San Jose, CA - July 30, 2009  - This October SLG Publishing will release the first issue of Winchester, a comic book series about Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune and architect of one of the oddest houses in the United States. Part historical fiction, part ghost story, Winchester will take the few facts known about the very private Sarah Winchester and try to provide a context for her building of the giant Winchester Mansion which is now an internationally known landmark and historic attraction.

“The place has always fascinated me,” said Winchester writer and San Jose native Dan Vado “I’ve lived around the corner from this place my entire life and it’s like the house has been begging me to write about it.”

After the death of her husband in 1881, Sarah Winchester took her twenty-million dollar fortune and $1,000 dollar per day tax-free income west to San Jose, California and bought an eight-room Victorian style farmhouse, which she immediately began renovating and adding on to. Construction on the house continued for 38 years nonstop until the day Sarah Winchester died. The popular belief was that Sarah Winchester built the house to appease the spirits of people killed by the Winchester Rifle.

“It would be easy to write Mrs. Winchester off as crazy, and to be honest that’s the direction we were taking with the comic series,” added Vado, “but then I thought about the tragedies in her life and the toll they must have taken on her, so I decided to make the Sarah Winchester in our series a more sympathetic figure.” Vado pointed to the number of patents Sarah Winchester held and the almost futuristic labor saving elements in the house as proof that, while odd, Sarah Winchester was not crazy or stupid. “The house was self-sufficient, one might call it green, well before there was even a name for it,” he pointed out.

The creative team wasted little time finding a new villain for the piece, deciding to make the ghost of Harry Houdini the new antagonist. Houdini had once visited the Winchester Mansion after the death of its owner and held a seance there. Later Houdini would spend his life debunking spiritualism and the supernatural, often debating the facts with Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “I couldn’t resist the irony of making Houdini a ghost since he so clearly did not believe in them,” said Vado.

The Winchester Mansion in the series is not a tourist attraction but an abandoned mansion that locals all know to stay away from, difficult given its location right near a freeway and major shopping mall. A series of ghostly events are set in motion when a police detective gains access to the grounds to investigate a missing persons case. As the investigation unfolds bits and pieces of the Sarah Winchester story are revealed and we meet several famous spirits who have taken up residence in the old manse.

Winchester #1 is written by SLG Publishing president Dan Vado and Illustrated by Drew Rausch (Sullengrey and SLG’s Haunted Mansion). The first issue will ship in October 2009 and will be available at better comics shops and the companies own website (www.slgcomic.com).

A short preview of the art can be seen at the SLG website.

Comics Radar interviewed SLG Prez Dan Vado about our digital comics site, Eyemelt.com. (I have many new issues will be up on the site soon! Stay tuned.) You can listen here.

Comics Crew writes about the role independent comic publishers are taking in pioneering the digital form. It features some comments from SLG prez Dan Vado on our digital comics site, Eyemelt.com.

Addressed are the standard response from comics industry people as to why they don't release digital comics: "People don't want to read digital comics." I've always interpreted it as actually meaning, "I don't want to read digital comics," which is like, to use an analogy Dan uses for a different situation, owning a grocery store and not stocking ice cream because you're lactose intolerant. But Dan speculates that what is driving people to read comics digitally is not a preference or even a neutrality for reading comics on the computer screen but people who want to read more comics than they can afford to buy.

Full article here.

There is an interview with SLG president Dan Vado at Newsarama, with the bold title "BECOMING THE FUTURE." Dan talks about Eyemelt.com, our digital download site. He explains why we chose not to use digital rights management (DRM) and what the future holds for Eyemelt.com.

The transition to physical product to digital is an interesting one to me. Did anyone ever have an epiphany that, mp3s are the way of the future!? I didn't. I just downloaded music from Napster like everyone else did, and now here in 2007, I haven't stepped foot in a CD store in months and yet I have all this new music from eMusic or iTunes. It was a transition, not a jolt, became a natural part of life without any shock to my sensibilities.

Will it be the same for comics? Well, it's a bit different, since reading a comic as a tactile experience is different from reading it on screen in a way that listening to a CD and an mp3 are not (though we all know of people who insist on vinyl!). But it's certainly something that I think will become the norm as more and more people grow to find reading comics on a screen a natural experience rather than a "Boyhowdy, that's not the way it was done when I was a lass!" one.

