The Origin of WCC: Enter the Pineapple

by Wendigo on September 11, 2014 at 1:45 pm
Posted In: Blog

So Danny and I had an idea, had somewhat of a direction, and all we needed was the proverbial wind in our sails to get going where we needed to. We were kinda screwed at the moment, because although Danny is a great artist in his own right, he really wanted to focus on the writing with me. Now I on the other hand can’t draw for shit. So who was gonna do art for us? We drew up a rudimentary flyer and decided we’d take a shot walking around some college campuses near us. We pinned as many of them as we could to the corkboard announcement…things. You know, those bulletin boards that say “There’s a new class going on somewhere in that area of the school” or “Found: 1 small child. Answers to “Kyle”. Or whatever. Anywho, we did that, and sat back and waited a bit. We actually did get several responses, not all of which were that promising. The biggest problem we were getting with the people that responded was they all seemed to have a certain art style, or they only liked to art on certain genres of topics. We heard from a buncha people that would ONLY work on Manga style comics, and others that would only do horror/goth style shit. They may have all been great at arting in their own rights, but they didn’t seem to catch our eye, and we had an idea of making LA Crazy Town more of a dark humor style book. Pro Tip: Drawing someone/something with blood dripping down from their lips DOES NOT = Horror. Horror is psychological. It’s that terror of what MIGHT happen, as opposed to just showing some big monster thing with blood and goop all over it. Anywho, again, back to the story. We got an email from a guy named Joshua Pina. Now, it’s supposed to have the ~ over the “n” in Pina, and for those in the class that didn’t know, that means Pineapple in Spanish. Also, Hola, me llamo Chris. Enough of that shit. We got back to him and asked if he could art up some specific things for us. I can’t remember how long it took for him to get back to us, I think it was only about a week or so, but he did EXACTLY what we had wanted. Danny and I just looked at each other and like an ’80s sitcom we jumped up, high-fived and freeze framed there in the air for like 10 seconds. When we landed, we knew we had found our artist, and more importantly…Pineapple makes salsa badass. Win win win.

More to come…

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The Origin of WCC: A New Hope for Comics

by Wendigo on September 10, 2014 at 1:40 pm
Posted In: Blog

So, Danny and I have been working on LA Crazy Town for a little while now, but I wanted to give you guys an idea of how much work has really gone into our book. A few years ago, I believe it was in 2008 or 09, I decided I wanted to learn something new and looked for a college to enroll into. I was actually thinking about trying to find courses that could help in writing for video games. See, ever since I was a wee little cub, I’ve always enjoyed video games, not as much for the way they look and present themselves, but more for the story and the characters. I’ve always felt that a game is one of the best ways to tell a story, mainly because it’s interactive. I can watch a movie/read a book, but when I finish it, and wanna watch it or read it again, it’s still gonna be the same story I know. I may pick up on a few hidden gems of insight I missed before, may see it slightly different than I did the first time, but it’s not gonna change what happens in the end. I already know what the climax is, so it’s not gonna blow my mind to see the good guy get the girl, take down the bad guy, and everyone put on smiley faces and shit. However, a game is interactive, as I said before, so now I’m controlling the story. It’s me on that screen jumping on goombas or nuking a city. I’m not telling a story, I’m living it (so to speak). Anywho, I enrolled into a school and not that long after I met Danny. He was quiet. I mean like…REALLY quiet. I met a bunch of other guys there, mostly people 10 years or more younger than me, but still some pretty alright guys. We had a small gang going there, about a dozen of us hanging out and working together on projects and shit. Well, Danny and I got to talking at one point and he mentioned that he was there because he really wanted to write for comic books, and was hoping the school could help guide him in that direction. Now, to be honest,  the guy that I talked to when I first enrolled (which was the same guy that Danny talked to when he did) pretty much just told us what we wanted to hear to get us to join up. I’m not upset about that, I get it. He was trying to get people to sign up, so he may have embellished a little to make us happy to say yes. However, truth be told, the school wasn’t that great for what Danny or myself was looking for. Now, if you want to learn about Game Art and Design, hell yeah it’s great for that, but not what we were there for.  But, if it hadn’t been for that school, I seriously doubt that Danny and I would’ve met, and we wouldn’t have had our epiphany together about writing a comic. That’s really what the whole gist of this little tale is; while we were there at the school, we started working on our comic here and there, coming up with characters, their personalities, places, landmarks, etc. One thing that really helped us with our characters was playing a couple MMORPGs together, namely City of Heroes/Villains, and Champions Online. Those games let us design our comic book heroes and villains and put them on the screen, as well as adding bios for them to showcase our own writing talent and such. Well, long story short (too late), when we left that school we probably had a healthy stock of about 100 or so characters created, at least a dozen or so landmarks/settings written out, and a few ideas for storylines to work on. So we started writing. And writing. AND WRITING. I can’t remember the last accurate count right now, but I think at this point we have over 200 characters, and even more ideas for storylines, as well as several ideas for entirely different comics too. The next step for us however, was to get an artist.

To Be Continued…

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