Written by Stephanie Forney
As I sit here pondering what to write I find myself a little stuck. We’ve been working on this idea for over a year’s time and suddenly we’re down to less than ten days. In the last year I sat quietly contemplating which packages to offer, calculating costs of printing, shipping, creating, and everything else…and then it suddenly came to me that I just needed to do it. Jump in with the rest of society and launch a kickstarter! It’s a scary, crazy, wonderful thing this kickstarter is and this is the only way we can get more of Scarlet Huntress out there to be loved. We learned over the past year that life is too short not to live the dream and reach for the stars. Here’s a little glimpse into what we’ve done:
When I first started writing Scarlet Huntress, okay before I started writing Scarlet Huntress, she was just an idea. Scarlet started with both is us brainstorming ideas because Sean was asked to come up with a story for an anthology book back in 2003. We came with all sorts of ideas for characters and storylines and whatnot, but once we started talking about werewolves we knew we were there. So Scarlet was born and she was a werewolf huntress…a modern-day take on the idea of little red riding hood fables. We did two short stories for the Portal anthology book (Twisted Gate Ent.) and then decided to develop the story more and start our own book. I couldn’t call her Red because that would be too easy, and every time I came up with a name Sean would shoot me down – “There’s already a character named that” – but eventually we settled on Scarlet. She is the heiress to a family of huntresses. All females. All strong women. All with names within the red color family (I’m an art teacher, I couldn’t help it!) And of course they all wore the red cloak at one time or another and then handed it down to the next generation. I didn’t want her to be a busty half-naked heroine. I wanted her to be real, have some real struggles, and be a little more rebellious than I could have ever dreamed to be when I was young. She rides a motorcycle and spent a few of her young teenage years being a runaway after her mother was murdered. Scarlet ran from her past, not realizing that there was a huge family secret that she wouldn’t learn till the time was right. Her Grams, yep Grams is in the story too, tells Scarlet about the cloak, the werewolves, and how her mother was really murdered. Scarlet then has to decide if she’s going to follow in the family business and become a werewolf huntress.
Of course the short answer is yes! And now issue #1 and #2 have been though a couple printings each and we created a couple supplementary books including a journal about other cryptid creatures that Scarlet comes across on her travels, and a children’s book version of the story titled Little Red Riding Hood: Origins of a Huntress. I feel like we’re still just scratching the surface of where I want to take Scarlet. And even though every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there is creating his or her own version of little red riding hood, I still love our take on the story. We’ve gotten her to become a huntress, complete her first kill, and she’s starting to train and come into her own. With the new anthology book we’re trying to fund I’m writing a story to finally introduce our heroine face-to-face with the villain of our story, Vincent, the werewolf who killed her mother. The other writers and I all come from different backgrounds. Bryan K. Borgman (Stratos) comes from an RPG and music background – he’s created his own miniatures game called Kaiju Kaos which Scarlet Huntress is licensed for and has little metal and resin figures for the game…they’re so cute! I mean umm…they’re buff and cool. And John Barker is the real professional writer of the group. He wrote The Dead Cell for Arcana Comics and has many other titles in the works. We each took our own take on Scarlet for the new anthology book – one dark, one mission-centered, and one continuing the regular story arc.
Now when you combine that with Sean’s amazing artwork (I swear I’m not biased even though I’m his wife) and THEN you add in the fact that for the first time the entire book will be in full, beautiful, digital color, you can’t go wrong with supporting the Scarlet Huntress Anthology. Sean has colored work for Zenescope, ManOrMonster?, APNG Entertainment, and his art has been on everything from t-shirts for Disney/LucasFilm to pinups in Hack/Slash, Mice Templar, and Voltron amongst countless others. Our kickstarter gained a lot of steam in the beginning and we’re so close I can almost taste the success but we’re not there yet. I need your help to spread the word and hopefully back our fabulous project. Sean has put together some amazing incentive packages with original sketches and new prints and much more. I really hope you’ll take some time to look over the Scarlet Huntress Anthology kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/838034909/scarlet-huntress-anthology) and let us know what you think over at Sean Forney Illustration (www.facebook.com/SeanForneyIllustration). Sean and I, along with the rest of our team have worked very hard to put this together, we thank you for your support, and we hope that you enjoy our work as much as we do!
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