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Last Of The Midnight Screamers: A Pitch by Lee Barnett

Published Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:20:02 -0500

Lee Barnett, or Budgie, is an old friend. Seriously he's very old, positively ancient. Best known for the Hypotheticals panels with Dave Gibbons, although he still thinks he best known for his story in X-Men Unlimited #4, he's working on a new comic. Well, rather, an old comic. Take it away, Budgie.

OK, one thing that came out of Bristol was that Bevis Musson and I agreed that we are doing Last of the Midnight Screamers, as a 120pp OGN.

LoMS has a strange history – it was originally an idea of mine that I pitched to Marvel in the long ago (2004!) days of EPIC when they were going to do creator owned material. As you'll recall, that fell apart and although LoMS never happened, there were some books that were solicited and sold as four issue minis… but were then cancelled. At the time, the first issue of LoMS was scripted and I had a full plot for the remainder…

Since then, the script has been "sitting in a drawer", until a couple of months ago when Bevis asked if I had anything he could draw that was 'different'. (Bevis, of course, created Queen of Diamonds and Dead Queen Detectives, as well as doing the art on Tony Lee's Journal. And not to forget Finland! Finland! Finland!)

I sent him the script, and he stuck up some pages… after which we started getting queries as to whether we were now working on this. Well, Bristol answered that question – we are; the script has been rewritten for an OGN rather than a four issue mini-series and although we're not formally pitching it around until more's completed, we figured we'd tell people this is an active project now.

So, if anyone's interested…?

LAST OF THE MIDNIGHT SCREAMERS

A 120pp Original Graphic Novel

By Lee "Budgie" Barnett (writer and letterer) and Bevis Musson (artist)

"Horrible supernatural monsters seek

opposite for long term relationship.

GSOH essential…"

Simon Opfer is the last of his line.

They are the mythical "Victims", dating back to when the family was cursed in 1692 at a small town named Salem. All Opfers are damned to suffer horrific fates by supernatural means of one sort of another.

Simon's great-great-grandfather was on the ship that transported Dracula to Whitby. Simon's great-grandfather inherited the wanderlust of his father… and was killed on an expedition to the North Pole, while searching out some kind of creature said to have been created from the parts of dead men.

And so it continued. A great-aunt literally torn limb from limb when she stumbled upon a town of lycanthropes, a grandmother who fatally answered a question asked by a troll, and parents killed by zombies, while on a second honeymoon.

And so we come to Simon. Wilfully ignorant of his family's curse, he's as much a victim in romance as his family has been in death.

Simon's single, and childless… and that's a problem for the very real denizens of the Supernatural. For there's a legend that goes along with the curse: if the last of the Opfers reaches the mystical age of thirty-three years of age without issue, the legend states that there will be no more victims. Ever.

And Simon's about to have his 32^nd birthday.

So those that make up the big players of the paranormal have a job, something that makes the bravest and most fear-inducing of them tremble.

They set up a dating agency, with one client.

And this is the story of how it. All. Goes. Wrong.