What Is This Sugary Serials Thing?
Sugary Serials is a comics anthology of all ages, full-color comics created with the sensibilities of the Saturday Morning Cartoon in mind. Get ready for stories with vibrant characters and a good mix of danger and fun.
The anthology updates daily on the web, and each issue’s content is collected in print at month’s end.
We are published by 01 Comics, and our print component is managed by Ka-Blam Digital Printing and their online store and fulfillment house, IndyPlanet.
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What do you mean, "Saturday morning cartoon sensibilities"?
Most of us remember getting up at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings to watch shows like Thundarr The Barbarian, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Dungeons & Dragons, The Smurfs, and Galaxy High. For a more visual reminder, here’s one of those two-page comics advertising spreads of a CBS fall cartoon schedule (thanks to Shawn Robare of Branded in the 80s for the image). Click the image to see a larger version.
This isn’t to say that Sugary Serials is playing the nostalgia card alone. We intend to map the sensibilities behind those old shows onto a new generation of comics.
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Those sensibilities, as we see them, are as follows:
- Vibrant Characters. In most cartoons, particularly the episodic ones, you had to deliver a lot of information quickly. These days you have less than 20 minutes per episode to get your story across. How do you make your characters register with so little time? You use shorthand. You make your characters bold and vibrant so there’s no mistaking one for the other. Think of any of your favorite characters from your favorite cartoon. I’ll bet you can describe them in a sentence or two, and nearly everything they do can be traced back to that description.
- Economical Storytelling. As previously stated, these cartoons were victims of time constraints. You don’t get much time to dwell on mood or scenery. You have to hit your points fast, but in an entertaining way. In a lot of cases the writers still managed to fit three acts into the story, a commercial break after the first two acts.
- And Good For You, Too. Stories accessible to kids as well as adults usually have a sense of wonder and earnestness to them. You don’t see many family films that celebrate ennui or cynicism. Sometimes there’s educational content in those stories, but never so much that you forget what you signed on for. Entertainment for entertainment’s sake is what we’re after, first and foremost.
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How does the anthology work?
Every month on the web site we’ll feature at least three new full-color stories from different creative teams. The stories will be released in 8-page chapters, which puts us at a 24-page monthly update schedule. That’s a page at least every weekday.
Each story will run between 16 and 24 pages. With 8-page chapters that means you’ll have an average of 3 acts per story. As each story is completed, it will be replaced by a story from another creative team. In other words, you’ll have lots of brand new stories rolling in every couple of months.
To illustrate what we mean, here’s a visual breakdown of the content for the first five issues:
Issues 1-3 will feature an act of Dreamform Defenders, Equalizers of the Divide, and Curse of the Pharaohs.
Each of these stories run 24 pages, making them three acts each. They all conclude at the end of #3.
In #4, we feature three new stories. Daring Dodo, Nemu*Nemu, and The Galactic League of Marshals.
In this case, both Daring Dodo and Galactic League only run 8 pages. So they both begin and conclude in this issue. Nemu*Nemu, however, continues on into #5.
#5, then, introduces two new stories (Super Pet Mojo and The Elements of Destiny), while continuing with the second act of Nemu*Nemu.
 This kind of staggering of stories will continue, as Super Pet Mojo is scheduled to run 16 pages, and The Elements of Destiny continues on for 24 pages.
As stories conclude, new stories are introduced. Older stories will return for new "episodes" as well. Thus the content on Sugary Serials will always be fresh.
Here’s where it gets exciting, at least for me. At the end of every month we’ll release a print edition of that issue. So you’ll be able to read it online for free, then purchase it at IndyPlanet. The archives will remain free, and you’ll always be able to buy back issues.
We also have free downloads to read offline on your PSP, in your favorite comics reader like Comical or FFView. We offer all our comics in PDF format as well.
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