featurebanner_ericgrissom_interviewAMBER LOVE 01-JAN-2013 To kick off a new year of VODKA O’CLOCK, I was more than happy to welcome return guest ERIC GRISSOM to the show to talk about comic projects, lettering comics, social media, animals and science. Pretty much anything was fair game in this conversation.

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eric grissom phil sloan vodka o'clock award wild pig 2012Eric partnered with artist Phil Sloan and colorist David Halvorson to continue a new volume of DEADHORSE, a comic book mystery series with elements of political intrigue, sci-fi, and possible supernatural (or at least explainable by science) surreal elements. We spend time recapping the first part of the series and looking at specific characters and plotlines that grow in the new issue. Part of this involves the suicide of a Senator which was televised live. Personally, I think the way it’s handled in DEADHORSE is a tasteful way to make a potential trigger issue work as benign as possible. Also, if you want DEADHORSE in print, you must go to the site and pre-order it because they are not doing a substantial print run. Take a look at a few pages:

Question to the listeners: Do you subscribe to individual accounts for each book/title/show or do you prefer only to follow the creator?

The spiderweb of social media is overwhelming. Eric and I trash the financial model of Facebook’s paid promotions. It’s complicated for the fans who have to switch settings to “show in news feed” and not everyone is seeing what you post even with paid promotions. Eric experimented with various networks and hasn’t found a quantifiable return on the time/effort/money investment. Plus, if all you do is promote your products and your crowdfunding campaigns, that’s not the sort of activity people appreciate.

“I always, sort of, feel like I have to do it alone in the woods somewhere and come out and show it off.” ~ Intentionally quoted without context

PLANET GIGANTIC also started out online for free but has since been acquired by Action Lab Entertainment. David Halvorson switches from colorist to artist on this project with Eric. There’s a main ongoing story and a backup self-contained short feature planned for each issue. Expect a lot of strange creatures, robots and a world run by a women. As it turns out if you like that sort of classic sci-fi with a modern approach, both of us recommend BLACK SCIENCE written by Rick Remender with art team Matt Scalera and Dean White and published by Image Comics.

Eric’s storytelling takes yet another turn with CHICKENS, a tense story about relationships between anthropomorphized farm animals. Artist Claire Connelly perfectly captures tension and anxiety in this story. The animals and humans have been swapped in the Chickensverse. The humans are farmed for food but they are barely mentioned in the first story. The central characters live in a town where the economy relies upon the success of the slaughterhouse. Eric and Claire also have plans for COWS and PIGS all taking place in the same world.

chickens1 eric grissom claire connellyLINKS:

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