The artwork for Shock and Awe is done by a very talented artist named Michael Odom. Here are some character sketches Michael did for me when we were brainstorming the main characters.

This second pinup is by a friend of Juan’s from Colombia.

1) Tell us a little bit about yourself and your comic Kogoshii. How did the project come about?

Well I am a “writer at large and shameless self promoter” I’ve worked with companies like Marvel, Shooting Star Comics, Platinum Studios, etc. I’ve bounced around the industry for about 10 years in various functions. Gigi is a manga goddess, who has blazed trails with her own successful webcomics on Drunk Duck (before they were bought out by Platinum)  and worked on her own Platinum book called Love Bites.

Kogoshii, basically came about from me talking to Gigi and saying “want to pitch something to Zuda?” And then brainstorming on what best suited both of our talents. I had an untitled story that was loosely based on a project that fell through and we went through it tossing out what didn’t work and refining what did.

2) Give us your pitch, can you briefly summarize the concept behind the story for people not familiar with your comic?

Basically the high concept is a romeo and juliet style story with a twist. It takes place in sort of an alternate world/timeline where Japan has become sort of the center of everything, but like with most countries it comes with its own dark past. There are these two groups, the Kaitou which are basically “ninja robin hoods” they’re trained in the arts of stealth and speed and taught that it’s dangerous for the few to control great masses of wealth, that while what they do might be illegal but it’s in the service of a higher honor because they are spreading the wealth around. Of course over the generations some have just enjoyed the thrill of the action more than the actual credo of the Kaitou but it is instilled in all who are chosen to live among them in their gypsie style camps.

Then on the otherhand you have the Hitokiri who are deathdealers. Assasins who trade human life to the highest bidder. They don’t really care much for honor or credos, they basically do what they are good at, and revel in their status and power. The two clans have been at war for as long as they’ve existed. Even if like in most cases of blood feuds by this point a great majority of them most likely don’t know what originally came between them.  Along comes two kids who don’t really care about past grievences, or power struggles. Shinji a Kaitou boy had been in love with Satori, a Hitokiri girl since the first moment he laid eyes on her.

They had a secret romance for sometime, until finally they were discovered and the two groups thought their union might be a way to bring about peace between the two groups. But that is a lot to put on the shoulders of two children. And they knew the punishment should their love not be enough to keep these age old enemies at bay. Shinji made a choice he thought was right, but he’s just caused more trouble than he can ever know.

3) Your entry, I believe, is one of the few manga styled Zuda entries? What made you choose this style and format for your comic?

I chose it, mostly because it is the format Gigi is most known for, and the style she and her daugheters love the most, and the themes of the story lead to a semi-shojo style story. So we went with our strengths!

4) This question is for Gigi, how was your experience working with Danny on this project and what challenges did creating an eight page zuda entry present you with?

GIGI: Working with Danny: easy

Challenges: not many just the format was unual to anything I’ve done for the web or print and Im trying to figure out a way to make the tones come off cleaner not so muddled. Its the first time I’ve had this problem

5) The name Kogoshii, what does it mean and where did it come from?

It is actually Japanese for “Glorious” It came from Gigi’s lovely middle child Venessa who is our demographic. She was so passionate about that name it became infectious. We did put it to a vote, both internally at Gigi’s house and on Facebook and of all  the potential names (I think there were 5 in all) Kogoshii got 66% of the vote.

6) Lastly, tell us why people should vote for Kogoshii and what we can expect from future episodes if you were to win.

We are just getting into the thick of it. When we pick up there will be a huge change in moods. We will get to meet the other members of the clans, we will get to see more of the history of the two sides, where their ideologies seperated, what caused the rift between them. And Shinji will have to face the wraith of Satori upon his return back home.

Gigi was very sad that we could only send 8 pages. Because there is something on page 11 that she was just dying to draw and share… We will only get to see that if YOU guys help us. We greatfully appreciate your votes! We are only a handful away from that top spot! YOU can make a difference.

To get more information about Kogoshii visit Zuda.com

1) Tell us a little bit about yourself and your comic The Urban  Adventures of Melvin Blank. How did the project come about?

