Accursed

Our Crestfallen Creator:

Kenney Broadway inadvertently incurred the wrath of a bona fide bog witch when he stepped on her toes during a fire drill. The toe-sore crone rebuked him in her guttural language, snatched a tuft of hair from his scalp, and hobbled off to what he could only imagine to be a shadowy lair cluttered with cauldrons, dried animal entrails, and other such accoutrements.  A week later, his hair returned to him via courier service.  It was affixed to an effigy carved out of candle wax and arrived with a note written in cat’s blood on a stretched goat’s bladder, as detailed in the postscript.  The note read: “From this day onward, a discordant chorus of fictional voices shall clamor in your head, shouting one above the other to have their stories told. And the instant you begin recording one chronicle, a new and more insistent voice will sing out to distract you.  Your best ideas will come in the shower and evaporate irretrievably before you’ve had the chance to dry yourself.  Serious employers will find your hard-earned English degree laughable whilst your family members slur words like freelance back at you and drown out your daydreams with blunted talk of real jobs and honest day’s labor.”  When Kenney presented his case to the citizens of Mortu’us Lull, they shamed him out of town with a combination of derisive snorting and mocking laughter.  Nevertheless, he feels uniquely qualified to bring you this tale of pessimism and self-pity, having spent a lifetime in painstaking research of those mindsets.

(NOTE TO READER: Given to hopeless flights of fancy, Kenney elected to represent himself with a liberal dose of poetic license.  However, the following account from Lucas Ryan is not only remarkable but entirely true.)

Our Anguished Concept Artist:

Lucas Ryan is an animator and illustrator for Dagnabit! (link: http://www.dagnabit.tv ) where the drawings are still done on paper with pencils, pens and markers in a process called “flogging a dead art-form.” For years before, he worked theme parks, an underground gypsy cart, and the Savannah riverfront as a caricaturist, stretching faces for cash. Lucas has also performed in improv comedy troupes and done street performance at Renaissance festivals in a vain attempt to force himself into social activity so the drawings won’t start talking to him. This hasn’t staved off madness, apparently, as he did build, for the Ren Fest, a life-sized, wooden camel that spits water and poops dates. When he was born he cried in bass, and now can be seen at karaoke bars wailing blues and rock songs to regain the comfort of his strange infancy. He once won a mustache contest at an art museum that was exhibiting works by Salvador Dali. He’s wrestled a bear. He’s the honorary brother of a Belgian knight. An Egyptian ambassador attempted to buy an oil painting of him, but was turned down by the painter. Despite all of this, he manages to remain quite boring at dinner parties.

Our Cheerless Colorist:

Sherard Jackson is a comic book artist who has been published by DC Online, Image Comics, Marvel, BOOM! Studios, Antarctic Press, Devil’s Due Publishing, Dynamite Entertainment, and others. His animation work includes the Warner Bros. film, A Scanner Darkly, and Collection Agency Film’s Flatland: the Movie. In addition to ink/coloring for Accursed, he is currently working on more creator-owned projects.

Our Woeful Webmaster:

Christopher Chestnut doesn’t remember when or why he was cursed, he only knows that he was cursed to be a professional dabbler, always finding new interests before he’s even seen everything the current one has to offer. As a result, he is fluent in several geek languages and his room resembles a cave of treasures, full of the most fascinating artifacts he’s found. He prowls the office by day as a writer and graphic designer, but by night he stalks the web to see what curiosities might catch his eye. If you see him at a con, you may be able to flag him down, but only for a moment. He wants to see a little bit of everything, and he’s determined to squeeze in that session on leatherworking this year…