So finally after all of these years we're releasing
Optimum Wound Volume One.
Here’s the deets:
SEPTEMBER 2 2009
$14.95 USD - 144 PAGES - BLACK AND WHITE
ISBN: 9780980906431
DIAMOND COMICS NUMBER -
JUL09 1019
How to order:
You can order it at your local comic shop using Diamond Order number
JUL091019
Here’s some links to
online vendors listing the book:
Heavy Ink
TFAW.com (Things From Another World
Torpedo Comics
Mail Order Comics
SciFi Genre
In the UK
Forbidden Planet
A
mazon (coming shortly)
Here’s a preview of the book. Click "Open Publication".
We started out together under one banner back in 2005 and this how we're going to enter the print world. Last year we put ourselves through comic publishing school by releasing
Danijel Zezelj's Rex. It was a very enlightening experience but we needed to cut our teeth by releasing our own works.
Enter the anthology Optimum Wound Volume One. It contains a piece by all of the OpWound crew and it's quite an intense read.
So what's in it?
Memento Mori
The book kicks off with Richard Serrao's brutal paramilitary actioner,
Memento Mori. This was our first and most successful webcomic and Rich has drawn 20 new pages for this revamped instalment. A black ops team hunts down a sadistic child butcher and then has to kill their way out.
Memento Mori is Serrao's love letter to exploitation films, violent comics of the 1980's and 1990's and splatterpunk fiction. He's been praised for his raw, realistic and yes abundantly inked comics pages.
Hart Fisher tells us the Craziest Stories Ever.
Hart Fisher headed up one of the most controversial publishing houses, Boneyard Press, most famed for their antics in the 1990's. He was invited onto and then lynched in the mainstream media on shows like The Jerry Springer Show, Entertainment Tonight, and A Current Affair, his personal life was a warzone filled with death threats, violence, rape and robbery, but the worst was yet to come. Seven days into shooting his first feature film, The Garbage Man, Mr. Fisher suffered a loss that would break him utterly, the brutal rape and murder of his first love and live-in girlfriend, Michelle Davis, during a horrific motel robbery. This is an incendiary read.
Battles Without Living Witnesses
Someone has sold Jon Starkweather out. He goes on a fact finding killing rampage. He pops amphetamines to stay awake and arms himself to the teeth. A trail of bodies are left behind. The syndicates call a truce and combine their efforts to hunt him down.
Starkweather kills his way up the food chain in Jason Thibault's
Battles Without Living Witnesses, originally a webcomic that was often acclaimed and occasionally slammed for its' gritty photorealistic style. And yes it was drawn by hand in pen and ink.
The Lost Jimmy Files: Unearthed
In 2005 a character and comic by the name of Jimmy Whatshisfuck appeared on the scene. It was written by Sean Fidler and illustrated in trademark realistic fashion by Jason Thibault and Fiona Ho. First introduced in a illustrated flash fiction piece in the Optimum Wound Sampler and then briefly surfacing as a webcomic Jimmy then all but disappeared.
Consider this resurrection day. The original short prose story and comic pages are presented here together in print for the first time. Hopefully this leads to more Jimmy tales or at least a JWF t-shirt.
Ryan Patterson
Ryan is the lead singer and guitarist for apocalyptic punk rockers
Coliseum. He's also a much sought after designer and artist for album covers, t-shirt designs and posters. Ryan took time out from his insanely active schedule which includes running
Auxiliary Records so we could present a showcase of his artistic badassery.
Branko Djukic
And no project with Optimum Wound would be complete without involvement from an Eastern European creator. This time we give you Serbain artist
Branko Djukic in one his only appearances in a North American or UK publication. He has published comics in major magazines in the former Yugoslavia and is a highly regarded teacher. In Volume One you'll get an introduction to his mind-blowing illustration skills.
We're pretty excited about all of this and I hope you enjoy the ride.
-Jay