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Pewfell Goes Down The Drain Of Chaos

Published Sun, 30 Nov 2014 11:00:27 -0600

Pewfell in: Drain of Chaos by Chuck Whelon, Kickstarter Graphic Novel Project. Running now through Thursday Jan 8th @ 11pm. Print edition to be released at close of the Kickstarter.

The world's most irresponsible wizard, is about to face his greatest challenge yet: fatherhood!

His wife pregnant and his home collapsing, wizard Pewfell takes a job with the Spirekassle city sewer patrol. But with a zombie-mad dictator running the government and a bloodthirsty army of chaos outside the gates, this may not be the best time to start a family. Join our hero as he deals with dirty diapers, unreliable contractors, idiotic co-workers, and a diminutive blue lodger hell-bent on a career in musical theater…

I'm Chuck Whelon, the creator of the Pewfell and I've just launched a Kickstarter for "Drain of Chaos", the latest graphic novel collection in this long-running webcomic series.

Pewfell is best describes as a semi-autobiographical, epic fantasy sit-com. It's a domestic comedy about an incompetent wizard named Pewfell, his wife Tina the warrior princess, and Gnoma, the small blue gnome who squats in their basement and makes Pewfell's life miserable. It's just like my own life, only with more zombies.

I began putting Pewfell out as a self-published black & white 'zine back in the early 1990s, when I still lived in my hometown of Basingstoke, England. In the mid-90's I moved to San Francisco, California, taking Pewfell with me and I started putting the strips up on the web shortly thereafter. The strip finally became a daily webcomic shortly before the year 2000 in full defiance of the millinium bug. It was soon picked up as one of the charter strips on Joey Manley's ModernTales.com. Since then it has appeared on Drunk Duck and ComicFury and has been complied into a series of comic books that are currently being released on ComiXology.com.

"Drain of Chaos" is the culmination of my many years work on the strip. It's a complete, and self-contained tale, in full color, clocking-in at 158 pages. And it hasn't been put out in an affordable, widely-distributed print edition until now!

When I first wrote this story, my own wife, Tina, was pregnant, and gave birth shortly before Tina the Warrior Princess does the story. I continued drawing the strip for a few years, but un-surprisingly I started getting busy drawing more stuff for kids, so never really got around to putting Drain of Chaos out in print. I worked doing loads of children's maze and activity books for Dover publications, LeapFrog Toys and others. I did a bunch of cartoons for Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and also worked illustrating a number of boardgames for Minion Games (some of which I'm offering as Kickstarter rewards). Now my son is 12 years old, and I'm suddenly feeling motivated to start drawing Pewfell on a Regular basis again. I figured that a Kickstarter for a new print edition of Drain of Chaos would be a great way to kickstart the whole process.

When it originally appeared, "Drain of Chaos" was a black and white, newspaper-style, daily web strip. This new print edition is fully-colored, and has been extensively enhanced and re-formatted, with many panels being re-drawn at a larger scale to fit with the comic book format and to better depict the setting and the epic chaos horde vs. zombie police battle scenes.

There are, of course, several Kickstarter pledge levels to choose from, including eBook, trade paperback and hardcover versions of the book itself. There's also original art, copies of my previous Pewfell Books, and some of the boardgames I've has illustrated for Minion. Plus there is a funny video of me making an ass of myself. The project has already been highlighted as a 'Staff Pick' on Kickstarter.

SPECIAL OFFER FOR ALL BLEEDING COOL READERS: As a special thanks for reading this article on Bleeding Cool, just message me with the code LEGITIMATELY COOL when you back the project for any amount, and I will send a you FREE print-and-play copy of my boardgame Legitimacy along with any other rewards you qualify for.