Broken Frontier

Dark Horse Comics and Felicia Day, star of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, are teaming up in a quest to bring one of the funniest online shows onto the pages of what will soon be the funniest comic based on a webisode, ever. Srsly.

Winner of the 2008 Greenlight Award at SXSW, as well as the 2008 YouTube Best Series and Yahoo! Best Series awards, The Guild is an online sitcom of web shorts written by, and starring, Felicia Day (Dr. Horrible, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, House). Since its formation, the show has racked up over twenty million viewers at watchtheguild.com.

The Guild follows six players, AKA “Guildies” (Bladezz, Codex, Vork, Tinkerballa, Zaboo, and Clara), who decide to finally meet in real life after spending months playing together in an online world. Their individual social dysfunctions lead to several problems in the real world, but together, as in the online game, they become greater than the sum of their collected baggage and start to become . . . well . . . kinda normal . . . er.

The online show now stands as one of YouTube’s most-subscribed series. It started as an independent project funded by fan donations via PayPal before being sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint in season 2. Season 3 will debut on Xbox/MSN/Zune on August 25.

The new comic, titled The Guild, was first conceived at San Diego Comic-Con 2008 when senior Dark Horse editor Scott Allie noticed that Day’s sharp wit and diverse talent would transfer well into sequential art. The series will be all-new material that expands on the actual in-game environment never seen on the show.
Allie stated, “Felicia’s amazing, and her writing will translate smoothly into comics. This’ll make a great companion to our line of comics. It’ll fit great alongside our webcomics and our Whedon books. And I’m really looking forward to working with her to get into some areas the show simply can’t because of budgetary reasons.”

The artist of the initial three-issue miniseries is undetermined, but the story will be penned by Felicia Day. Day, a self-proclaimed gaming aficionado, stated, “I’m really excited to work in a new medium and expand the Guild universe. The comics will be a great way for fans to become more involved with the characters, and see the characters interact in environments that we can’t afford to show in the web series. I can’t imagine working with a better company than Dark Horse. It seems like a perfect match for the show. Indie cred to the max!”