At the 2012 New York Comic Con, I got the chance to speak with Jared Burrell, the owner, cofounder, writer, head illustrator and publisher of Loaded Barrel.
“Loaded Barrel is a production company we started in 2007, and we launched right here in New York Comic Con. What we do is live action graphic novels, so it’s as if all the books and all the panels of our books were actually filmed. We have actors, sets, props, whatever, and it’s all digitally entered and hand drawn and illustrated to give us a look that feels a little bit different. So you’re kind of combing comic books with a very cinematic, movie type feel, which works since with screenwriter and directors, we’re allowed to get a lot of our own influences inside our media and art. We were working on what was going to be our next film and we came up with this idea called Riamla horror, which is a 13 year old girl who is born possessed with this demon inside of her, and when growing up, it trying to come out and she has to learn how to control it, and we knew it would be good for a comic book. So we made it a comic book and came here to Comic Con and the copies sold like hot cakes, and we’ve been doing it ever since.“
Having a live action comic book is an odd way to make one, so I asked why so. “It was just intuitive since we knew we wanted to film stuff, so that’s just how we did it. It’s kind of funny when we look back at the development of the photos- it was just the way we saw how to make comic books. With Marvel and DC doing all the superhero stuff, we figured it would be hard to stand on the shelf with those guys, and while we could work our way up to it, we decided it would be better to start here, and we just keep developing the style and it’s become something we’re more and more proud of. We just won a national award for best graphic novel from the Independent Publisher’s Book Awards, for our first full length graphic novel, Grey.”
You can check out Loaded Barrel Studios at its website here.
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