UPDATE: FUNDED at $1800, 3 times original goal! Frank Marsters is also known as “Paeregrine” and “Frank of Mars.” A Kutztown Communication Design grad, he is creating a full-color comic book based on his popular web comic Paeregrine.Cast. The comic book project is already funded via Kickstarter and heading toward new goals. I’m a backer. I love it when a former illustration student takes the initiative to make a dream come true. You have until November 13 to share the dream, which Frank explains earnestly in his basement.
Q. Frank, What year did you graduate from Kutztown University?
December, 2012, my entire KU experience took 5.5 years to complete.
Q. What were your concentrations?
I graduated with both Illustration and Interactive. I had enough classes to graduate with Graphics as well, but ended up dropping my last requisite class in my final semester to help save my sanity.
Q.What is your day job?
I am currently working a few days a week as an in-house freelancer at Neo-Pangea, where I did my Internship and where I was a part of the Intern Abuser project. In the evenings I am doing freelance illustration to help make ends meet. Ideally, I would like to make my comic my full-time job, but, alas, I’m not there yet.
Q. Can you tell us about the inspiration for the cast ?
The cast of characters are all people I interact with on a mostly daily basis. I originally started out looking at each character as a 1:1 representation of the person behind it, but it quickly became more about caricatures and exaggerated versions of these people. Paeregrine, BeardRex, Ondine, etc. have become characters of their own, loosely based on the people they represented.
Troy Gaerthe is the inspiration behind the BeardRex character, he helped me out a good deal with some site issues early on and still is a big help/support to the comic.
Q. Technical Question: Where will you get the comics printed?
It is currently my plan to use a web-based service called “KA-BLAM”. I can print short runs based on how many of each cover are selected on Kickstarter. KA-BLAM will print “Sketch Covers” on good drawing paper making my hand-drawn cover reward a lot easier to complete.
Q. What are the figures for web hits? What was your biggest day?
The comic’s website has undergone a few face-lifts, – since moving to the current incarnation it has over 100,661 page views.
The comic (above) about the sale of Mojang / Minecraft to Microsoft got the highest number of views I’ve had in a single day: 17,530. But that is way higher than my daily average.
Q. How many subscribers?
As of the moment there is no way to subscribe to the site itself. (Working on that. Fan/followers on social media, hovering around 300.)
Q. Are you getting hits internationally?
From a lot of different countries. My top 7 nations (all in the thousands of hits) are the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Sweden, France, and the Netherlands. The international attention astounds me and makes me really happy. The French branch of the major games company Bethesda shared one of my comics. That was a really big deal to me, they translated the message along with it and everything.
So, if you like, support the Paeregrine Kickstarter here and get the comic book for a pledge of only $8. Or, you can always read the Paeregrine.Cast free online, updated 3 times a week! ‘Nuff said.
