Broken Frontier

The names of Ian Culbard, Nick Plumber, Adam Adamowicz, Andrew Krahnke, Jacob Chabot and Rafael Silveira probably don't ring a bell with you. However, on January 4, 2006, you will become a little more familiar with these six gentlemen when they make their comic book debut in Dark Horse's New Recruits anthology.

In case you don't remember, the anthology is the result of the 'New Recruits Contest' Dark Horse held from late 2003 to early 2004 in the hopes of finding new talent. And the company did. The six finalists were asked to submit original stories, tales that will find their way to a store near you early next year.

Each Thursday, we take a closer look at one of these horsemen of the future so you can get more acquainted with them. On duty today is Nick Plumber.

Saluting the New Recruits - Part I: Andrew Krahnke
Saluting the New Recruits - Part II: Rafael Silveira
Saluting the New Recruits - Part III: Ian Culbard
Saluting the New Recruits - Part IV: Jacob Chabot

BROKEN FRONTIER: What do you do in real life?

NICK PLUMBER: I work part time for SCORE, a non-profit organisation that does counselling to small businesses, I write for Modern Drunkard Magazine, sing for the band Barstool Messiah, do independent film, and am the vice president of the Colorado Music Association.

BF: At what point did you decide to enter Dark Horse’s “New Recruits” contest?

NP: This kind of goes back to how I met Adam (Adamowicz, the artist on his entries).  I was bar hopping and met him at a bar called the Cricket on the Hill in Denver, we ended up hanging out at his place drinking beer after hours, and I saw all of his artwork.  It blew me away, and I decided that I had to do a comic with him.  I pitched ideas to him for several years until I had one he liked, and then wrote it.  He read it and said: “great, now sell it.”  So, I started sending out query letters to every company that would read them, and during that search I came across New Recruits and submitted some sample art from Adam and a script.

BF: Did you have any experience in visual storytelling before you sent your submission of to Dark Horse?

NP: I’ve written five screenplays, and worked on four different independent films, so yes. This is my first comic though.

BF: Many of today’s current writers and artists have been die-hard fans of comics ever since they were kids. Has becoming a professional comic book creator always been a dream of yours?

NP: The dream job for me is just the writing part, honestly comic book writing has never been a goal, I just had a story that seemed right for the medium.

BF: If you read comics during your childhood, which books appealed to you the most, and why?

NP: As a kid, I was a fan of the X-Men and Spiderman.  Later it was Nexus and The Badger, then Sandman.

BF: What about the current comic book landscape? What are some of your favourite reads today?

NP: Nowadays, I read a lot of web comics like Something Positive and local stuff like Stan Yan and Adam Air’s disturbing and rude comics that he did with Stale Ink.  I think there are a lot of small press indie comics out there that are fantastic, and the web has created a whole new low cost medium that gets ideas and artwork out there.

BF: Has your perception of comics changed, both in terms of comics as a medium and how the industry works, now that you’ve got a story being published at a major company?

NP: The industry is about how I imagined it, a whole lot of hurry up and wait.

BF: Why did you decide to enter the “New Recruits” program with the Pied Piper?

NP: Well, we were hitting the deadline, and Adam couldn’t do the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse script we originally wanted to do because it was 42 pages.  I’d already written Pied Piper as a vignette to go with a larger piece, and I liked the story, so we went with it instead. It is set in the same universe, but it’s a shorter and less complicated story.

BF: Where did you get your inspiration from when conceiving the story?

NP: I used to have this apartment in Chicago’s Wicker Park in the early Nineties when that neighbourhood was still scary.  I had rats, lots of rats.  I would lie in bed and hear them  scurrying through the walls.  I would set out traps and they’d disappear, I began to fantasize that the rats were building a big trap, baited with beer, and that I’d go into the kitchen and go “Oh, a twelve pack” and SNAP! they’d get me.  Later, the landlord poisoned them all and they died and rotted in the walls, which caused quite a stench.  Good times, good times. 

So, basically it came from paranoid delusions while living in a rat infested hole.