Alan Moore Revolutionizes Digital Comics with App for Creators

Creators with a passion for comics are bound to get excited when they hear that Alan Moore, the visionary behind V For Vendetta, Watchmen, and From Hell, is set to shake up the world of digital comics just as he did to print comics in the 1980s. He has teamed up with Ocasta Studios to develop an open-source toolkit for writers and artists hoping to experiment with online comics.

Electrocomics will take the form of a comic book and a free digital toolkit for creators within and outwith the comic industry.

“Personally, I can’t wait,” said Moore. “With Electricomics, we are hoping to address the possibilities of comic strips in this exciting new medium, in a way that they have never been addressed before.

“Rather than simply transferring comic narrative from the page to the screen, we intend to craft stories expressly devised to test the storytelling limits of this unprecedented technology. To this end we are assembling teams of the most cutting edge creators in the industry and then allowing them input into the technical processes in order to create a new capacity for telling comic book stories.

“It will then be made freely available to all of the exciting emergent talent that is no doubt out there, just waiting to be given access to the technical toolkit that will enable them to create the comics of the future.”

Electricomics will be a 32-page showcase with four very different original titles:

Big Nemo - set in the 1930s, Alan Moore revisits Winsor McCay’s most popular hero

Cabaret Amygdala - modernist horror from writer Peter Hogan (Terra Obscura)

Red Horse - on the anniversary of the beginning of World War One, Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys) and Danish artist Peter Snejbjerg (World War X) take us back to the trenches

Sway - a slick new time travel science fiction story from Leah Moore and John Reppion (Sherlock Holmes - The Liverpool Demon, 2000 AD)

Electricomics will be self published by Moore and long time collaborator Mitch Jenkins as Orphans of the Storm, and funded by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts. As a publicly funded research and development project, Electricomics will be free to explore the possibilities of the comic medium, without the constraints of the industry.

The app will be built by Ocasta Studios, under the guidance of Ed Moore (no relation to Alan Moore). Ocasta create apps for the likes of Virgin Media, Vodafone, Harveys and The Register, but this is their first venture in the world of comics.

The research team will be led by Dr Alison Gazzard, who has published widely on space, time and play in interactive media, and is a Lecturer in Media Arts at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education. Joining her, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is a pioneer in the field of experimental digital comics and senior lecturer at The University of Hertfordshire. Moore’s daughter Leah will edit the project, having created the 150 page digital comic The Thrill Electric for C4 Education in 2011.

Find out more about Electricomics here.