Also for the next issue, Da Silva plans to interview Doug Stanhope, co-host of Comedy Central's The Man Show, and to recruit friends and fellow local stand-up comics -- including David Kenny, Kevin Nelson, and Matt Haffer -- to write for free.
In the meantime, the group has set for itself a reasonably attainable goal: the launch in November of a comic book called Incorporated, based on Da Silva's Outcross comic strip. It's his "unintentional opus," he says.
Oscar Jimenez
Oscar Jimenez
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Incorporated is the name of a fictional detective agency that "performs other services," Da Silva explains. "Their fees are sometimes just money. Sometimes they're certain magical items. As long as you do what they want, they'll solve murder cases, find missing children. The tagline is: 'They're not the good guys, but they get the job done.'"
Incorporated is run by the Grecken family. In each generation, only one Grecken rules. At the story's onset, eighteen-year-old bisexual bombshell Ally Grecken inherits the company and recruits a new, two-person staff. In the first issue, the reader will meet handsome Henry Boyton, a cop from Orlando. "He doesn't have the best life, but it's a good life, and he's happy with it," Da Silva says. "Then something happens to his sister, and it's the first thing to slowly break down Henry's life." When Ally Grecken arrives with the means to save Boyton's sister, the cop becomes an employee.
In the second issue, due next January, Grecken hires Charlie Grass, a British cat burglar. "He's a bastard, but he's probably the most likable bastard you'll ever meet," Da Silva says. "He could push an old lady down the stairs, and then you'd look at him, and he'd give you a wink, and you'd think, 'Yeah, that was kind of funny.'"
In the third and fourth issues, Henry and Charlie begin to work on cases. Issues five and six will be expanded versions of plotlines already published in Outcross: A god offers Incorporated "anything" to retrieve something that has been stolen from him. Da Silva says that throughout the storyline, he will take mythology and religion and treat them in modern ways. "You find out that everything you've ever known about every religion or myth has been true, but the characters have had to live on since then."
Omar San Cristobal will lay out pages for Incorporated. "He draws sketches with almost no detail," Jimenez says. "Instead of details, he can do an actual storyboard as to where the story is going to go."
Frank Pellon, 21, will do what Jimenez calls "the breakdown work: facial expressions, shading, and clothing details. He'll do things like define the belt buckle and add pockets to pants."
Pat Pungpee will do the inks on the story, darkening the images and giving them depth. Pungpee has a good eye, Jimenez notes: "He'll put stuff into the panel that he sees is missing. Like one time, he inked for me, and I didn't draw the full background. In the inks, he added a car and buildings and clouds. And when he did that, he gave it a better feel to my characters talking in the foreground."
After the inking process, Jimenez himself will add color for the cover and grayscale for the inside, black-and-white pages by scanning the images into the computer and altering them using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
"We'd like a minimum of 500 sales locally with the first book," he says. "Nationally, we'd like 2000 to 5000." For an indie comic book, he explains, those are respectable numbers.
One of the group's primary methods for promotion is attending comic conventions. With booth after booth of comic book collectors, stores, and artists, conventions are the showrooms of the comic industry. Occurring every spring in Orlando, MegaCon is one of the largest such conventions in the country. The Outcrosscreators attended in 2001 and 2002, but had to forgo the trip last year because they didn't have the funds. With a new sense of purpose, they returned to the convention last month with four boxes of Outcrossback issues and went home with half, having sold roughly 240 copies. And they were on the receiving end of an interview of their own. "Stupid Sci-Fi," a Website (www.stupidscifi.com) of videos, reviews, games, and sci-fi news, features two alien puppets who crash-land on Earth and interview people involved in science fiction and fantasy. Outcross's third issue will, in turn, include an interview with the puppets.
Though Outcrosshas stumbled a bit in its attempts to bring its magazine to the masses, its creators are determined to move forward. "Meeting fans, getting feedback, selling books -- all of it helps keep us motivated," says Da Silva. "It's kind of like therapy, too. There's just something about seeing a 300-pound guy with a full beard and dressed as a Powerpuff Girl that makes you realize, 'My problems aren't that bad.'"
