Glimpses of Darkness

In short, Into The Darkness (ITD) is an independent comic series. What it's about...well, that's a different answer.

ITD is a blend of genres (action, superpowers, horror, character drama) and covers a variety of topics that have interested us outside of the standard Good vs. Evil tropes. So many works of fiction only cover that divide, or the divide within one's self to overcome and succeed as a result. We wanted to cover other things as well: Fact vs. Fiction, Destiny vs. Free Will, and so many more. But if this kind of deep retrospective puts you off, we promise there's also a lot of love for martial arts brawls, angry dead things, explosions, gunfire and witty dialogue to look forward to as well!

Much like the real world, you'll find very little clear-cut good and evil here...real people aren't usually that neatly defined. Rarely do we find villains in real life that don't believe that they are somehow the hero of their story. Rarely do we find heroes who are without fault and always do the right thing. Even the best of us are fallible, prone to poor judgment, fatally flawed...you know: HUMAN. We've tried to create characters that are fallible and that you can relate to — super powers or not.

We've established a series of rules that govern how we write and draw Into The Darkness. Developed mostly by observing what bothers us about comics we read, these rules guide how we craft our characters, tell our story, and how we design and visualize our characters.

RULE #1: No Costumes. If we woke up tomorrow with super powers, none of us would go out and sew spandex as our first action.

RULE #2: Characters will be portrayed realistically. No arms the size of Dwayne Johnson's chest, guns bigger than a Cadillac, or women with 4-inch diameter ankles and boobs cinched up under their necks like twin goiters. (Also known as the "Anti-Liefeld Rule")

RULE #3: Dead is Dead. I know that seems like a hypocritical rule when we have dead things wandering around. What we mean is major characters with a confirmed death will STAY dead. We can't make the decision lightly to off somebody, because there is no coming back. Seriously, how many times has Phoenix died? It might be cosmic balance: She keeps dying because Keith Richards won't...

RULE #4: Superhuman abilities must have a reasonable explanation of how they operate. Now look, we know it's a comic book. We're not saying everything has to stand up to scientific scrutiny, we just need to be able to have some sort of logical reason behind how our heroes can do what they do. So we're not going to have any characters that are an obese man with the ability to turn into a human flying saucer. This is a real thing, we swear we couldn't make this up.

We're approaching ITD a little different than most comic books are handled. We're treating more as if it were a high-end cable TV series. Each issue is called an episode, and there are ten episodes per a season. Every season will focus on a particular story arc, and roughly a year will pass in the comic timeline between each season. There are a few reasons we're doing this:

By having only ten issues instead of twelve per year, we feel we can keep the writing leaner and tighter to avoid the filler material that pops up in many books
This system lets the characters age in real time along with us. Writers tend to rely on a crutch in comic books and cartoons: imaginary characters don't age like actors do. We feel this tends to make characters become stale after a while. Since the characters will age, it forces us to think dynamically and imagine how their personalities will evolve and change over the course of these adventures.

Characters are the heart and soul of a good story, and it's no different with ITD. We've been developing this story a long, long time and our characters have developed so that we know their individual voices as if they were real. And that's what a strong story is really about: making you care about the characters as if they were actual people. They mean a lot to us, and we're hoping they will to you, too.