Posted in: Comics | Tagged:

Eternifest – The Article About The Comic Book About The Festival That Never Ends

Published Sat, 08 Apr 2017 10:00:43 -0500

By Erich Onzik

Imagine, a world where every person around you is probably hallucinating. A vanity fair of massive proportions within a music festival that seems to have gone on forever. Vibrant and bacchanalian, humanity hemorrhages into the throes of tailgate parties, outdoor concerts, tent cities, and the occasional orgy glimpsed through dubious clouds of smoke.

You awaken there with a strange sense of deja vu. After your routine LSD kicks in, you're ready to start business as usual. Business is scoring tickets to the VIP tent, scoring more drugs between beers, remembering to eat, and checking out random sound gardens, bong yards, and hammock forests. Business is booming here at Eternifest.

How did it all come to this? Where does it all end? What's the goal here? Who wants to know? Chances are you're asking these questions much too late. For all is not exactly right at the festival that never ends. Greed and avarice still exist and thrives in the ranks of madmen and nitrous oxide mafiosos. One wrong move with them and you could end up with spiraling down a bad trip.

Such are the odd trials and tribulations society that somehow went to the people's party. Or was it the party people? After so much time, people are beginning to forget. To find out the answers, and survive, one must be adventurous. That's where we find our man, Deal, a mischievous drug dealer, on the run from the Nitrous Mob. Bad hombres who'd kick you to death for not buying their gaseous "Hippy Crack."

With the help of a few friends and lovers, Deal must solve the riddle of his life at the edges of Eternifest before the vicious Nitrous Mob catches up with him. Of course, they've got other, more insidious plans to execute while they irrevocably corrupt the general scene. Through the journey, Deal makes some alliances, encounters new campsites and mysterious festival grounds, makes love, and faces monstrosities that are both man and beast.

Originally conceived as a film, the music of Eternifest will rock out in the reader's head as an eccentric and luxurious graphic novel. The first collaboration between myself, Erich Onzik, and artist, Josh Mongeau. I developed the idea over the years to combine my love for comics and music.

Truly, it was a mental experience piecing together a sci-fi odyssey into a comedic and epic tale over the last few years. Turns out, a music festival can be a nigh mythical backdrop for a weird story about drug dealers. I reckon people who've been to one can relate the sentiment. Who hasn't found transformation and revelation within the visual stimuli of a raucous concert? I figure it'd be a great place to cut my chops as a storyteller in the graphic form. Although I do have some prior experience as the writer and penciler for my first graphic novel, "Rubbers."

Check out some of my stuff at www.rubbers-comics.com. You'll get something of a sampling of what I'm peddling these days. You might recognize the influence of psychedelia as inspired by the adult weirdness of "Zap" comics and basically all things by R. Crumb. There's nothing more satisfying than taking the oddities in life and weaving them into a story.

Eternifest, however, will be a step up, in my mind, because of the exceptional artwork conjured up by Mr. Mongeau. Josh is a seasoned artist with an extensive resume in art direction and graphic design. If you take a gander at his work at www.joshmongeau.com I think you'll agree that his style and skill will lend itself nicely to a colorful science fiction jubilee.

Josh and I met at a bar. It doesn't take much, but after a few beers, Josh and I got to talking comics and at some point, reached the topic of Jodorowsky, his films, then his comics and the artist he frequently collaborates with, Jean Girard aka Moebius. Stemmed from our combined love for their books, Josh and I hope to channel their strange and surreal style you find in books like "The Black Incal." Enthralled with Josh's own body of work, I pitched him the idea of Eternifest, showed him the script, and the rest is, as they say, history. I guess good things can come from drinking.

But Eternifest has a way to go to its fruition. For the time and man-hours it'll take to finish a 150 pages of high quality debauchery, we set up a Kickstarter goal at $10,000. Contributors get rewarded anywhere in the range of a handsome pdf copy of the entire 150-pages of debauchery, to being featured as a background character in the book itself. I mean, who wouldn't want to be in a comic book doing something crazy and stupid? If you like the cut of our jib then look for us on Kickstarter and consider backing what could be the most psychedelic comic book of our age. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, you'll find some redeeming social value in this mind-bending tale loaded with partygoers, monsters, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. Check out the art, check out the Kickstarter, and check us out too.

Let's make comics outside the mainstream. Let's propagate the strange and unusual and see how far it'll take us. After all, we're all in this together, and we've got to fight for our right to party. Join the fight, join the fun. In fact, let's design a world where the fun never ends. It's a comic book, it's a graphic novel, and it's a movement too. Move… towards the light.