Brent Jackson
You don’t know Richard Fairgray(Blastosaurus, Black Sand Beach, Cardboardia), but you will. After over 250 comic and OGN releases, this month, the New Zealand-native-turned-Canada/Los Angeles transplant is set to release Haunted Hill! The honest, funny, slice-of-life weekly web series is a surrealist soap opera chock full of the seediness and grime known as everyday Hollywood…with a healthy dose of aliens, ghosts, and trampolines.
Eva’s wife got a job she couldn’t turn down. Now back in Haunted Hill (the lowest part of Hollywood that can still claim “Hill” status), Eva must navigate feeling out of place—balancing exhaustion with the desire to be vibrant and adventurous. Haunted Hill circles the drain of a functional life, turning the simplest task into a hilarious ordeal.
“Hollywood is my favorite place,” said Richard Fairgray. “It’s this brutal mix of hope and unending, exhausting adventure, but whenever I try to explain it to people who don’t live there they think I’m describing Hell. I like to think of it as a place run on optimistic fear. This series is my way of capturing what makes it so special and so terrible all at once.”
Richard Fairgray is nearly blind, with 3% vision remaining in one eye. Sick of digital coloring on his myriad other titles, for this series he jots squiggly lines to traditional pencil-to-paper and colors with markers. Once a 6-page sequence is drafted, the script is printed and the layout is loosely sketched, drawn right away while it’s still fresh—that’s mad dedication to the creative process in the name of comics.
Fans of Love and Rockets and Strangers in Paradise won’t want to miss Richard Fairgray’s Haunted Hill, starting January 20th at www.richardfairgray.com. The series is free and will post every Wednesday, so sign up to be notified!