A Crow Becomes a Phoenix

Last week I talked about how Feed Them to the Crows began. This time around, let’s dig into what happened next. Mario Candelaria and I had knocked out the three scripts together. We took turns bouncing between the panel breakouts and dialogue to the point where I cannot tell you who did what now. We were excited about this story. It has a climax that really packs a punch. The whole thing builds to that moment and it’s so much fun. We were holding something special and it felt like a live grenade. Where would we put this?

We were so sure of this book that we wanted to try to pitch it around. We had some opportunities at a couple smaller publishers and one slightly larger publisher. We worked with an artist to draw a few pages and meticulously worked on a pitch packet. This was it. We were going to send this in and the editors will love it and it will get picked up and we’ll be the next Robert Kirkman.

That did not happen. Literally, right after we sent in the pitch packet to the biggest opportunity and the warmest lead, there were a lot of shake ups at that particular publisher. The editor we were pitching wasn’t even there anymore. It was just DOA.

That certainly put a damper on things, but we were still excited about this story. Why not go the Kickstarter route? Our artist wasn’t particularly interested in that. I get it. They were going to do a lot of heavy lifting to bring this thing to life. The scripts were already written so our part was done. We were at an impasse. It was at that point that I figured Feed Them to the Crows was over. We tried, but this was one of those ideas that just wasn’t going to make it.

Until it did. We’ll cover off on more of this process next time. For now, please make sure to sign up for pre-launch for the Kickstarter campaign so you are notified when we set this thing live. The first issue is fully illustrated and colored. We’re just working through the letters right now.

While I have you in the Kickstarter mood, the campaign for The Dreamlands Anthology has officially launched. Please check out the campaign for a collection of TWENTY horror stories inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft including “Humanity’s Horrors” from myself and Roberto Duque. This story is killer, following Rhan-Tegoth, an Elder God that awakens to the present day, only to be horrified by what he finds.

I’m still working through my extensive video game backlog. This weekend I finished up my “good” playthrough of Infamous: Second Son. I absolutely loved the first two games in this series on the PS3 so I was excited to finally check out the next installment. The games are set in a world where some people, called Conduits (or “Bio-Terrorists” by the government) develop super powers. In this game, you play as Delsin, a young Native American guy who can absorb the powers of others. The kicker with these games is you decide what you do with those powers. Do you use them for good or for evil? The gameplay itself changes based on your decisions, as do the powers themselves.

The side quests in this installment were pretty repetitive and boring, like spraypainting certain buildings or finding and eliminating secret agents. The main story and the gameplay through it were solid though. I liked the twists in the story and how everything came together in the end.

I played the Good path first. I just started my Evil playthrough and I found that it’s tougher to do psychologically. Some of the choices you are forced to make are obvious in what you should do so you have to be particularly selfish to choose the Evil path. This game initially came out in 2014 and it was a very different world then. I am less interested in making the Evil choices in the present day. I think this would be different if the decisions weren’t as cut and dry, like those in TellTale Games, where you can’t possibly make everyone happy. This one is like the choice between helping a civilian lying in the street or literally punting them as hard as you can. Seems like an easy choice to make.