A big part of Small Press Month will be the Small Press Publisher Spotlight, which will provide some insight into the companies behind the books as well as hard looks inside the books themselves. The inaugural edition is taking a look at a relative new comer to the comics game: FutureDude Entertainment.
FutureDude was founded by Jeffery Morris in 2010, an event that seems inevitable if you know much about him. He was born in Chicago, but grew up in Phoenix during the moon missions and a golden age for science-fiction in all media. Aside from being a big fan of “Spider-Man,” Morris also liked classics like Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica, and ”Omni” magazine. His family moved back to Illinois in 1980 when he was in high school, and he later earned a degree in cinematography from Southern Illinois University. In 1990, he published a graphic novel titled “Utopia” with computer generated artwork from Michael Berglund. It wasn’t the first comic to have art created digitally, but it was still quite rare at the time. Morris didn’t just like fictional science, though. He’s versed enough in science fact to create the award-winning Alpha Prime curriculum, which teaches the basics of interstellar physics to elementary school children, and to help with public outreach for the JPL, NASA, and Lockheed Martin.
Morris moved to Minnesota’s Twin Cities with plans to open FutureDude Entertainment with the master plan of creating television animation and feature films. Before he could do that, though, he knew he would have to start a little smaller. When asked why he decided to go with comics, Morris says they’re “a fantastic way to quantify an idea and test it out with a target audience. They are also a way to gain a following for a concept before investing the massive dollars required to produce a large-scale media project like a film or TV show.” With that in mind, FutureDude released its first graphic novel in April 2012, “Venus: Daedalus One”. It was successful enough for a sequel (“Mars: Daedalus Two”) to get funding through Kickstarter although it’s not yet been released.
As FutureDude’s production infrastructure grew in 2013, the company decided to take some of the concepts they’d been developing and try them out as monthly comic books. If you’re a “Previews” reader, you probably noticed the ads they’ve been running since mid-summer. While it’s hard to quantify the success of an ad campaign when launching a new product, Morris feels they helped FutureDude make “significant headway” in standing out in a crowded industry. Ads in “Previews” aren’t exactly cheap, but the crew at FutureDude feel they “have products that matter, so [they] wanted to invest in getting the word out and showing that there is more to [them] than the typical indie publisher.” Their debut miniseries was “Brainstorm”, followed “Parallel Man: Invasion America” a few months later. Both were co-written by Morris, with the former co-written by Ira Livingston IV and drawn by Dennis Calero, and the latter co-written by Fredrick Haugen and drawn by Christopher Jones. “Parallel Man” is also an animated short film.
All of FutureDudes’s books have a strong focus on scientific accuracy, to the point of having credited science advisers. There are still imaginative elements, of course, but the books definitely fall into the One Big Lie realm of science-fiction. Despite his past work with schools and curriculum, Morris is quick to reassure that these books are meant to be entertaining, not educational. Eventually having some FutureDude books in schools and libraries is a long term goal for the company, however.
Future comic plans for the company include the sequel to “Venus: Daedalus One” and two new properties. The first will be “Retrograde”, described as a time traveling fight to change an unalterable past. The second is about a teenage girl who discovers her favorite game is much more than it appears. It has a working title of “Battlewing” and will also be turned into an animated short like “Parallel Man”. FutureDude is also developing Oceanus, a film about undersea explorers set for production in 2016.