Bill Williams: I’ve been making comics for over ten years now and publishing things under the Lone Star Press banner.  Making a few bucks by making comics is harder than ever, so I have been trying new things like making webcomics.  My SideChicks strip has been my focus for the last couple of years where I write, (occasionally) ink and (sometimes) color the thing.While looking for more work as a freelancer, I drifted into a writing group with a few friends.  Clockwork Storybook is made up of Bill Willingham, Matt Sturges, Chris Roberson, Mark Finn and me.  We get together and hammer the best work out of each other.  Anyway, someone in the group was asked for a pitch by a major publisher and we slaved away at that thing as a group project.  The publisher was fine with the group concept and a couple of us are still trying to crack that market and get steady work.  We got a solid pitch together and got back notes and then tightened it up a bit and sent it back in where it was dropped.  That’s life as a freelancer.  But we did a load of work for free and I decided that if I was going to do another pitch, I’d try to get paid something for the work done.  So, it’s a bit mercenary, but I wanted to get paid a few bucks for my part in the pitch process which is kind of how I look at the Zuda Deal.  Ironically, I’ll probably spend more on advertising the strip than what I made for the project to date.When it comes to story, I wanted to do something narrated by a character with a different point of view.  Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a terrific example of this.  So, I wrote the script and called Thom.

Thom Zahler: Bill and I had been working together on lettering SideChicks and some other design projects. When he called about working on Melvin, I was thrilled to be able to work with him from the ground up on a project. Not that lettering isn’t collaborative, but this is certainly our closest collaboration.Also, I was familiar with Zuda and was looking to pitch something myself. I wasn’t able to lock in a concept I liked enough. Bill came with one fully-formed, so it was a match made in heaven.Most of my recent projects, including Love and Capes, have been ones where I wrote and drew the whole project. It was nice to be called upon to fill the art duties and be able to concentrate exclusively on that.

2) Give us your pitch, can you briefly summarize the concept behind   the story for people not familiar with your comic?

Bill Williams: Here is the pitch for the strip from the competition page–  “With the mind of a child and the strength of a brute, Melvin Blank chases the American Dream in the heart of a big decaying city. In between shifts as a dishwasher, he has his urban adventures.”That was the heart of the pitch when I sent the script over to Thom.  After he read the script, Thom still had a few questions so on the phone, I came up with some shorthand for the strip.  It is the ongoing adventures of Lenny from Of Mice and Men.  And then Thom said, “click.”  As to art style, that’s all Thom.

Thom Zahler: I’ve been messing around in a more cartoony style, and when Bill sent his pitch, I didn’t see how they’d mesh. But when he mentioned Lenny from one of my favorite books of all-time, it all made sense. Lenny’s a cartoon of sorts, and has I believe been the inspiration for some Warner Brothers cartoon (“I will love him and pet him and name him George”). Plus, I think the cartoony vibe gets across the seeming innocence of Melvin and how he views the world. When you see a cartoon go dark, it leaves you wondering what will happen next, since it plays against expectations.I also picked up on Bill’s mention of the city being “decaying”. I wanted to do something that didn’t look just like Love and Capes, so I muted the color palette and have all the inked holding lines print in a sepia. It gives it a sun-bleached desolate look that hopefully gets across Bill’s vision.

3) Your entry is a complete eight screen story that has a beginning,  middle and end. What made you choose this format?

Bill Williams: God help me, but I’m a bit of a contrarian and when I looked at the Zuda strips, I saw a few common threads.  A load of them were the first sixteenth of the first chapter of the war epic to end all epics.  And that kind of work is easy.  No writer has a problem droning on and on and chewing up the dead tree real estate.  A classic example is the writer who has his characters spend a chapter having lunch or trying on hats.  While you can use those chapters to unload Chekov’s gun cabinet, the heavy lifting of writing is shortening a story.  Telling a story in sixteen panels is much much harder with every line of dialogue and pacing decision being more important.Plus, I had a mercenary reason for working like that.  In the Zuda contract, it states that there is an additional payment if the story is included in an anthology.  I figured a complete story would have a better chance than a fraction of a story and I think that art should go off in odd directions.  In terms of style, having a cartoonist like Thom draw the thing gives it an added dimension that I enjoy.

