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Hello, everyone and welcome to the launch of what we hope is going to be a memorable run of the web’s newest teen-horror comic, SHADOWGIRLS. Dave Reynolds and I have been working on this project for the last two years. I’ve know Dave longer than that, he was actually the original colorist for the first STARKWEATHER series. Because of other commitments he was only able to do the first issue, but it was enough to get me a publishing deal. Subsequent colorists were unable to capture his moody watercolor style and so the first issue was recolored to match. But we didn’t lose touch. It was almost a year later when we talked at Wizard World Chicago and he told me about his concept for a book called SHADOWGIRLS.
I will confess now that I wasn’t sure about working on the book at first. I was still working on STARKWEATHER, had a full time job and a full time family, and my “collaborations” thus far had not gone well at all. But since Dave thought enough of me to ask me to work on it with him I felt that I should at least give it good reading. So I read through the docs and looked over his designs. I read about the single mother named Charon, (pronounced share) and her daughter Rebecca…and a few days later I was in. I had never written about female main characters but there was something about the concept that completely drew me in. I sent him my ideas for the series, (I had some suggestions that were a bit of a radical departure from his original concepts but I do remember that mentioning Firestorm sold him on almost anything I said.
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So I started banging out scripts, (after a few false starts) and the characters started to breathe for me. Charon especially would continually surprise me. And I would bounce ideas back and forth with Dave and pretty soon we had our first issue complete. We released a preview copy last year at Wizard World Chicago and even had some publisher interest…but we didn’t like what we were hearing. After some more back and forth, we decided to do it on our own…and do it our way. We would release it on the web and thanks to the advancements in print-on-demand we could also release it in print at the same time and sell it directly to our fans. (There’s at least three that we know of…)
So here we are. Two years later and we are launching the SHADOWGIRLS web-comic and most unusual for a new comic, it updates daily…Monday through Friday. It’s taken a great deal of time and preparation to make sure we’d be ready to do it this way, but we felt that anything less would take too long to tell our story. We’re committed to keeping this schedule for at least the first year. I think it would be a little irresponsible to promise anything beyond that but we feel very strongly about keeping a solid schedule. And lucky for us, there are other people who also feel like contributing to SHADOWGIRLS. This is our first day and we’ve already grown from me and Dave to including additional short story writing contributers, (Travis Legge and Egg Embry) contributing art assists, (Nik Ronis and Allison McCulloch) our unpaid and dedicated editors (Jesica Rodriguez and Angela Nelson) and we even have a spin-off in the works…BEFORE WE LAUNCH!! (I think you’re going to love the SHADOWBABIES as drawn by our contributing artist Misty Coats. They’re disgustingly cute.)
I want to thank everyone who’s pitched in to make this launch happen, but none of this would have been possible if not for Dave Reynolds. He’s a great collaborator and friend and unlike my previous team-ups, Dave has proven to be more than dedicated to this project. I’ve never met anyone who’s worked so hard without promise of reward. The man must be half Spartan. I’m honored that he asked me to be a part of this and I’m proud of our work. So…welcome to this first day of SHADOWGIRLS…and I hope to see you back Monday through Friday!
David A. Rodriguez, Writer/Co-Creator Shadowgirls
