I hate it when online recipes bore you with the life story of the author before you can get to the actual content so in that spirit here is the stuff this post promises! (If you want some context or to learn more after the fact read on.)
RUSTPUNKS
by Tim Demeter
So in my introduction post I mentioned that I’d been working on a story about carnies for some time and that I had actually made some major progress on it. That’s a true story. I had the entire story outlined in detail, had a good chunk of it scripted and had even finished these first six episodes.
I’m actually extremely proud of the result. They’re a little bit prose, a little bit comic book, a little bit graphic design and a little bit animation. Basically a combination of all the things I enjoy creating. This is why I call them episodes and not issues. These are NOT comic books even though when people make me describe them as something that exists that’s what I call them. Regardless, I think they’re neat and I had a blast making them. Especially given I’d never worked in any animation software ever before. (By episode 6 the effects are getting pretty cool if I do say so myself.) Said animation is understated and is intended to serve the flow of the story. They are NOT intended to be low budget cartoons. I hate the sort of motion comics where it’s just “Hey look! Wolverine’s arm moves!” and I don’t have the time/resources to create a fully animated project on my own. I did want to play with some of the ways shows like Samurai Jack use movement to convey mood though and this is the result.
So why did this stop at episode six if I’m clearly so in love with my own work on this one? Well, as I implied in that same intro post, my world kinda went sideways two years ago and when it did this project got derailed for a number of reasons that are long and boring.
HOWEVER -- If you dig these as much as I do, take heart! They’re coming back. Sort of. The new title of the project is The Midway Man. It stars a reworked version of the same lead character, still takes place in carnival culture and will still be an experiment that mixes all of these different storytelling mediums. (With a new/old component added into the mix…) It’s gonna be cool. My revisions to the “show bible” are due to my editor on May26. Look for updates after that.
A couple notes about these episodes:
These links will NOT be broken as of March 31st 2020! Thanks for all the likes. As promised, I've fixed these.
The “jump to a different episode” button doesn’t work. Sorry. It used to take you back to a table of contents page but I’m using that hosting account for this site now. It will just take you to an empty landing page now. [I fixed this too. It goes to a pretty plain TOC now but it works.]
The Kabuki Robot brand is proto-Quixotronic. It’s also the name of a comic my ex-wife made in grad school. She graciously offered to let me keep that name but while it does reflect my brand not so much for the rest of the Quixo group so that’s the story with that.