A new ongoing alternative history comic book series – East of West sees the Seven Nations of America created after the almost mystical conclusion of the American Civil War. Enter the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and fast forward to 2064 where a supernatural apocalypse awaits.
From the award-winning team of Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta.
Copyright Image Comics 2013.
Doctor Who producer and writer Steven Moffatt has announced details of the upcoming season at Comic-Con. Episodes include Toby Whithouse’s “A Town Called Mercy” which will air as the third episode in the season.
“It takes us into a genre Doctor Who hasn’t attempted since the 60s – it’s a full-blooded western. We knew from the start we needed some serious location shooting for this one, and given the most iconic American setting imaginable, there was only one place to go – Spain,” explained Moffatt.
The story filmed in Almeria, home to Spaghetti Westerns of the past, includes a showdown between Doctor Who (Matt Smith) and a half-human, half-robot in a western town set in the Victorian era.
The only previous journey to the Old West was when the original Doctor Who, William Hartnell visited Tombstone in a four-part story from 1966 titled ”The Gunfighters.” Full details can be found in my book “Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns” (McFarland & Co.). Autographed copies are available on request.
There were mixed reviews and a weak opening weekend for Priest (2011). Increased ticket prices for the 3D film averaging $12.75 and a reliance on CGI and horror stereotypes over a strong storyline appear to be the main complaints that account for the box-office disappointment. The film will do well to recover its $60,000,000 production costs.
Read a cross-section of reviews of the film at Rotten Tomatoes
1. Thor $34,500,000
2. Bridesmaids $24,409,000
3. Fast Five $19,534,000
4. Priest $14,500,000
5. Rio $8,000,000
I recently had the chance to watch Nickel Children – a short sci-fi steampunk Western that has already won awards at two film festivals. You can read my review elsewhere on this blog. Here is my interview with creator and director Kevin Eslinger.
PG: Can you please fill us in on your background Kevin.
KE: I am originally from Indiana and have been living in Nashville, for over seven years where I graduated from Watkins College of Art and Design. I studied Film with a concentration in cinematography. I am mostly a shooter and have shot dozens of projects on both HD and film mediums, including 16mm and 35mm film, however two years ago I finally decided to produce one of my own projects.
PG: Tell us about your current project ”Nickel Children.”
KE: “Nickel Children” was written about five years ago and I have been periodically coming back to it every so often. Make changes, sit it on a shelf, and come back to it later. Slowly tightening it over time. In between edits, I was also creating characters, villains, plots and subplots. Developing an almanac of sorts full of history and lore about this new alternate world. I began looking at my interests :Sergio Leone westerns, dark/gothic settings, Universal monsters (my father was a huge Universal monsters fan – Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Dracula), science fiction and Robert E. Howard. After researching and pulling all of these influences I kept coming up with this term “steampunk”, which oddly enough had most of those aesthetics built in. I never knew my interests combined had a name. More research shifted the style into Gaslamp Fantasy, and finally as I began developing the story and really hanging true to my interests, it fell into WEIRD WEST.
The film was shot in 5 days on a ridiculously low budget, self funded, on location in Nashville TN. However, for all of the exteriors, I traveled to Nevada and took several reference photos that I knew we were going to need. My brother, Justin, did all of the visual effects and 3d modeling in the film, as well as shot a large portion of it. We both collaborated to create the look and tone of the film. The film was completed in July 2010 and began hitting the festivals/conventions in September, starting with Dragon*CON.
One of the things I wanted to do with the film, was just jump in head first. And slowly release more information about the characters origins through the series. The audience will wonder, create, and grow with the characters. Most of my writing involves leaving a lot of the exposition out and let the actors act. I don’t like to slap the audience in the face, or hit them over the head with all of the details. I love leaving out a few details to let the viewers/readers mind wander a bit and start to develop their own back stories, wants, or desires for the characters based on the actions.
