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And you thought your comic book store was crazy.
THE VARIANTS is a new webseries by Richard Neal, Ken Lowery and Joe Cucinotti, set in the confines of the Zeus Comic Shop in Dallas, TX.
With tounge planeted in cheek, the show "...pulls the curtain back on (and maybe embellish) what life is like for the people who work at a comic book shop" according to series writer Cucinotti.
The series was inspired by the smash-hit THE GUILD, about a bunch of World of Warcraft players and their lives in front of and behind the scenes.
THE VARIANTS uses a comic store as its locale and follows employees Richard, Barry, Joe and Keli through their adventures in dealing with customers, situations and personalities which are, well, comic. The roles are played by their namesakes, Richard Neal, Barry Fuhrman, Joe Cucinotti and Keli Wolf.
So you could say the characters are variants of their actors...
“Barry and I both play unapologetically gay characters," Neal told the Dallas Voice. "But extremes of ourselves. Joe is the heterosexual who can be socially awkward, the nerd who pines for the girl he can’t have — that’s the Spider-Man story.”
The stories though are equal opportunity mayhem, easily identifiable to any fan, gay or straight, of comics, SF or pop culture.
Check out the first episode, embedded below, and decide if art imitating life imitating art imitates the life at your comic book store. The next episode will be out September 2nd.
Check out their site at: The Variants.Com
Comments
Thanks for the article! We're having a blast doing the show. Our next episode goes up on September 2nd. Can I also add that Ken Lowery is also a creator and show writer?
Richard, I'll tweak it to add Ken to the copy. I also edit the "doorQ.Com: The Gay SciFi, Fantasy and Horror Site" where we ran a story about your show, too. I'll tweak the copy there as well.
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