Posted in: Comics, Digital | Tagged: Comics, kickstarter, pandas

Kickstart From The Heart: The Pandas Show

Published Thu, 08 Aug 2013 17:30:26 -0500

Bleeding Cool's Kickstarter Correspondent, Shawn Demumbrum has lead three Kickstarter campaigns to launch comic books, two successfully funded and one that wasn't. Each week he will point out some of the unique Kickstarter projects that wouldn't normally be published by the big comic book companies, but deserve your attention. Shawn is the Manager of Comic Book Programming for the Phoenix Comicon. He is currently working on the Nothing Can Stop Me Now: Stories Inspired by the Songs of Nine Inch Nails.

Today, we talk to the team behind The Pandas Show Kickstarter Both have worked on digital comics for Mark Waid's Thrillbent imprint and on Marvel Infinite Comics. Mast and Geoffo have both worked together on Pax Arena, a sci-fi action mystery, and The Walking Pandas, a parody of Walking Dead cast by Pandas. Their Kickstarter expands the Panda Universe beyond the Walking Dead and beyond just digital comic books.

Tell us about the Pandas Show. Is it an extension or possibly expansion of the work on the Walking Pandas?

G: Yes, totally. We had fun doing The Walking Pandas so we thought, why not push a little further and have fun with anything from the geek and pop-culture past and present?

M: The Pandas Show allows us to mock anything from the recent movies, comics & music albums (Man of Steel, Game of Thrones, Justin Bieber) to people a bit forgotten nowadays like Charles Bronson, Mr T. or Justin Bieber. We plan to make new parodies of The Walking Dead inside The Pandas Show's episode, during halloween, thanksgiving and christmas.

It seems like the Pandas Show Kickstarter is an ambitious campaign. Digital Comics. Video Games. Print Edition. Why so many projects at once?

G: We're part of a generation surrounded by different mediums (comics, mangas, animation, movies, games) and we want to create stuff that will appeal to this audience. Now, the project is ambitious, definitely, but we're confident we can make it.

M: In fact, it's been almost two years now since we started to work on several mixed-medias & transmedia projects. I'll quote the great Chuck Wending for those who don't know what Transmedia is. It's when you "take a single story or storyworld and break it apart like hard toffee so that each of its pieces can live across multiple formats." For us, it's one of those few things that could make comics interesting again for the younger audience.

G: We're french and in France, the two or three big publishers that can handle that kind of big projects mixing comics, video games & social networks seems genuinely interested in the Transmedia concept but always get cold feet in the end, often telling us market doesn't exist yet and that we should all wait a few months and see what happens then.

M: True story. We developed several Transmedia projects, touching on the Western genre to modern action & thriller stories and were in talks with several of thouse publishers for a long time, but at some point… Well, let's say that instead of waiting, we thought we could try something else and see if we could work on a cross-media project and get it crowdfunded.

G: One thing we do – and that make it easy for us to manage mixed-medias projects – is we work mostly on Flash and Photoshop, what we call the "100% digital strategy". That allow us to use our graphic assets for the comics and the video games without too much trouble. So really, it's not so much several projects at once, it's one big project.

Why Kickstarter?

M: Because in the public eye, we thought Kickstarter was synonymous of crowdfunding. It also has the highest rate of successful projects, a rather clear and visually attractive design and a pro-comics and video games public who regularly attends the website.

G: We were also very tempted by Indiegogo, which was more attractive to Europeans because of the possibility of paying by Paypal (on Kickstarter, you have to use Amazon Payments).

Why Panda Bears?

M & G , together: Because pandas are cool!

I really enjoyed your Kickstarter video have you considered making the Pandas Show an animated series?

G: Haha, yeah, of course. Even if our "100% digital strategy" and the use of Flash can save a lot of sweat and time, it still is a lot of work. We need people for the animation, for the voice acting and the sounds… And money, obviously.

M: Geoffo graduated at LISAA – an animation school in Paris – and I did a Film Studies degree, so we're definitely opened to do animation on any of our projects,as long as we can have a team to help us. It's such a perfect fit for transmedia projects, it'd be a shame not to consider it.

How do you create comics for screens vs print?

M: I think it's time for us to say that we call the kind of comics we do "Turbocomics", from the "Turbomedia Medium". It's a term widely used in France since 2010, that was created by Yves "Balak" Bigerel and Gobi, while drunk.

G: You may know Balak as "that guy" who did "About Digital Comics" in February 2009, which set up the format/canvas you can find now on Marvel Infinite Comics, Thrillbent Comics, DC² etc. It allows the reader to navigate simply using either mouse clicks or arrows on the keyboard (or by slinding/touching if read on tablets & smartphones).

