That’s Murderdrome Official Merchandise, you maggots!
These are works in progress, but, if you’re in the Belfast apple store queue on Friday night/early Saturday morning, you could well be getting a freebie…
UPDATE
I’ll be at the Apple Store either late Friday night (around 11ish) or early Saturday morning (around 6ish) (or maybe even both times). Take a FREE T-Shirt (limited numbers!), get your photo in the local press (if they’re there!) and let me know about it (at our usual address) upon verification, I’ll send you some of my 2000AD artwork - ORIGINAL, PUBLISHED 2000AD comic art. Bargain.
So, just received a much anticipated email that tells me that… yes… project codenamed ‘Little Ducks’ can go ahead (I’m starting to think that my ‘Secret Project Name Generator’ should be on the App store).
What is it? I can’t say. I’d love to say. But I can’t. But… it’ll be free. And brilliant.
Now we now we can go ahead, it shouldn’t be too long before we have a working mock up. And from there, a final comic.
Not ones for sitting on our hands lamenting, infurious has been furiously working on it’s next big project. And here it is: EyeCandy - comics for kids. For 99cents you get a goofy little comic (featuring all the same coolness as the murderdrome comic, ie you can skim through to the inks and to the pencils - which are super simplified to help kids copy the artwork) and we’ve added some funky extras - every panel can, with the press of a button, become a colouring in page. Up will pop a little palette and off you go colouring. And, is if that wasn’t fun enough, every issue will feature a very cool little ‘toy’ - issue 1 has a googley eyed horse. Shake him and listen for the whiney… (While his eyes roll around his head…)
Watch it on youtube, and, in the next week or so, you’ll be able to download it for your iPhone/iPod touch for just 99cents.
The infurious digital pixies (Phil and me) are busy at work putting the final touches to Eye Candy our second project. Eye Candy will be under the BLUE PILOT software banner, for reasons that will become apparent.
We expect to have it with Apple in a couple of days, and then we wait… should be no problem with content on this one or the next…
We’ve gone from one ‘banned‘ comic, to a heap of content. Project Number Two is almost complete and we’ve got three more really impressive projects being built as we speak. As soon as they appear on the App Store, we’ll post the URLs here so keep an eye or even better, subscribe!
We’ve spent the last few days accosting strangers in cafés and showing them the MURDERDROME comic and watching their jaws drop when we reveal some of the features that didn’t even appear on the YouTube video. We’ve also had the opportunity to show it off at the last local Mobile Monday event.
As well as some really cool stuff we can’t talk about, we’ve been invited to demo the application at a local business networking event. The MURDERDROME comic #0, even without half the features, was described as:
“one of the most promising pieces of technology from the province this year”.
And, by ‘homing in on’ I don’t mean ‘deciding’ or ‘getting ready to think about’ I mean, in a couple of days we should be sending Project Number two to the Apple Store.
What to expect? Well… something different. So different we’re going a slightly different name (though, not that different). You’ll understand when you see it.
Personally, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this could just reinvigorate the comic book industry or create what the comic world has sorely needed for the last decade. I wouldn’t go so far to say that… but I’d defend the right of anyone who would…
This seems to be something of a double edged sword - our hits have gone through the roof but we’re drawing in a lot of people wondering what exactly is so exciting about a silent video of someone’s fingers swiping across an iPod touch screen. (To settle any heated arguments: it’s an iPod touch, I used the phrase ‘iPhone’ because it was shorter - the comics will work on either…)
So, right now, we’re looking at over 25k of hits. S’not bad. Imagine if I’d thought to include sound in that sucker!
Here at infurious HQ, I’m something of a leaky bucket. It’s just to darn-gosh-hard to contain the excitement of the stuff we’re doing. Yeah, it’s a shame about Murderdrome, but it’s certainly not dead. Just … waiting. In the meantime, if you hear the name John McCrea mentioned… well… you didn’t hear it from me…
While we’ve enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame, we haven’t forgotten that the whole point of this is to get some crackin’ good comics on the iPhone.
Just to be clear - we are absolutely in support of Apple’s decision to decline to accept material they find unsuitable for the audience, we are asking that they consider that the market is large and varied and what might keep one person happy is going to offend someone else. I’m sure that Apple will come to some decision regarding a ratings system on the App Store outside of games/entertainment appications.
In the meantime, it’s up to comic writers and illustrators to create their content for this new platform. We’re dealing with the first wave of comic creators at the moment and I hope we’ve not missed replying to each and every creator and attempting to keep you all informed.
