Getting Away with Murder: A Comic Book Kickstarter

I can’t say I had it tough growing up. At least, not in an outward way that would make sense of the heroin cravings and passionate strangulation of “Getting Away with Murder: A Lowlife Story”.

For me, the mental maelstrom and cynicism I experience daily is what shapes my characters. This inner struggle reacting to an outside force is where my stories start. The chaos and constant fight of addiction and the overwhelming corrosive force of guilt are the internal struggles of the nameless main character in, “Getting Away with Murder: A Lowlife Story”.

Back when I was more of a musician, playing shows all around New York, my band had played a show at this lounge in Brooklyn. The lounge has since closed down and at the time it was not thriving with activity. But when you walked in there was a huge empty floor with a couple pillars disrupting the view across the lounge. There was a stage that was painted the same matte black that coated the whole interior of the building and just past it was a hallway to a couple dressing rooms. There were three acts playing that night and only two dressing rooms. We were first to arrive so we put some of our equipment in one of the dressing rooms thinking ourselves grand that we had as large a room to occupy before going on.

However, as the other acts showed, we were relegated to the hallway, letting the “bigger” acts have the preparatory space. I remember having forgotten a piece of equipment in our former dressing room. I opened the door while knocking, not expecting anyone to be naked but instead seeing the 12-piece band, the headliner that night, all turn to look at me, aghast that someone should walk in. The lead singer was hunched over in front of the makeup mirror, the kind with the clear bauble bulbs so bright you don’t see a crevice in your skin, with a line of coke just below his nose. Their brief look of fear quickly changed to anger. Who the hell was I and all that nonsense.

But really, who the hell were they? We were, all of us, nobodies.

Our story, “Getting Away with Murder: A Lowlife Story” came somehow and somewhere from that idea. The main character, a rocker who had a brush with money and fame, now forced to live a middle class life not only addicted to heroin but addicted to the thrill of playing. He thirsts for the old days of people cheering for him, of having “rock star privileges”, and the parties where he’s the focal point. He’s on the downslide of stardom, plummeting toward being a nobody and it’s the most painful thing. Also, he just killed his ex-groupie.

Two MoCCAs ago, I was walking the floor when I met MJ Steele (MJ's Site). He had an 11” x 14” inked drawing of Kurt Cobain mid-air playing his lefty fender strat in a warehouse to a silhouetted crowd, the Seattle Space Needle seen through one of the warehouse windows. No doubt about it, I had found the artist to help me tell this story. 

MJ’s style could be compared to more known talents like Sean Murphy or Rafael Albuquerque. Could be. If I were forced to make the comparison. The reality is, he draws inspiration from those artists while still maintaining his own unique style. He’s a balance of precision and broad strokes. Sharp black lines meeting swooping water colors. MJ studies illustration and cartooning at the School of Visual Arts.

Once MJ started churning out fully inked and beautiful pages, we need a letterer. We were lucky my brother, Thomas Griffin (Tom's Art), who can do any part of comic work artfully and skillfully, stepped in. He lettered the pages without the black outlines typically seen on word bubbles and captions. This let the bubbles fit MJs artwork without the obvious outside source that can sometimes disconnect the words from the pictures.

Currently, we’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to help us raise the funds and some buzz for this one-shot comic. Check it out at this link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/583569168/getting-away-with-murder-a-lowlife-story

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Article by Sean Griffin. Sean is a writer and co-founder of Gryphon Knights Comics. He currently writes the comic book "Hero" for GK and is studying Creative Writing for his MFA at Manhattanville College.