Reminder that TOMORROW is the Frank Hannah livestream. I will post a recap/things of note on here when it's all said and done (provided it doesn't run too late)
JOIN US… FEBRUARY 2nd for another live stream interview to kick off the New Year presented by Army of Darkness & Evil Dead Comics, in partnership with Hounds...
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Alright, livestream is over. Here are the interesting tidbits:
On what happened to Space Goat:
* It seems Space Goat had money problems from the get-go. It wasn't until Hannah's nine-issue run was over that he actually got paid for writing them (after pestering and yelling at Shon Bury about it). After Hannah got paid for those books, he basically got pushed out and ghosted by the company when he inquired about continuing writing the ED2 series.
* Hannah didn't know about the board game until the day it launched (which happened after the aforementioned payment ordeal and subsequent ghosting). Space Goat then roped him back in to film a video for the Evil Dead 2 Omnibus & Art Book Kickstarter project.
* Bury used money from the ED2 board game Kickstarter to start paying all the other comic writers and artist he owed. Apparently some people were getting paid on time, and some (like Hannah) were not. Bury thought the money train would keep rolling his way with the Terminator board game, and was disappointed it didn't even come close to the same level as ED2.
* There was an internal revolt at Space Goat when Bury started burning through the Kickstarter money, and a lot of people left the company. Everything truly fell apart when Bury was accused of assault by an employee, followed by an alleged lawsuit, and eventually the bankruptcy. Bury has basically vanished since then.
On the comics themselves:
* Each series was only three issues since that's where sales start to dip on titles that run a bit longer than that.
* Since Space Goat had no real social media presence at the start, word of mouth and convention appearances is what informed them of the first book's success.
* The #1 rule StudioCanal had for the series was that nothing can effect the events of
Army of Darkness or "disrupt the canon".
* Hannah knew of the "Revenge of..." one-shots during their production, but was not kept in the loop by editorial about their actual plots (which is why the main series never mentioned the events from those books).
* The simulacrum Ash losing his hand in
Dark Ones Rising was not a mandate from editorial or StudioCanal (or even fan request), Hannah figured that people would want to see the more iconic depiction with the chainsaw hand and decided that point was the right time to bring it in.
* StudioCanal didn't interfere at all in Hannah's run except for one instance: they did not like the idea of Ash being born out of the cow in
Dark Ones Rising #1, so the artwork was intentionally kept vague so you didn't know if Ash came from the cow or emerged from the mud puddle.
On the plus side, Hannah revealed that he another industry professional have recently been floating the idea of getting another publisher to pick up the Evil Dead 2 comic rights to reprint the Space Goat stuff and continue where the series left off. While this at the "just talk" stage, he said he'd love to revive the title, and has ideas ready to go if it does happen.