Another aspect of the piece, was to include modern social issues that could have been an issue in our alternate universe as well. I feel that sometimes by taking these issues and just re-wrapper it set within a sci-fi or fantasy backdrop, that it could just as easy raise awareness as even a documentary on that issue. A couple of the conventions, I actually had people come up to me after a screening and ask me if that sort of thing really happened in the late 19th century. While I expressed that the film is solely fiction, I would not guarantee that such atrocities did not exist. We have had numerous people respond to us that they felt that the film is effective in raising that awareness in which I am glad that the film has that impact.
We had local members from the steampunk community from Nashville and Atlanta, that travelled to be in the film. We also had prop makers and costumers lend their wares to help including Kaitlyn McClain (KMK Designs),Justin Stanley (Red Fork Empire), Hans Meier (PH Factor), Jill Osborn, and Christian Matzke. Aria Durso led the costuming department to get everyone suited up and did an amazing job! Keith Stacey nailed the score on the film, and Ian Quinn (stunt coordinator from 24, Heroes) was excellent and keeping everyone safe.
PG: What’s been the reaction so far?
KE: We have screened in well over twenty venues, from film festivals to sci-fi fantasy conventions with enormous response. The audience have said they loved the characters, the costumes, the production design, the music, or the message or all the above. However, the most common complaint we get is, “It’s not long enough!” and this is a complaint that the entire cast and crew love hearing. After every screening, we also hear how they want to see more. The film ends wide open, and really leaves the viewers hanging a bit. However, this is something that was completely intentional and set up very episodic. As this is something that I am definitely pushing for, to take the world and its characters and expand its universe.
PG: Where do you plan to go next with the project?
KE: The next step, we are working with local artists to create graphic novels and online web comics to complement the films, and are planning to release them online as I continue to expand the world and build the community. The next films are going to require a little bit more budget than I can handle out of pocket. So in the mean time, I am going to continue delivering content with mini-stories around the characters, build the community and once the bigger budget hits we’ll do the films.”
http://nickelchildren.eslingerfilm.com- http://www.facebook.com/nickelchildren
Interview copyright Paul Green “Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns” 2011.
Issue #1 Cover Art: Alex Maleev
Great news for Apocalyptic Western fans. Sam Raimi has been signed to direct an adaptation of Radical Publishing’s comic book Earp: Saints For Sinners. For those not familiar with the concept of the comic book, lawmen Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp fight to maintain law and order in an increasingly lawless Las Vegas and United States of the future.
The feature film is being produced by David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman of Mandeville films, Radical’s Barry Levine, and Raimi business partner Josh Donen, for Dreamworks Studios with Matt Cirulnick (South Beach) providing the script.
Thanks to Becky Manukyan of Formula PR Inc.
Source: Natalie Silverman at Hollywood.com
The stuffed and preserved Trigger on display
In a script straight out of a Weird Western Roy Rogers’ famous and fondly remembered horse Trigger will find himself a TV star all over again when his stuffed remains feature on a Saturday cable show from RFD-TV, Omaha, Nebraska. Starting November 6, Roy Rogers Jr. will introduce Roy Rogers films with Trigger and Bullet serving as a backdrop in the studio. Kind of eerie…
Trigger and Bullet were recently sold at auction in New York for $266,000 and $35,000 respectively following the closure of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum last December. The total sale realized $2.98 million according to Christie’s. Every item was sold.
Roy Rogers features in my Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns with his 1951 film Spoilers of the Plains in a story involving rockets and satellites in space.
Believe-it-or-not Trigger [Golden Cloud] began his illustrious career as Maid Marian’s horse in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1939).
Here’s the official plot synopsis for next year’s Cowboys & Aliens film starring Craig Daniel, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Noah Ringer and Sam Rockwell.
1873. Arizona Territory. A stranger (Daniel Craig) with no memory of his past stumbles into the hard desert town of Absolution. The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don’t welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). It’s a town that lives in fear.
But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky. Screaming down with breathtaking velocity and blinding lights to abduct the helpless one by one, these monsters challenge everything the residents have ever known.
