Dadtown

Dadtown refers in part to the fact that our heroine Mallory Loscoe lives in a colony town on another world where her father is the mayor. More significantly, it’s a phrase that suggests the themes of the story well, which are to do with discovering who you are and establishing your independence. This applies both to characters, and the colony itself, which in many ways is trying to recreate life on Earth though the planet Pria is very different, and there’s been no contact with Earth for centuries.

 

Tell us about Mallory…

Mallory Loscoe, a vain, petulant teenager who has been spoiled in ways that could only happen to the daughter of a corrupt megalomaniac. She has awesome hair, unlike her bald father Emmet, an overweight despot with a cuddly side and an allergy to the planet that causes him to blend his food in a nutritank that he’s constantly plugged into. There are robots too. They wear suits. And cute lizardy-chicken creatures called sneets. You can ride one home, then eat it. 

 

Where did the idea come from?

It all started years ago when I was stuck on a low budget film script about two brothers, one a failed musician the other with a driving school. I was sick of naturalistic British drama and the conventions that go with it, so I took a few days off to do something I was passionate about, where budget wasn’t a concern. And came up with this crazy space opera with a bizarre family relationship at the heart of it that wouldn’t be out of place in a Greek drama, alongside broken robots and a southern gothic in space feel. It just sat there for years, waiting for the right people to develop into something real, and those people are the art team Raben White and Jess Parry. It’s not just about their skills and commitment – we get on amazingly well as a team, and they share my conviction that if an idea has the right sort of wrong, then it’s worth pursuing. If we weren’t doing Dadtown, we’d probably be kidnappers.

 

Tell us more about the artist and colourist.

I can tell you very little about our artist Raben White, but I can tell you this. He grew up in Hong Kong, where he read lots of manga. And he has a parrot which he got a quail butler for, to tidy up after it. Then he wanted other quail to keep the first one company. Which also means he has lots of little eggs. 

 

Jess Parry is the youngest and most mature of the team. When she isn’t colouring comics she colours her hair. And she is making a computer game, something she’s studying at Confetti. She recently became a student ambassador, because she thought she was going to get some Ferrero Rocher. They haven’t told her yet. Raben and I might have to get her some instead.

 

You’ve released Dadtown as a serial online…

We have 8 pages up so far, another few every other Wednesday. The art team have a good chunk of pages complete and are working on new ones all the time. The whole story should run to around 120-150 pages, released in chunks of about 5 every update.

 

How do you feel about digital comics in general? 

Digital comics vary as much as any artform does. There are ones we like, ones we don’t. What’s great is nobody can stop you putting them out there, though that doesn’t mean people will read them. Some people are doing really interesting things with the form, and the benchmark for that kind of experimentation – always in the service of the story - remains Valentine, written by Alex de Campi and drawn by Christine Larsen . The story often uses the concept of layers on a page, which can be brought up with a click – the background is one layer, the foreground another, and something might appear on top of that, as does text. It’s done very well.

 

I also enjoyed Crossed: Wish You Were Here, by Si Spurrier and Fernando Melek, though be warned it is seriously dark stuff: http://www.crossedcomic.com. It’s a story that could work just as well on paper, and the same applies to Freakangels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. Really, I’m more about the story working than anything else: sometimes the bells and whistles get in the way of that.

 

How long does it take to put together a comic serial like this and what's your business model? 

Hmm. How long? Think of a long time. No, longer than that. Seriously.

 

And that’s fine. We’re all busy people doing this in what we laughably call our spare time because we love it. And it needs to be fun. 

 

Business model? We quite like what Minecraft have done, building their thing up to sell to Microsoft for billions. But for now we’re doing it because it’s fun. And that’s important. There’s a world out there full of mediocre corporate entertainment, tested on focus groups and precision-engineered. And sometimes that’s ok. Dadtown is more the bespoke kind of entertainment. If Minecraft are One Direction, we’re Xylophone Man, though I’d quite like us to be Gil Scott Heron.

 

What do you hope to achieve through Dadtown? 

Let’s see what happens. People have already been kind to us. Emmy-nominated filmmaker Patrick Lewtschanyn said “This looks awesome!” when he saw what we were doing. Science fiction writer Philip Palmer likes us. And so does Ian Douglas, a local writer who does sf and fantasy and says our site looks “stunning”. 

 

For now, that’s enough – along with the kind things lots of people who aren’t writers or filmmakers have said about Dadtown. It may be that we do a Kickstarter to collect the whole story in graphic novel form. If we’re lucky, a publisher might approach us about doing something like that themselves. We’ll see. Right now, the task for us all is to get the next page done.