What other projects are you working on? I'm just curious because I love RP and your work is amazing.
So, I’m actually pretty excited to chat about a bit of this stuff. I’ve talked about it (and even shared a bit of my stuff) on Patreon over the past year.
All of these are basically in either pitch or script form. Don’t know which ones I’ll end up doing, or in which order. Just trying to have a variety of things ready to pitch to various entities.
1) Emma Hart: Personal Demon Hunter
Modern-day demon hunter hunts inner demons as a sort of “action therapist.” Think Buffy meets Daria.
2) The League of Infinite Jennys
Woman with dead-end life is inducted into team of her way-more-interesting alt-timeline selves. Together they travel through their past to save their futures – bickering constantly over their life choices.
3) Pixie Legal
Lawyer gets idiots out of deals with devils, leprechauns, genies, and the like. Ends up accidentally kind of ruining the world in the process.
4) The Misfit Spartan
Spartan flunk-out tries to redeem himself by braving the island of the Sirens, only to find all the “women are icky” Greek myths (Sirens, Gorgons, Amazons, Harpies, etc) are all misogynistic bullshit. The Sirens, for instance, aren’t trying to drown sailors, they’re trying to inform everyone that Zeus is a rapist – but nobody will listen. Also there’s wars and stuff.
5) With A Bang
Tech companies launch orbital billboard. 30 seconds after going live, it’s hacked to display weird porn. It continues to do so for five years straight. Hilarity ensues. This is a short story I wrote that I kind of want to adapt to a Black Mirror spec script.
6) Big Time
Teen resists morality lessons from his uncool time-traveling future self. Ends up in a cat-and-mouse game – Future Him tries to prevent an unspecified catastrophe, Present Him tries to prevent himself from becoming such a loser. But Future Him is trying to better Present Him for a reason… only, real change takes more than a day.
There’s others, but those are the main ones.
Oh, also, I interviewed at Disney last week to work on effects for Frozen 2. So maybe I’ll be doing that as a day job for a bit. Who knows! At this point, I could use some income and stability.
if you’re taking votes…
#4 pleaseeeee
So that is actually the one that’s most interesting to me personally for a couple reasons:
One, I’m a cishet white dude who’s been essentially working in Themyscira for five years. Making art that in some way reflects my own experience would help me process my own life a little bit.
Two, I don’t think it’s been done correctly on a big canvas yet. Like, take Medusa. Her story has been totally and completely fucked up in virtually every portrayal of her. The myth version is that she was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, then Athena turned her back on her, cursing her to become a horrible snake-haired woman. Later, Perseus kills her in her sleep because Athena told him to.
It’s when you blend in the historical record that it becomes super fascinating. So the Greek scribes describe the Gorgons as being based in Libya (broadly. North Africa), specifically related to the Berbers/Amazigh. One of the Berber/Amazigh tribes is the Tuareg, a matrifocal people that traditionally has put their men in veils and their women in power.
Lo and behold, archaeological studies have found temples to a proto-Athena Amazigh/Egyptian goddess named Neith there, which the Greeks used as a basis for Athena. Moreover, there’s a lot of religions dating back to Mesopotamia where priests/priestesses wore scary stone masks for rituals, which the Greeks called gorgoneia.
So if you take the Medusa myth as a sort of psuedo-history, you could read it as this: seafaring Greeks (Poseidon) invade a matrifocal society (the Gorgons/Amazigh/Tuareg) led by terrifying stony-gaze women (Gorgons/gorgoneia-wearing priestesses) with curly (snaking/African) hair, appropriate their culture (Neith/Athena), then later come back to kill the witnesses (Medusa).
While there’s probably not enough evidence to make a full-throated historical claim to that effect, there’s certainly enough of an idea there that one could base an interesting story.