Now, the stranger they rejected is their only hope for salvation. As this gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he’s been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against the alien force. With the help of the elusive traveler Ella (Olivia Wilde), he pulls together a posse comprised of former opponents—townsfolk, Dolarhyde and his boys, outlaws and Apache warriors—all in danger of annihilation. United against a common enemy, they will prepare for an epic showdown for survival.
Paul Green [PG]: Can you describe the premise of the sequel.
Jeremy Mohler [JM]: Initially, we were planning to expand on the invasion and show how the aliens attacked across the whole world at once. We wanted to show a variety of the different plans of attack the aliens had and tell each of the various stories. However, as we were developing this plan, news came up about the actual Cowboys and Aliens movie and we had to change our plan a bit to feature the main characters only.
PG : How did you become involved in the sequel to Cowboys & Aliens?
JM: Platinum Studios actually contacted me. They had seen my work on my personal content world Baeg Tobar and wanted me to help organize, further create the world for Cowboys and Aliens, and develop a sequel for Cowboys and Aliens.
Alana Joli Abbott [AJA]: Jeremy Mohler, who I’d previously worked with on a fantasy worldbuilding project called Baeg Tobar (which I’m now working on again!) contacted me to ask if I’d like to work on a comics project for Platinum. I was enthusiastic — and I was even more excited when he told me what it was going to be about. Aliens? The Old West? Twisting that old trope of Cowboys and Indians so that they were a team rather than adversaries? I was delighted! Jeremy also wanted us to focus on the actual, real-world history, and I was glad to have a chance to learn more details about an era I’d loved in fiction.
PG: Is the alternate title Cowboys & Aliens: Worlds At War intended to supplant the original Cowboys & Aliens II title?
AJA: Originally, that was going to be the title for the second volume and spinoff, but due to the movie, they decided to just go with “II” and planned to make Worlds at War a completely stand alone, independent project.
PG: Are web comics a viable alternative to printed comic books?
AJA: I think it’s becoming more and more true that they are — but I think it also depends on the purpose of the comics. Guys like R. K. Millholland (Something Positive) manage to bring in enough through donations to make a living on the comic (or, at least, did the last time I checked). Rich Burlew of Order of the Stick has changed the model so that he’s built up his following online and is able to sell tie-ins and books that reprint his online work. I think that second model is the one that’s most likely to be sustained in the long run — people who love your work for free will pay for it so that they can hold it as a print version. Will all the people who love your work buy your product? Probably not. But I suspect it’s a big enough market that it has the potential to pay out for the rock stars of our industry. The rest of us will probably have to keep our day jobs. 
JM: Honestly, I hope that the printed comic (or graphic novel) never goes away and I strongly feel that it won’t. But, I have to admit, I am really in love with the idea of web comics. Web comics are cheaper to produce and have the potential for a much wider audience than printed comics. Especially for small press. I think in the next few years as people start to realize this and the quality of web comics starts to catch up with the printed comics, I think a lot of interesting things are going to start to happen.
PG: Do you think the Weird Western genre has a future or is it the final gasps of a dying Western genre?
AJA: Honestly, I think the Western genre is growing and expanding in new and exciting ways, rather than dying off. I know that there are arguments about this in the industry all the time — those of us who work in Weird Westerns think it’s just a natural progression of the exploration of those themes that made us really love Westerns: the frontier, people doing their best with limited resources on the edge of civilization, that sort of thing. The more we can continue making the flavor of the West relevant to a modern audience, especially updating some of the ideas that make old Westerns harder to love (particularly the treatment of Native Americans), the more likely the Western is to thrive in all of its formats.
JM: Oh, definitely. There are always going to be people that love westerns, especially weird, sci-fi, fantasy westerns.
PG: Why was the sequel abandoned after only two chapters were completed?
JM: Actually, the project has been put on hold, not abandoned. We are waiting for the release of the movie to get a little closer and then we’re going to reassess the project and see about starting again.
