I’ve had this bookmarked but didn’t get a chance to watch it until this week… and really enjoyed it. It’s fun, it’s funny, and it’s musical. If you’re a fan of supervillain comedies, musicals, Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris or Nathan Fillion (Mal from Firefly/Serenity), you’ll probably enjoy this.
The Buzzcomix Top 100 webcomic website went through an overhaul recently (you may have noticed the vote button was broken), and they’re ready to test it all out. Beta testing means they’re looking for people to break things (so they can get them fixed). Breaking things is fun! Check it out, have fun and if you happen to give us a vote while you’re over there, I put up a piece of artwork from Seth depicting the Loki clan as a vote incentive.
For all those readers in other countries that have been waiting to read mine and Seth’s Steampunk Faeries for free… now you can! Wowio just relaunched and gave us the option to open it up to various countries. I was very judicious with which countries I opened it up to, so if you’re any of the following countries, you’re out of luck:
…
Wait, I selected EVERY country. So now’s your chance. Go give it a read and let us know what you thought.
So there we were… we had a concept, some sketches of the characters, and a few single page stories plotted out.
Creating is only half the battle.
I’m pretty sure I mentioned we were pretty new (and naieve) to the whole webcomics scene at the time. We had some other site hosting us (one owned by a director Seth and I were both fans of), so we didn’t concern ourselves too much with things like navigation and archives and building traffic. We probably should have done more promotion or more to make our comic more accessible, but we were focused on creating and having fun.
Conflict brings the eyeballs.
As we picked up momentum with our characters, we started throwing out some short story arcs that lasted 3-4 episodes, and response was good to them. So we wanted to go into a much longer storyline… and that’s when I realized that my original antagonist, though mischievous, was really a “hero”, so I needed to find someone to really challenge these kids. There are a number of villainous characters to work with in Norse mythology like the various jotun (the shape-shifting Thiazi, the nine-headed Thrivaldi, the fiery Surtr), the underrealm races (dwarves/dark elves), the offspring of Loki, and a number of others.
As I rolled all these characters around in my head, I decided to look back through our archives and as I skimmed over episode #5, I paused for a moment because I could swear the eye had a “you’re so gonna pay for this” look to it as it dropped into the well. It made me think of an eye soaking up all that knowledge as it worked to gain its freedom from the depths of the well of wisdom.
And it just took off from there into our first lengthy storyline. I thought it would be neat to reverse roles for this… to follow the origin story of the villain instead of the hero, so we ran with that. It also gave us a chance to show off some other places in the nine realms of Norse mythology. And the response was good to it, so he became our young godlings’ main adversary. Someone to be able to prompt them into action.
And new story lines flooded our imaginations. It’s funny how a good villain will do that.
So, how did this webcomic about the Norse gods come to be? Well, it’s an interesting story…
It started as a pitch…
A long time ago, in a comic kingdom far, far away, a call went out to creators young and old. A spark of a dream to create for this comic book juggernaut. And I answered that call. At the time, I had done a number of comedic short story pieces for a comic book anthology, and I was already starting to feel the labeling effect (“Oh, he’s a comedy writer, what would he know about horror or realistic comics?”). So, I set out to do some serious pitches.
All rejected.
So, I gave in and put together a comedy pitch. I was at the park one day with my kids and noticed a group of elementary school kids horsing around when I started wondering what that same situation would be like if they were all gods of mythology (since I was a big fan of mythology growing up). I quickly put together a pitch with the Norse gods as elementary school kids and sent it out.
No response. Not even a rejection. So, I tossed it aside and pressed on with other projects.
A fantasy land…
One of those was a fantasy comic… a “tongue-in-cheek jab at Dungeons & Dragons conventions” with this artist I had met at a comic convention in Chicago (where I had done a portfolio review for him). We’ll call him Seth. While we were working on this pitch for this comic, we talked about how it might be easier to pitch if we build up at least a small audience for our work. We figured the web would be the easiest (and cheapest) way of doing that, so we discussed some ideas.
I went against doing Arazel & Xarenia (yes, the characters that have been guest appearing in Brat-halla) because I wanted to make a print comic of them and didn’t figure people would buy something they could read online for free (I was very naieve in the ways of the webcomic when this took place nearly 5 years ago). But we wanted it to be in the fantasy genre, so the readership could easily translate from the web to the print endeavor.
The comic needed some stripping…
Among those original ideas, I pulled out that pitch for that Norse comic. As a friend and successful comic book writer once told me (paraphrased), “if you have a good story, you should be able to pull out everything that ties it to one specific universe and it should still be able to stand on its own.” So, I took the characters back to their mythological roots and reworked it as a Spy-vs-Spy type of webcomic with Thor versus Loki.
As I was working on scripts, I started looking around for a place online where we could host it. I checked with a friend who was doing a fun little webcomic at fairly popular site. And his comic was coming to an end, so there was an opening there. We pitched the (still evolving) Brat-halla webcomic idea, and the editor there loved it.
But that was only the beginning… (to be continued)
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