Casket Queen original comic by Wmpyr

CASKET QUEEN
2014 comic book notes by Wmpyr

CASKET QUEEN free comic book by Wmpyr

Since it would be kind of silly for me to do a review of my own comic book, let me share some "production" notes with you. I've always been a fan of Full Moon films since I saw the original Puppet Master back in the day on either Cinemax or HBO. Not too long ago, I went out and bought 32 films from Full Moon, and watched at least one movie a night until I completed everything and wrote reviews for each one. I had a blast of a time and watching all those films inspired me to tell my own horror story.

Originally I was leaning towards doing a horror board game rather than a horror comic book. This character is what I came up with because I wanted to do something eye catching.

Hybrid Monster

I made a total of four characters. Each one was a hybrid monster. First one was a Dracula plus Frankenstein's monster, second was a werewolf plus martian, third was a zombie plus cyclops, and finally the fourth monster was a headless horseman plus centaur. After the board game idea wasn't working so well, I decided to do a comic book using Lego. So I made the Dracula plus Frankenstein hybrid monster using Lego, and when I tried to put him in a Lego casket, he wouldn't fit because his head was too big. I was disappointed in this, and the more I was thinking, trying to figure out how to make this work, the casket seemed a lot cooler than the monster. So then I made a story revolving around the casket rather than the hybrid monster. So what if the casket was haunted by a vampire ghost? I really liked the idea of a vampire ghost, because it wasn't the conventional vampire, this would be an ethereal energy vampire rather than a walking corpse that wants blood.

Things got really interesting when I thought, what happens when a human sleeps in the casket? They go to coffin world! And that is when I knew, that I unlocked a whole new world to explore. Yeah the casket can literally attack a person, trap a person inside... the whole buried alive thing, or even violently like an iron maiden, or chomp down with the lid to decapitate a person because it's supernatural after all. And then there was the other possibility that late at night, the casket would open up, and release the ethereal vampire to go drain people of their life force. I also thought that it would be cool that if a person goes inside the casket, when they are released they can be changed into a monster like a possessed maniac, zombie, or vampire. All of these ideas are game, but I thought that the most interesting idea is coffin world. It's all about coffin world. In fact, I regret calling it Casket Queen, I should have named it Coffin World. I like the idea of coffin world because I can do just about anything. I can put in a haunted castle, a vampire dragon, vampire knights, and other creatures.

After I wrote the basic plot, I started making the comic book, four photos at a time. This way it was easy for me to organize and keep track of the story progression because it was like an ongoing sunday comic strip. I didn't make full rooms, walls, buildings or any other kind of backgrounds not because I don't have enough Lego pieces, but to keep things simple and convenient. I kept telling myself, imagine this is a B-horror film, keep "the budget low", but then it ended up being more like a theatre show with very limited props. I photographed everything in the same location, because lighting was so difficult. It would have been even more convenient if I had used my laptop to take the pictures, but I wanted the picture quality to be higher than anything I had done before, so I took extra steps using the iPad for photos. It's really a big deal for me not to mutilate my Lego pieces, by coloring them, or customizing them, instead I buy from other compatible brands such as Kreo, Mega Bloks, and Tenkai Knights, and use accessories from www.brickwarriors.com and www.brickforge.com

Once I had the skeleton knight appear, I was satisfied, because this is where IMO, I showed the readers that I can and will introduce all kinds of cool creatures. In this story I wanted romance, to me romance is a staple in a good vampire story. I also wanted the main characters to have superhero like powers so that this story could crossover to a superhero genre. In the next one I would like to introduce my idea of vampire rules. Mine is a bit unconventional. I look forward to bringing out the Van Helsing type character, plus two very important items the Ouija board and ecto camera. And in the one after that, hopefully I can introduce martial arts kind of like the classic horror/kung fu film, The Seven Golden Vampires.

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