I’ve never been a real fan of indie comics, preferring to con myself into believing that I didn’t want to get attached to characters that wouldn’t last their creators’ interest span. Sure, I missed out on a lot of wonderful diamonds and gems, especially “indie classics” like Strangers in Paradise, Hellboy and Lone Wolf and Cub, but I stayed secure in the fact that, no matter how bad the Nova plotlines were, or how forgettable the New Warriors became… they would still be around… mostly. If there’s one thing to be said about indie comic creators, though, it would be their ability to adapt to the ever-changing demands of the readership, or to push the boundaries of what’s already been defined.
In 2010, the first of these are the team of Todd Denis and Black Sheep Studios, with their experimental comic – Rekill. Their goal, to get 1 million fans on their Facebook page, in order to secure investors to fully develop the project.
Oh, and there’s a talking baboon that doesn’t appreciate being called a “monkey”.
At first, the world of Rekill hardly seems like a groundbreaking concept. Conceived by Todd Denis in 2003, it revolves around cloning history’s Most Wanted (e.g. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc.) for others to hunt – like some cartharsis-inducing real-life version of a computer game. The whole clone plot device are as passe as Ben Reily, and the sci-fi dystopia is a literary topos honestly done to death. In fact, a senior of mine once wrote a similar story when he was 15 for his Individual Research Study (the ancient predecessor to the now villified Project Work).
What makes Rekill different is their conviction to set an otherwise impractical goal: 1 million Facebook fans. So far, they’ve reached their first milestone, 5000 fans, and have therefore released a prequel comic, entitled “The Particle Void”, as promised. Ideally, this would be an impetus for even more people to indicate their fan-dom via Facebook. In fact, because I believe in the concept behind this experiment, I am encouraging as many as I can to give Rekill a chance, just to prove that an indie comic is “socially viable” in this day and age.
The page is http://www.facebook.com/rekill
