Broken Frontier

Despite the near non-existence of the once popular format of genre based self-published comic books, a new ongoing comic book series named Dead Man Holiday, by first time writer/artist Colin Panetta, will have it’s first issue released on June 25th, 2008. This will be the premiere issue of Dead Man Holiday, although it says # -3 (number negative three) on the cover. The issue will be released via Mysterious Transmissions, the author’s own publishing company. Dead man Holiday is a science-fiction/ action comic, with storytelling sensibilities firmly rooted in independent film and small-press genre comics of the eighties and nineties. Dead Man Holiday # -3 is entirely black and white, with hand painted grey tones throughout, and runs 36 pages. The issue features guest art by Brandon Dawley (TheDawl.com) and Jeremy Gregory (HereThereBeRobots.com), available only in the print version. It will be made available in two formats simultaneously in June 2008; as a traditional pamphlet comic book, printed by POD comics printer Ka-Blam, and as a PDF download from DriveThru Comics, offered free of charge.

Plot: Dead Man Holiday # -3 introduces Thad Planck, a low-rent security guard in an imagined future where a section of the city he lives in has been flooded and abandoned. Thad’s in charge of patrolling this area, referred to as Little Atlantis, and has a mysterious supernatural encounter with a bizarrely-dressed, living skeleton. A Mexican wrestler, classroom violence and canine defecation also factor into the plot of this issue.
The plot and look of Dead Man Holiday is meant to emulate 80s genre films such as Evil Dead and Mad Max, but told from a much more personal perspective. This direction is borne of the artist’s dismay over most recent genre comics on the market being too superficial, and more personal comics being too mundane.

This is writer/artist Colin Panetta’s first self-published comic book, although he did previously produce the webcomic The X-Heroes. He is keeping a detailed journal of his experiences self-publishing Dead Man Holiday # -3 on his blog Hot Wax Mealworms, the specific entries of which are available here. The entry on offset printing was covered by Tom Spurgeon’s The Comics Reporter, Publisher Weekly’s The Beat and The Comics Journal’s Jounalista.