Broken Frontier

At Chicago Comic-Con, Walter Koenig, famous for portraying Pavel Chekov on the original Star Trek and Alfred Bester on Babylon 5, talked about his recently signed comics deal with Bluewater Productions. Broken Frontier chatted with Koenig briefly between his meetings with fans and autograph seekers.

BROKEN FRONTIER: What can you tell us about your upcoming projects with Bluewater?

WALTER KOENIG: I just signed a deal to do graphic novels for Bluewater. One will be a compilation of stories I had done in the 90s about a character I created called Raver. They’re going to bring it out as a graphic novel and I’m going to add another story to it.

[Raver, originally published by Malibu Comics in the 1990s, follows the twisted adventures of a man with the power to reshape reality based on his own psychoses. Each episode of mental breakdown experienced by Raver alters the world around him, transforming it into the stuff of his own nightmares. Raver’s powers continually create new worlds, creating potentially limitless story potential for the series, but making a return to the real world an ever elusive goal for the protagonist.]

WK: The second one will be a series of stories that will eventually become a graphic novel called Things to Come. It’s my twist on vampires after the apocalypse. They’ll both be published in 2011.

[The current popularity of vampires in our culture makes the timing of this series fortuitous. However, Koenig stresses that his vampires are different from what’s come before. No sparkles or romance here, only the existential quandary of a new race of creatures born from humanity’s destruction of the planet. Koenig’s vampires appear to be a bridge between the human race and what will come after them, though he was hesitant to reveal just who or what that will be.]

BF: Do these projects already have an artist attached to them?

WK: They have artists attached to both already but I don’t remember their names. This all happened just a while ago over the weekend. So I’m not yet as familiar with everybody as I should be.

[Broken Frontier has learned that artist Nathan Ooten will illustrate Things to Come, with a cover image by GMB Chomichuk, featured above. Gregg Paulsen provides the cover for the Raver collection, though there is no word yet about who will be assigned to the new story Koenig is writing.]

BF: How did these collaborations come about?

WK: What happened was that I wrote a novel called Buck Alice and the Actor-Robot which has been made into a 45 actor radio drama. It will be released through Brilliance Audio in November. And a gentleman called Jerry Robbins, who was involved with the radio drama, had his own deal through Bluewater and he put me in touch with them. So that happened last Thursday or Friday and I got the contract, signed it, and they brought me some art to look at over the weekend.

BF: Are you still acting or taking a break from that world?

WK: I’m acting whenever the opportunity arrives. Those opportunities aren’t there that frequently but I need to be busy. Nothing right now though.