Thom Zahler: Obviously, this is all Bill since he came up with the original idea of Melvin, but I agree with him completely. There are a lot of billion-issue magnum opuses out there, and they’re a bit of a commitment. Comics seem to borrow a lot from TV these days, and I’d like to see them borrow that idea of telling an accessible story with a beginning, middle and end. Sure, you might lose some of the nuances coming in on a middle episode of Buffy or Grey’s Anatomy or Burn Notice, but they all catch you up right quick.Plus, Bill’s written a story that, while complete, screams out to continue. It’s a great “best of both worlds” approach.

4) Where did the character of Melvin come from? Was it hard to tell  the story from Melvin’s simplistic viewpoint?

Bill Williams: I tended bar an a variety of places, so I have spent time with a broad spectrum of people from the restaurant business and Melvin is a bit of a composite.  I have this odd fascination and affection for dumb characters whether it is Woody from Cheers or Joey from Friends.  At the time, I had just watched The Wire and some All in the Family, so I had urban decay in the back of my mind.  I considered what it would be like to be the last man standing as the world kind of fell apart around you.  This first story is a brick falling from that tumbling wall as Melvin has the problems of the outside world literally end up on his doorstep.

Thom Zahler: Visually, I wanted big and dumb. So, he comes across as a pudgy guy, but there’s some structure and muscle there. And his face is so expressive that I can go from the innocent expression and body language to something a lot more terrifying. Bill called for the character to be hidden for most of the story, so it took a lot of staging to keep him in shadow or cut off and make it feel “natural”. Hopefully, as you read it, you’re trying to turn your head a little more to catch a better glimpse of Melvin.

5) In your synopsis for the comic you say “Melvin is absolutely sure  that he is living the American Dream and he wants to share it with the  rest of the people in his neighborhood”;  What is the American Dream  to you and how is it similar to Melvin’s?

Bill Williams: Well the American Dream has classically been defined around the drive to be a home owner and by that definition, Melvin is living that dream.  His parents are deceased and like any kid he inherited things from them when they passed.  I think that my American Dream is closer to the modern definition that falls under the umbrella of ’success.’  I think the prior dreams had their roots in ’success’ but the shorthand of the age called it homestead or home ownership.  A feeling of security comes from having some place that some rich powerful person cannot kick you off of.

Thom Zahler: The American Dream? Wasn’t that a run on Shade the Changing Man? Bill’s answered Melvin’s vision better than I could have, so I’ll just take the second part. Mine comes down to the pursuit of happiness. I quit my day job in late 2001 and went completely freelance and never looked back. To succeed on my own terms, have the kind of life I want and get that by doing the thing I want, that’s my dream, and thankfully, my reality, too.

For more information about The Urban Adventures of Melvin Blank visit Zuda.com

1) Tell us a little bit about yourself and your comic Sidewise. How did the project come about?

DWIGHT: Well, I’ve been in this wacky biz for about 4 years. I was nominated for a Harvey and Eagle Award for my fantasy epic The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo. I’ve published creator-owned titles with Image, Silent Devil Productions and Arcana Studio and written stories for IDW, Devil’s Due Publishing and Slave Labor Graphics. I am married to a beautiful, intelligent, witty woman named Rebecca and I have three sensational sons named Clayton (13), Duncan (11) and Logan (8).

I am billing SIDEWISE as “Sublime Steampunk for the 22nd Century. The story is about a teen genius named Adam Graham. Adam borrows his parents’ time device to visit 1902 London, only to find himself in an alternate dystopian past. As a member of Nikola Tesla’s band of young freedom fighters known as SteampunX, Adam must wage a war against a myriad of deadly steam-powered robots, mad scientists and a nefarious state police controlled by Queen Victoria’s preserved brain to free the oppressed nation, crown a new monarch and return to his world in time for a final exam.

I created SIDEWISE after my 13-year-old asked me what Steampunk was. Originally titled SteampunX, I took the idea to my pal Igor Noronha after he suggested we work on a Zuda submission together. Igor really dug the idea and began working on a few character sketches. Production moved along quickly, we submitted the project and here we are.

IGOR: I am a Brazilian born artist and am currently living in Denmark. When I have the time, I develop my characters and stories over at my website www.tlobstudios.com. I am 24, and I have been an independent comic artist and creator since I was 15, so I know a bit how rejection and (relative) success are like. So far, I worked for Brazilian publishers and for Image as colorist. But the will of creating my own stories made me a one-man band — now I write, pencil, ink, color and letter my own comics. To tell if I am successful in all these tasks, you gotta read my motion comic Light Apprentice Nate (lan.tlobstudios.com) to find out. Now I am trying to develop each skill the best I can.