AJA: Abandoned is such a harsh and sad word. The team was ready to keep going with the comic — I had several more pages written, and I think there was more art in development — when Platinum put us on hiatus. It’s sort of a pipe dream of mine that one day they’ll ask us to come back on and continue working on it (especially with the recent buzz about Robert Downey, Jr. playing Zeke in the film version!). I’d be delighted — but at this juncture, the team has all had to move on to different projects to keep working.
PG: Do you think the proposed Cowboys & Aliens movie project will result in the sequel finding a new audience and lead to completion of the sequel?
AJA: I hope so! We had both Cowboys and Aliens II and another alien invasion story, set in a similar time frame but featuring a big city reporter and the situation in several other countries, in the pipeline. I’d love to get back to both projects.
JM: Yes, I do.
PG: Are there any plans for future work in the Weird Westerns genre?
AJA: I have a short story that I’m quite proud of on submission to SpaceWesterns.com, which I hope someday sees publication. I’m also looking forward to my friend Jeff Duntemann’s Drumlin project, which I may have the chance to work on. (Jeff wrote a brilliant short story, “Drumlin Boiler,” which was published in Asimov’s in April, 2002. It’s one of my all time favorite space western stories, and he’s talked on his web column about the possibility of expanding that world with multiple authors.)
PG: What project are you currently working on?
JM: I’m actually working on several projects at the moment. One is my personal content world, Baeg Tobar, a rather massive fantasy/sci-fi world with comics, novels, short stories, and all manner of other content. I also have several other things in the works, but nothing that I can really show at the moment.
AJA: I’m working on some adventure writing for Wizards of the Coast’s Living Forgotten Realms campaign, book reviews for industry journals, and a serial novel for Baeg Tobar with Max Gladstone (who has a really excellent space Western short story up at SpaceWesterns.com
PG: As you know the sequel is an alternative history science fiction Western. Do you enjoy weaving historical facts into a fictional premise?
AJA: That was some of the most fun I had on the series. When we had initially talked about how often we were going to update, we talked about two “art light” projects that wouldn’t require panels. One was the “microcorder” sessions, in which I got to talk about what all of the characters who were journeying into space were thinking about. The other was a column, essentially, of Zeke talking about historical facts, portraying them in his own way. For this, we linked to different sources so people could look into the stories without Zeke’s casual way of talking. I was also very much looking forward to working in some of the history about the Chinese in America, which is one of the topics that I’m glad more weird Western writers are exploring. (Emma Bull did a fabulous job with this in her fantasy Western, Territory.) There are so many stories to mine there! There are these great tales of how people on the fringes of society anyway were the first to be able to look past the things that were strict boundaries for their “civilized” counterparts — white folks who were able to grow and develop friendships across racial (or national, in the case of the Irish) lines. If we do get to go back to it, I’m looking forward to further diversifying the cast as the story progresses (once we get Zeke back to the West and out of Washington, D.C. *g*)
Cowboys & Aliens II is available online at 
Drunk Duck!
Logo and illustrations copyright © 2009 Platinum Studios, Inc. Interview copyright © 2009 Paul Green. All rights reserved.
The sequel to The Misadventures of Clark & Jefferson by Caravajal and Borstel, which is listed in my book and elsewhere on this site, is due for release from Ape Entertainment January 2010 as a 3-part mini-series.
“The wild west can be a scary place, as four unlikely friends discover, when they stumble upon a remote town deep in the Colorado Rockies that is being attacked by big hairy creatures. Sadly, for our gang, these hairy things may be the least of their worries.”
Enjoy the trailer.
A trailer promoting the 2007-2008 comic book mini-series from Ape Entertainment The Misadventures of Clark and Jefferson. Story by Jay Carvajal. Art by Marc Borstel.
Listed in my book as a Science Fiction Western set in 1875 Arizona where Sheriff Clark and Deputy Jefferson encounter flesh eating aliens.
