Intrepid verisimilitude

I said I’d have a little information about the next project I’m working on so here go. There's a couple of short side stories I want to tell first... But they're going to really short. The big project though...

I’ve mentioned that I love super-heroes and so do a lot of people. I mean, there’s a reason Captain America did so well at the box office. There’s a motion in a lot of comics and even webcomics to downplay the whole super-heroing aspect of super-heroes, like getting rid of the costumes or the secret identities, or just trying to not make them too “corny”. And to me, that’s like calling a story a fantasy story, but not having anything magical or enchanting in it, or calling a story a western and it doesn’t have any horses in it, or gun-slinging, or tumbleweeds. That’s part of the fun of those genre’s and to omit them just feels dishonest to me. If you want to do super-heroes, then Goddammit, be proud of it and do them. Yes, you should try to do them GOOD, but don’t be ashamed of it! Hell, if you do it good, then there is nothing to be ashamed of AT ALL.

Now this is a project I’ve had on the back burner for quite a few years, and with Shadowgirls premature ending, this project has been booted up to the forefront. You see, there’s not a lot of super-hero-like comics in the webcomic community. Oh, there are some to be sure, and some of them are pretty damn good. But they’re far outnumbered by the sheer amount of video-game reference books and slice-of-life books. And of those super-hero books, there's a small few that do it with pride and dignity, but it seems to be that the majority of them are mostly comedy series or parodies. And making a super-hero parody is like making a parody of Twilight: The jokes have already been told and it’s unoriginal. It’s too easy to be cynical. But telling a super-hero story with true verisimilitude, dignity, optimism and respect to the genre… THAT takes actual skill. And I think I can do it. Or at the very least, you’ll all get one hell of a great laugh at my sheer incompetence! :P

Now, is this in the same universe as Shadowgirls? Well, this series is it’s own story. (But don’t be surprised if a certain girl rears her glowing blue eyes around.) I don’t have a release date for this, as I’m still writing the script. (Which I'm totally having a blast doing.) But I want to get the entire first story arc (which is about 4 issues long) completed and drawn first before going live on the web with it. I also want to get the rest of Shadowgirls Season Two done before as well. I'll be keeping you posted regularly here about it's progress.

So I know I didn’t reveal too much, but I think you can get a good idea what I’m thinking. If you’re going to super-heroes, you can’t cower away from it, coming close to doing them, but then just pulling back enough, painfully disguising the series with some genre buzzwords like “deconstructionism”, or loading the book with rampant violence and near tasteless sexism… All in a vain hope that you won’t get taken less seriously by the elites.

You have super-powers and costumes. You need have verisimilitude. And you need to be…

...Intrepid.