It’s the quiet, normal-looking ones that can surprise you, as the old adage says.
Danny Allain, Sulphur resident and native of DeQuincy, appears to be the textbook definition of Southwest Louisiana normal in his blue jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap. He is quick to laugh and easy in manner.
But for much of the summer, he’s been immersed in zombies... and the Old West.
Allain and his business partner, Paul Soileau, are publishing the four-issue series Dead Reckoning, a Wild West tale about two brothers who end up dealing with the zombie apocalypse. The first issue is set for release on Wednesday, July 25 with a big zombie party at Paper Heroes on Ryan St. in Lake Charles from 4 p.m.-6 p.m.
They’re even going to have ‘brains-on-a-bun’ to eat, though if you don’t like Sloppy Joes, you’re not forced to eat. Probably.
“I’ve always been a proponent of preparing for the zombie apocalypse,” Allain said with a laugh.
Dead Reckoning is his entry into the almost decade-long resurgence of everything living dead, although Allain, 30, has been writing and drawing comics since he was a child.
“I’ve been drawing for a long time, since I was little. I just liked drawing, and I liked telling stories. Comics are a good way of putting them together,” the writer and artist said.
“I write all my own stories. I see them in my head, and then put it out so everyone else can see it.”
Dead Reckoning’s opening pages begin with a shaman looking to bring his dead daughter back. She comes back all right, just in time to make him her first victim. But it’s what happens next involving the two brothers and their survival that makes the story for Allain. It’s not all about the zombies, and it’s more than four issues of zombie bits strewn all over the desert landscape.
“I’m not going for originality, really, just trying to tell a good story with good characters,” Allain said.
“And then put zombies in it,” he added with a grin.
Allain’s zombies work like the more recent examples of the undead fiends, from works like Zombieland or the updated Dawn of the Dead. They bite. They infect. They turn friends and family from sources of comfort to instances of dread. But these aren’t the slow, plodding George Romero shamblers of earlier films. These monsters are coming at the characters full tilt and that means a more immediate and exciting foe.
Dead Reckoning isn’t Allain’s first foray into the comic book world, and it’s not even his first attempt at a Western mixed in with a little something else.
“I did a comic book in 2000, a western where an alien spaceship crashes, and the hero gets in and tracks down people. It’s called The Bounty,” he said.
Readers would be astute to notice a similarity with the Harrison Ford/Danial Craig flick Cowboys and Aliens, which also had it’s own comic book before the movie came out. Allain was a little bitter about it.
“I got on the fourth issue of The Bounty, and then Cowboys and Aliens came out. I was so mad about that. My wife and I were in the theatre when we saw the trailer for it, and I started cussing when I saw it,” he said.
It led to Allain taking a break from comics, until four years later, when Paul Soileau asked him if he had any ideas for publication.
“That’s when I started working on Dead Reckoning,” Allain said, though that doesn’t mean he didn’t have the idea earlier. “I have sketchbooks filled with ideas, about six or seven of them ready at any time to go into comic form.”
Allain’s process begins in the brainstorming phase for each page.
“I still have to storyboard. I brainstorm, write it out, do some thumbnails, and then storyboard,” he said.
However, he tries to nail down a character’s look from the beginning with sketches.
“That’s so you don’t have a character looking totally different when it comes down to putting it on the page,” he said.
“After that, I go over the pencil sketches with these cool markers. Then I scan the page into Photoshop and do touchups and some work on the background. I have a friend who’s helping me out - he’s lettering it - because I’m horrible at technology. The Photoshop step takes me forever, but the rest of it goes pretty quickly.”
Although he got the first issue out within a month of 16-hour days, the remaining issues will be spaced out about two months apiece.
“It took me a month to do the first issue all by myself, which is super fast, but that’s because I had summer off. I still had to put in 16-hour days. Each page took 16 hours, start to finish, and there are 28 pages,” he said.
“The next issue is going to have 40 pages because it’s going to be full of super zombie action, so that takes a while.”
When they premier the first issue at Paper Heroes on July 25, Allain’s going to personally be signing copies. That doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about the next issue, and where it’s going to go.
“I think about it the most when I’m driving, for sure. That’s when I get most of my ideas and thinking done...while I’m driving. I think of cool little things, because I’m always thinking of cool scenes,” he said.
~sulphurdailynews.com
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