M: Balak's work came after Brendan Cahill's Outside The Box (2002), John Barber's Vicious Souvenirs (2003), Trudy Cooper & Danny Murphy's Planitum Grit (2007), Laichi's Triptyykki (2007), Nocturnal-Devil's Siblings (2008)… What I mean is, digital native comics created FOR the screens have a long history, I love Balak to death but you can't reduce it to one person, that's why we like the "turbocomic" word. It's a stupid word like only the internet can adopt.

G: Whatever you choose to call them, working on digital comics is a completely different way of thinking. With the turbocomics, you don't need to fill the pages, and that changes everything. You don't think in term of « I have my blank page, how can I fill it to do a cool narration » anymore. You can surprise the reader each time he goes to the next screen.

M: Digital and paper as WE see them are two different mediums. But they're not opposing each others. We can see that with all the print comics adapted from the Marvel Infinite Comics, nothing prevent the digital production to come to the print medium. And in both case, you want to tell a good story above all.

G: You just don't pick every drawing from the digital comic and put them on the printed version. It's a new job in comics. Make digital comics work on paper.

The Pandas Show is your third digital comic with Thrillbent. Thrillbent has really been pushing the definition of what digital comics are. What has it been like creating digital comics under the Thrillbent imprint.

M: Thrillbent is one of the best places to go if you want to make original and fully creator-owned turbocomics. I have nothing but good things to say about the guys from Thrillbent, they were always very helpful during the making of Pax Arena season 1, offering production and technical advices, even when they were all snowed under sixteen tons of work.

G: Something great with Thrillbent is that Mark Waid let people do whatever they want as long as the story and the art is good. He doesn't want to just do super-hero comics. Each weach you can find a bunch of installments from very different series (and FOR FREE). Thrillbent now has a few comics for kids as well. For young creators like us, it's a way to get exposure and meet people who share the same interest in digital comics.

M: It only belongs to us to push the boundaries of turbocomics and take advantage of the freedom Thrillbent gives us. We're working hard on Pax Arena season 2, which will be longer and as you can see, we launched our panda themed series, because, like Geoff said, Mark welcome all kind of series. The Walking Pandas & The Pandas Show are nothing like Pax Arena, again, it's more something we do when we want to have fun.

How is writing for digital comics different when you are telling a story from a panel view vs. a page view?

G: With the turbocomics, you can stretch out a scene, make it last, set a particular mood. You don't have to do 20 or 22 pages. You can go anywere from 1 to 200 screens – if you have a good story. For the Infinite Comics, Marvel tends to stick between 40 and 60 comics. Not too long, not too short.

M: I'm not writing digital comics like I would do for print comics. Basically, it's very close to the Marvel Way. We have an outline for the episode, I'll do a first draft of the storyboard, then Geoffo and I talk about it – in Pax Arena's case, we showed the storyboards to Balak too – and then after hours and hours of talks, Geoffo does the final storyboard draft. It gives us the chance to try the effects and make sure the pace of the story works. It's only when I got the final screens drawn by Geoffo that I'll start to script and put the final dialogues in.

What role does storyboarding play in guided view comics?

G: Just like for a movie, it's essential. It help you visualize, create that one effect that will really help the narration and push the boundaries further. Without that, you'd tend to do rookie mistakes.

M: Agreed. Like, when people only doing "reveal panels" (that's when you just show one panel at a time, very very boring) and just use the whole space of the screen for one panel, basically doing splash pages on the whole comic, it's screwing up the rhythm of the turbocomic. While when do several storyboards for this kind of comics, you can adjust the pace and correct the storytelling.

G.: Yeah, the storyboard shows you how your turbocomic will look like, where it works, where it doesn't. Marvel understood that and recruited Balak to do the layouts on the Marvel Infinite Comics. It's an odd job, but a necessary one.

M: We're now working since a few months for Marvel, doing storyboards as well, and we do feel we're making a difference.

With only a few days left in your campaign, you have a challenge to reach your goal, but it's not impossible. What would you say to those who haven't pledged to your campaign to convince them to pledge.

G: Please keep pledging, even if we don't succeed (damn you holidays), it matters to us. We're trying to bring something fun to the table and we want to keep giving our digital stuff for free online.

M: Yes, that's something really important for us. We tried to put what we think are interesting Kickstarter packs, but if you help us, we can indeed keep going on that road and put our work on the torrents & Warez forums.

G: So if you like pandas & parodies & french people, you know what to do to make Justin Bieber and us happy.

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