Seifert and Ketner ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ — summer 2010!
July 24th, 2009Rather than staring at my screen and hitting refresh over and over and over on the live Tweeting from the Eisner Award ceremony, I think now is a good time to unveil me and Russ Manning Award Nominee Lukas Ketner’s new comics project: The next issue of the Escape From Alcatraz comic series by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy!
The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy is a nonprofit that partners with the Golden Gate National Parks to produce, among other things, really clever merchandise about the parks. In 2007 they released Escape From Alcatraz: The Dummy Head Breakout (written and illustrated by Sara Ryan and Steve Lieber, our fellow Portlanders and a couple of really awesome people), the first in a line of comics detailing the 14 different escape attempts that took place while Alcatraz was a federal prison. For the second issue, they came to me and Lukas.
We’ll be telling the story of the 1946 escape attempt, the one called the “Blast-Out” of Alcatraz, or even “The Battle of Alcatraz.” It’s a really amazing, violent story — a half-dozen conspirators exploited several holes in the way Alcatraz was built and run, and managed to get a hold of weapons and free the entire inmate population… only to discover they’d misplaced the one key that’d get them out of the cellhouse building and out onto the island. It all ended in a stand-off between three armed prisoners and two platoons of Marines.
Lukas and I are really excited about telling the story — it’s got firefights, twists of fate, psychotic killers, 18-year-olds getting in over their heads, acts of heroism, acts of barbarism… and pretty much all the protagonists die. Think Reservoir Dogs with ’40s gangster slang in place of pop culture references, set in the most famous prison in the world. Think AWESOME.
The comic is going to be 22 pages, full-color, and will be available for sale in the Alcatraz gift shop probably sometime next summer.
As a side bonus, when Lukas and I went down to SF for WonderCon in February we got to go on an amazing private tour of the island. (I, personally, spent 10 hours on Alcatraz that day.) Here’s some photos I came away with.
