17 April,2010 11:52 PM IST | | Janaki Viswanathan
American punk musician Wolfgang Parker lets fans pry online while he writes 1888, his debut graphic novel. The bad news: he needs donations to print it. The good news: you can pay to be a character
The foggy alley is lit faintly by gas lamps. The cloaked man lunges forward, knife on the ready, as the screen echoes with screams and fills up with a burst of red. Jack the Ripper inspires fiction again; this time a graphic novel. It's not out in print yet, these pages are up on the Internet.
Read, contribute, read
Punk musician Wolfgang Parker's first comic book, 1888, is available online even as it's still being written. The bad news: he needs fans to contribute financially, $6,000 in all, so that the book makes it into print. The good news: fans who contribute $10 get a PDF copy of 1888. A $250 contribution earns them a mention in the book, and a $500 donation means you can turn into a character. The bad news, again: there's just one slot left for a fan-inspired character. Deadline for contributions: May 23.u00a0u00a0u00a0
Why Jack the Ripper
The romance surrounding this brutal murderer, according to Wolfgang, was that he belonged to Victorian London, and of course, that he was never caught. The protagonist of 1888, Deklin Skurlock, is inspired by Wolfgang's adolescent years, a time when he was obsessed withu00a0 Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game. "For years, I searched for Jack the Ripper-inspired fiction but I never found the story I wanted to read, so I decided to write that story at some point."u00a0
The independent recording artiste decided to take 1888 online because he wanted to give fans a taste of his comic book creation. "I'll be posting video updates to the backers, showing how a comic book is created.u00a0 They will get to see the mechanics of telling a story with sequential art and words, and believe me, there is a lot more than meets the eye," he says in an e-mail interview.u00a0
The 170-page book that Wolfgang has been working on for two years, will be broken into four comic books.
So far, Wolfgang says, there haven't been pledges beyond $500, though there's still a month before the deadline draws to a close. Apparently, his teammates tried to get him to post a $1,888.00 USD amount for the book. "But I couldn't think of anything that we could give them as a suitable reward.u00a0 Well, nothing legal, at least," he says.
Become a part of the 1888
Log on to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wolfgangparker/1888-victorian-horror-graphic-novel To contribute, you'll need to create an account on the website.u00a0
