[Groop] Piekos' Dead Ends Online

[E C]

http://www.comicon.com/pulse

PIEKOS' DEAD ENDS ONLINE

BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO
No one can say Nate Piekos isn't taking full advantage on the World Wide Web to create stories. He's crafted an interactive horror story, like a "Which Way" book, that gives readers the choice of several paths to take, and a different outcome associated with each. If you make a bad choice, though, you can't just flip back a few pages or go that other way, you're stuck back at the beginning of the chapter again. But, if you choose well, you might be able to see the story through without any pratfalls. Dead Ends launched on December 12 and Piekos has tons of readers desperate for the next chapter. 

THE PULSE: What inspired Dead Ends? 

PIEKOS: DEAD ENDS started as a phone conversation in October of 2003. I was shooting the breeze with Blambot team member, Shane Clarke and we were reminiscing about role playing games and zombie movies. I’d been itching to get back to writing prose, and all the ingredients came together to spark the conception of DEAD ENDS. I did a lot of writing while I was in art school, but had stopped for a period between college graduation in ‘98 and the fall of ‘03. I had worked on several indy comic scripts, but writing scripts and writing novels are two different creatures. Scripts are about as threadbare as you can get—they are never intended to be seen by the end user. Novels on the other hand, are all about being perfectly polished and entertaining on their own.

THE PULSE: Why make this interactive and why the horror genre?

PIEKOS: To my knowledge, no one else was utilizing the web to tell an interactive story. The internet not only allows me to let the reader choose the path of the characters, but I can randomize links so that each choice can have several results. I also wanted to prevent the reader from going backwards. I think being able to go back a step and re-decide is cheating. There’s a lot more at stake for the reader if he/she knows that they’ll have to start over at the beginning of the chapter if they make a bad call. I chose horror because I’m a fan of the genre. I’m a sucker for B-horror and you just can’t get any more fun than zombies. Years of role-playing games in junior high and high school also influenced me. That’s interactivity and randomly generated game mechanics at its finest. I geeked out quite a bit with Dungeons & Dragons as you can tell! 

THE PULSE: SO you're writing about the horror genre and zombies, but what really scares you?

PIEKOS: The President. When a guy can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear”, I’m not sure he should be the most powerful man in the world. 

THE PULSE: How hard is it to get "fear" across in the online world? Is it easier or harder than writing a scary "print" comic book? It seems a tough task either way ....

PIEKOS: Getting fear across in novel form (print or online) is MUCH easier than via a comic. A comic can show you a creepy zombie, but a with a novel, your brain is filling in the blanks. And there’s nothing scarier than that. I honestly don’t expect anyone to be really terrified by DEAD ENDS. It’s all about the B-movie factor. I’m tapping into the things that make us all twitch in our seats as human beings. (Like crawling through grave tunnels dug by zombies, or having a rotted corpse lick your thighs 
) It’s campy and it’s gross—but I’m also making sure it’s character driven. The zombies are secondary. I’m a firm believer that without strong characters that a reader can sympathize with, and a well crafted plot, you end up with crap. I believe the same can be said with comics. Which is why I guess we’ve got such a glut of comics and movies featuring a lot of T & A with copious amounts of pointless violence. I’m not opposed to those things, but without any real story to give them purpose, it’s just unnecessary. When’s the last time you went to see a flick with the psychological impact of the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE? When’s the last time you came away from a comic like THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS in awe of the tale you just enjoyed? Few and far between sadly enough.

THE PULSE: Agreed! So what were some of the biggest challenges to making Dead Ends a reality - and the type of story that you could walk away feeling impacted by or in awe of?

PIEKOS: Mostly technological. It’s not my strong point. I’m the writer and designer, but the web presentation is largely outside my expertise. Luckily I have Stuart Robertson and Shane Clarke. They took my Photoshop files and turned them into a fully XHTML and CSS website. A graphics-intensive website no less — something not yet widespread with XHTML and CSS I’m told. The other factor was getting my mental processes working in novel mode again. Had to oil the gears as it were. I usually write WAY more than I need and then edit the hell out of it. I edited the first chapter of DEAD ENDS for content about six times. It’s probably forty-percent shorter than the first draft. It’s all about tightening it up.

THE PULSE: Sounds like you're done a lot of hard work. What has been the most rewarding about working on this project? 

PIEKOS: The satisfaction of writing a fun story again. It’s an easier medium to complete than comics. I sit down, I write a paragraph, and it’s already closer to the final product than a comic would be. Both can be just as rewarding, though. They’re just two different things that I love equally. Seeing the whole thing come together was a great thrill as well. Alfredo Lopez Jr. has contributed about ten digital paintings for the project that are just astounding. Why Alfredo isn’t making oodles of cash doing comic covers is beyond me. His art can be seen at lopezstudios.com as well as all over the DEAD ENDS site. I’ve actually started writing in scenes that were completely inspired by the art Alfredo’s giving me.

THE PULSE: How has reaction to the site been? Since it launched December 12, how's it gone? What kind of feedback have you gotten?

PIEKOS: Reaction has been really great. I’ve gotten good feedback from just about every type of reader; from casual “killing time at work” people to comics editors and everywhere in between. The morning after I launched the site, I had a half dozen fan art submissions in my mailbox. But the best praise has been the e-mails from readers who are desperate to read the next chapter. I must be doing something right. I’m a firm believer in the formula set down by the old detective serials: Leave them with a situation the characters can’t possibly get out of [it] alive!

THE PULSE: What kind of research did you have to do for this project? How'd you get the setting just right? Getting the nuances of the geographic area down ...?

PIEKOS: As far as story elements go, not much. I’m a life-long New Englander. So creating the backdrop town of Dead Ends was pretty easy. It’s a mish-mash of the places I’ve lived in or driven through over the years. These tight-knit communities take on a bizarre life of their own. Even going so far as to have their own terminology for things not used anywhere else. For instance, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island everyone knows what a “dynamite” is. It’s a loose meat sandwich with peppers and onions in a torpedo roll. If you tried to order that almost anywhere else in the same state, people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. The other thing that really fascinates me about New England is the weird mix of history and modern convenience. People live with microwaves and cable TV in their houses, but their back yard might still have the rock wall dividers that their ancestors built before the Civil War. It’s pretty cool, actually. As far as research on horror and zombies goes, I’ve been immersed in that since I was a teenager. So the building blocks were there. I’m just giving it my own spin. My zombies do some funky stuff
like tunnel really fast underground. I wanted to add some new features to the old standby!

THE PULSE: Where can people read Dead Ends at? What's the official URL? 

PIEKOS: www.visitdeadends.com -- they can also pick up a free desktop image, buy DEAD ENDS merchandise, and get the official Dead Ends font that I created.

THE PULSE: Cool. You're always involved in a half dozen or so things. What other projects are you currently working on? 

PIEKOS: I’ve always got a bunch of projects going on with Blambot. Right now I’m lettering some titles, doing a few custom font designs, and designing logos for people (including a renowned musician whom I can’t name until the project is over 
 ). As far as my illustration, I’m reviving my indy comic, LINT McCREE over at Logan DeAngelis’ new PV COMICS label at pvcomics.com -- I’ll be writing/drawing stories for the web and in print. I’m really jazzed about coming onboard. Finally there’s a system set up where the artists are earning the lion’s share of the money generated by their work.


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