2) Give us your pitch, can you briefly summarize the concept behind the story for people not familiar with your comic?

DWIGT: SIDEWISE is a time travel story with a twist. Instead of merely traveling back into time, Adam moves “sidewise” into a parallel universe where he is forced to fight for his life against robots, science-sorcerers, a ruthless state assassin and a dead Queen’s brain.

Throw in Nikola Tesla as a resistance leader and advanced technology exo-suits and you have SIDEWISE.

3) On your blog you have written several articles exploring alternative methods of publishing for comics, Do you think Zuda is on the right track with the future of the industry?

DWIGHT: Oh, absolutely. In today’s industry, creators should use every distribution option available to them. For instance, I have two webcomics: The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo (http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Surreal_Adventures_of_Edgar_Allan_Poo/) and Interagents (http://www.th3rdworld.com/web-comic/Interagents). Interagents is also available for purchase exclusively through IndyPlanet (http://www.indyplanet.com/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?osCsid=1e258e9192ea502064cde4e551daebd9&keywords=interagents&osCsid=1e258e9192ea502064cde4e551daebd9&x=22&y=6). Now I have SIDEWISE on Zudacomics.com (http://www.zudacomics.com/node/1305). I’m always looking for new distribution options to get my work out to readers.

Yes, Zuda is definitely leading the way. The key to selling a print comic book successfully is to build a fanbase before the book’s released. Especially in a tanking economy. Readers simply do not have the extra cash to risk on an unknown property. By making SIDEWISE–for example–available for viewing on Zudacomics.com, we can build a fanbase and generate interest in the property before the book is released in print. It’s a genius move.

IGOR: Besides that, I think Zuda is a pioneer in the webcomics medium and is a great opportunity for both amateur and independent artists to show their work to a big crowd and get some cash for it. Many people complain about the format of the competition but I think it makes the experience unique for both the artist and the reader, and that’s a thumbs up.

4) This next question is of particular interest to myself and other aspiring comic book creators. You’ve got several project going on right now including the popular American McGee’s Grimm, What’s your secret? How do you continue to create great comics and not go insane with all the deadlines?

DWIGHT: 14 years in the Army taught me how to multi-task, focus my energy, remain cool under pressure and to be pro-active and tenacious. I don’t sweat deadlines, I just get to work and accomplish the mission. In most instances, publishers and editors have been amazed with how quickly I can produce. On American McGee’s Grimm, for instance, I completed the first three scripts before the deadline for issue 1.

I don’t have a secret to my success. I’m just a hardworking perfectionist who’s been blessed with an overactive imagination.

IGOR: And, he’s a zombie!!

5) This last question is for Igor, What was it like collaborating with Dwight on this project? What inspires those cool “steampunk” designs for the comic?

It has been extremely cool to work with Dwight. He lets me free to create the art like a kid in a backyard with all those toys to play with. And that’s why I am enjoying so much to work on this project, I have the freedom I want to explore things my way, tapping here and there before. From the start, we had the idea of working on a steampunk all-ages comic with the appeal of manga-style art. But I wanted to add a bit of more of my own style and ideas, that I think most of them wouldn’t go through if I were working with a strict editor. For inspiration, I watched a lot of steampunk-themed videos like Blur’s A Gentlemen’s Duel and researched about Victorian England architecture for quite a while. Since the story is set in an parallel reality, I used my artistic freedom to develop the designs from there to something more personal of mine.

For more information about Sidewise visit zuda.com or visit Dwight’s blogs at:

http://dwightmacpherson.wordpress.com/
http://dwightmacpherson.blogspot.com/

]]> http://www.originalwonders.com/wondercomics/wonder-of-comics-interview-with-june-2009-zuda-contestant-dwight-l-macphersons-sidewise/feed/ 0 http://www.originalwonders.com/re-evolution/re-evolution-fan-art-2/ http://www.originalwonders.com/re-evolution/re-evolution-fan-art-2/#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:36:23 +0000 GusHiguera http://www.originalwonders.com/?p=1204 Wow, I’m impressed by the quality of this pinup of Chehuahua fan art someone pointed me to. Pretty awesome