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DESTROY DYSTOPIA: WEBCOMICS DONE RIGHT

November 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

ddbanner2 DESTROY DYSTOPIA: WEBCOMICS DONE RIGHT

Optimum Wound has a few other kindred spirits out there putting out amazing work online.

Christian Krank is a lunatic mad fucker. And a very talented one as well. I first read Christian’s work last year when he contacted me on MySpace. His comic Destroy Dystopia is a truly sublime and engaging experience. He mixed 17 million different elements into a blender and out came a psychotic new webcomic.

His pages while being quite densely layered are easy to follow. He’s from Germany and had the balls to pull off a story in English. He describes DD as a “kind of b-movie with splatter effects. Even so the later chapters seem to deviate from that.”
Destroy Dystopiae5 DESTROY DYSTOPIA: WEBCOMICS DONE RIGHT

Our friend Kenneth Ashcraft put a blurb on webcomicsnation.com stating: Killer art and badass story this comic takes the graphic novel to new levels!! A must read!!

Inside and out, front to back; this comic is the best I have seen on the internet so far. It reminds of Cybernary from back in the day and a little Bladerunner plus something all new. Keep an eye one this one boys and girls, this comic is gonna hit the big-time!!!
That’s pretty damned accurate.

Christian is one of Dave McKean’s children. What I mean by that is Dave was one of the first to scan his drawings into the computer and then go to town with multiple layers of textures and Photoshop coloring underneath. Ashley Wood and Ben Templesmith employ techniques that are variations on this.

And Christian is taking it into another direction altogether.
If you dig cyberpunk, manga, ultra-violence, Judge Dredd, The Road Warrior, Bladerunner, Ghost In the Shell or just a mind-bending bloody trip through the future, Destroy Dystopia is your ticket. Take the ride.

He’s got a shitload of pages posted. Pay attention to the backgrounds as he has a lot of things going on within each panel.

You can find the man himself on MySpace. Look him up.
He’s making us all up our game.

Through his webcomic he ended up working with Clifford Meth and Rufus Dayglo as the colorist on the graphic novel Snaked DESTROY DYSTOPIA: WEBCOMICS DONE RIGHT for IDW Publishing.
From there he continued on with Rufus on Tank Girl: Visions of Booga DESTROY DYSTOPIA: WEBCOMICS DONE RIGHT. He’s a hell of an artist.
Gotta drink me one of those Neuro Turbos someday.

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Richard Serrao’s new online graphic novel, Silent Scream

October 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

silent screamwcnheader Richard Serraos new online graphic novel, Silent Scream

It’s been a long time since one of the core OpWound creators has launched a new webcomic. The wait is now over. Richard Serrao’s new online graphic novel is now live. It will update with 3 new pages every Thursday over at webcomicsnation.com.

The goods.
Silent Scream is about a stripper named Bouncing Betty who goes on a kill crazy rampage taking out mobsters, pimps, hit men, pedophiles and any other low-lifes you can think of and along the way she becomes partners with a two man kill team who teach her a thing or two about hunting and killing two legged prey.

I got Rich to write a few words on his new story.
The original idea only involved her and it was called 13 the Hard Way and was about her time working for the Triads as a hitwoman. The other part of the story involving a hitman and his partner was originally pitched to Marvel comics as a very dark and violent Punisher mini story about 3-4 years before Max was created and of course it was rejected for being too dark and too violent. So…that left me with all of this material finished and no one wanting it. That’s when I decided to have a bit of fun with the stories and mix them together and see what happened.

I wanted to do a revenge story that I wanted to read, very reminiscent of the grind house films of the 70′s and 80′s. At the time Punisher Max didn’t exist and most of the comics out there were pretty tame with the exception of Preacher. I didn’t want to pull any punches so I made it with an over the top level of insane violence, sex and peppered it heavily with foul-mouthed dialogue and finally stirred it with a film noir sensibility.

Most of the comic scene has changed during the length of time that it took me to do the work for this GN but I still feel like no one has really touched on a story exactly like this one…Silent Scream pretty much wrote itself. For me the hard part was trying to get into the head of each character in order to understand how they would think and speak and still be able to walk away afterwards without losing who I was. It was sort of like method acting, immersing myself so completely into each character. It became a bit scary for me at the time because I was on Morphine in the Hospital hooked up to an IV unit. I was not allowed to eat for almost a week as tests were being run on me. Needless to say, writing when you’re hopped up is quite an experience to say the least.

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New pen and ink drawing by Richard Serrao.

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Nekropolis has been cancelled, change of course for OpWound

October 15, 2008 By 5 Comments

We’ve done a lot of hard thinking around here and made some big decisions. Plans have changed slightly.

King of Nekropolis is cancelled
The orders numbers came in from Diamond on King of Nekropolis and they were not large enough to justify printing the book. The reception was only about half that of our first book, Rex. Either people weren’t as jazzed about K.O.N. or we were the wrong publisher to put it out. Either way, we’ve killed the project. We will definitely continue to push Rex though. The webcomic continues to get a lot of readership which is encouraging. We’re extremely proud of that book.

Silent Scream starts on Thursday, Oct 16th.
We’ve got a new online graphic novel starting up this week, Silent Scream. It’s Richard Serrao’s first new work since Memento Mori. It’ll update on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the rest of the year and beyond. It’s another gritty crime revenger brought to you in glorious black and white. This is a wet one with plenty o’ bullets.

Build Your Own Comic Empire
We’re starting up the “build your own comic empire” blogs again. They’ll be similar to the ones we did last year on MySpace, but updated and will go into much further depth. There’ll be tutorials, reviews, interviews and tons of other info-packed blog posts that will help new creators further along in their journey. Oh yeah…and there’ll be videos now as well.

Optimum Wound Volume 1.
We’re going back to our original plans to put out our creation under one roof. This was where our heads were at back in 2005 and ’06. The plan is to drop a 160-200 paged affordably priced bomb on you every 3 months. Something that takes a while to finish, doesn’t empty your wallet and will leave you thirsting for more every new season. We started off as a group package and I feel I’ve let down our original fan base by veering off into other publishing endeavors. I spent a whole year worried what the comic mainstream thought about us when the whole reason we launched was to be another alternative to the status quo.
You’re going to be served up a steady diet of edgy and sometimes dangerous fare again. I feel our original voice has been lost and now I’m ready to bring it back 120%.

We’re putting together Volume 1 right now and will have it out in the Spring of 2009.

Hitting the ground running.
You’ll be seeing this blog update a lot more often. There’ll be commentary, Q&A’s and new artwork posted regularly. You’ll have a reason to keep coming back.
Thanks for sticking around this long. We’re just getting started.
-Jay

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