It's something to consider. Augie De Blieck does a bit at his latest Comic Book Resources column, but he notably doesn't mention anyone who is already distributing their comics digitally. (Dan speculated that this is because De Blieck would like to write about about the subject without seeming to promote any new venture, but I am cynical, and I found this phrase in the column telling: "I don't care whether you're a DC or Marvel partisan" -- those are our choices, eh? All right, so the column was inspired by DC's slumping sales in February, so he's just staying on-message. But I am tired of hearing about DC and Marvel, all right? They're like older siblings who can do all this amazing shit but are nothing like you. And I don't get the whole partisan thing, anyway.)

And there are publishers getting into the digital comics business. PullBoxOnline.com launched just before Eyemelt.com, and Top Cow recently announced that they would be releasing digital comics through the pop culture news site icv2.com at video games site IGN.com. There's also a site called Wowio.com, which distributes free books, which "AbacusComics" hipped us to through the comments. It's interesting to know about, but why, when someone is telling you about a new business venture would you choose to give him them advice that maybe he would like to scrap all the work he's put into it and the vision he has for it, and, you know, do it the way you do it instead? "Might be a better, less labor intensive track for you to try," AbacusComics writes. Wowio certainly sounds promising -- this person claims 1,000 downloads in a week, which, admittedly, is far more than we get on Eyemelt.com. Hell, let's throw over all this work we've done to get started establishing a site and brand and do that instead!

I'm kidding.

SLG Prez Dan Vado's interview is the top story in this week's Publishers Weekly Comic Week newsletter (that's a lot of the word week) -- Vado Talks Dollars, Sense and Comics. Dan talks about the risks in moving toward the book store market, publisher-artist relationships, publisher-direct market relationships, and just how much that chair behind a table at our booth is worth.

I got a funny feeling of  déjà vous as I read the article, and I remembered it was because I heard Dan on the phone with Douglas Wolk, saying everything that is now in print.

I have NY Comic-Con photos coming, courtesy of SLG First Son Dustin Vado. Meanwhile, here are a couple of NYCC-spawned articles about SLG projects.

The first is an interview with SLG head honcho Dan Vado at Toon Zone, in which Dan talks to "Ace the Bathound" (I assume this is a pseudonym) about the SLG's Disney-licensed comics, the crazy world of optioning, and more. A couple of corrections:

The Haunted Mansion comic book is NOT based on the live-action movie. It is based on the Haunted Mansion ride in Disney theme parks.

Ace writes, "Vado noted that Eric Jones and Landry Walker’s Little Gloomy comic was optioned and might become a live-action movie. He also said he thought James Turner’s Rex Libris would be a great prime-time cartoon in something like an Adult Swim block, and that there has been interest in the title but nothing definitive yet." The titles here are switched around -- it is Rex Libris that has been optioned (we were waiting for an official announcement, but I guess the cat is out of the bag) and Little Gloomy that Dan thinks would make a great cartoon. EDIT: And actually, Little Gloomy has been optioned, by 1492 Pictures.

And toward the end, Ace writes: "He said that the the new coloring studio working on Gargoyles really 'gets' the art style, and that both 'didn’t want it to be just another licensed comic.'" Here Dan was actually talking about Tron, which is colored by the talented guys at GURU eFX. You can see their work, as well as that of artist Michael Shoykhet and the Walker Jones team in Tron #3.

And at Wizard Universe is an interview with Landry Walker about Tron. I love thinking about THE COMPUTER WORLD while using THE COMPUTER WORLD. It gives me the same strange feeling as when I think about my brain... using my brain. It's like the lapel pins of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Song in Pyongyang by Guy Delisle, a great graphic novel.

Anyway, in this interview Landry ruins my child-like illusions: "It’s an analogy," he says of THE COMPUTER WORLD. "There aren’t actually these little people running around inside the computer."

Gee, thanks, Mr. Wizard. But at least I can still have a light cycle.

Thanks to all the fine folks who have added SLG as a MySpace friend!
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SLG's Dan Vado is not exactly a Howard Hughes type, but he rarely does interviews. He's mysterious that way, you know? But Neil Kleid convinced him to do some straight-shooting in an interview for Newsarama. You can can read it here. Note Dan's semi-rant about viral marketing. Also, he reveals the secret of Beer Can Chicken.