long-term passion, it also served as my roundabout doorway to print comics, first by getting me in touch with Roy Boney, with whom I worked on Dead Eyes Open, a critically acclaimed comic for SLG that pushed the boundaries of zombies beyond anything previously attempted in -- well, any medium, really.

Roy and I also partnered on The License, a '70s-style crime drama (although the series went through a couple of other artists first). The License was featured on the action comics portal Graphic Smash, which was how I (finally!) met...

Jerzy Drozd. I was already a fan of Jerzy's, having talked up his online book The Front endlessly at the Man-Man site, so just being in the same place as his and Sara Turner's series The Replacements was a thrill and a half.

But then Jerzy and I got to talking, and... well, a pitch was born.

Rise, Kraken! was literally a wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night idea after reading too many old Captain America and Teen Titans comics: "what if somebody told the story of a world-domination group like Hydra or H.I.V.E., but from a sympathetic point of view?" and Jerzy was the first person I contacted about putting together a pitch. And he was game, to my heel-clicking, toe-tapping, singing-and-dancing delight.

So we put together a pitch, and the rest is history. Well, will be history. Is history in the making.

You know what I mean.

Starting in a few days: the production diary! There's a lot going on behind the scenes here, both at Ape and in Jerzy's and my respective hectic homes. Board games under development, Web sites being designed, and weird, wild ideas of how to make Rise, Kraken! an experience that extends far beyond great comics alone. - Matt p.s. A quick piece of development art: this is KRAKEN veteran Arms McGee.

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