Friday, August 17, 2012

Atroxity: the Online Graphic Novel


"Bad things happen to bad people in dark locales."

Sound appealing?

Maybe not, but that's the sorta-joking shorthand description I've adopted for my current creative project.

Well, calling it my current creative project is rather misleading, seeing as how it is the creative project in my life right now, the creative project I've been working on for so long that I don't remember what life was like before it began to infect my brain.

The project is a graphic novel.  Hell, the project is a series of graphic novels, because I hate genre fiction's tendency to sprawl and I am a raging hypocrite.  Nothing quite earns an eye roll from me like the words "part one of an epic series," and yet the book we are working on is part one of an epic series.  Sorry, my fault!

The epic series is called Atroxity, and the first book is being unveiled as we speak, piece by labored piece.

And when I say labored, I mean it.  Each and every finished page is a veritable time-sucking black hole, from the writing--which is now more or less done--to the roughs to the pencils to the inks to the digital layouts to the colors.  If "bad things happening to bad people in dark locales" doesn't sound like the most compelling grounds upon which to invest minutes of time reading, imagine spending months upon years on it.

Fortunately, I'm not carrying the load alone.  A team has grown to handle the staggering task of bringing Atroxity to life.  I'm the writer and general project lead, Luke Master is handling pencils and inks, and Mike Barczak is on colors and tones.

I may have started Atroxity but it is no longer entirely mine, and I couldn't be happier about it.  Atroxity is now an equal partnership that is growing and mutating out of my sole control, which gives me that new dad grin as I watch my baby waddle out of my protective embrace and off toward the first day of school.  Atroxity will probably turn out to be a paste-eating troublemaker that pees down the playground slide, but that would be rather fitting for something easily summed up as "bad things happen to bad people in dark locales."

Okay, so it is admittedly more than the whole "bad people" thing, and in fact the story eventually includes a lot of humor and action sequences and scenes where people say important things and cry.  The tale starts dark and gets darker, true, but there will be a lot more places visited along the way than might be immediately obvious.

And so my actual, serious, trying-to-sum-up-Atroxity-so-that-you-might-consider-reading-it-spiel is as follows:

"Atroxity is character-driven urban fantasy noir graphic novel in which one man attempts to unravel the secrets of the dark and dizzying city in which he finds himself."

Does that sound better?  Find out for yourself: over twenty pages are currently live at the Atroxity website with more coming soon.

Check it out, follow us on facebook, climb on board for the ride.

Atroxity: The Online Graphic Novel




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