Iron Giant and Despicable Me's Stephan Franck Launches New Graphic Novel, Book, and Audiobook on Kickstarter

Stephan Franck, Head of story for the forthcoming Playmobil movie and supervising animator on the beloved animated classic The Iron Giant, is currently funding the third installment in his third volume of Silver vampire graphic novels on Kickstarter.

Videos by ComicBook.com

Franck, also a key story contributor to Despicable Me, tells the story of a woman who is a descendent of Van Helsing teams up with con men to rob Dracula’s treasure.

“I love the world of animation,” said Franck. “But there’s something magical about the world of comics that I can’t resist. Silver is a supernatural story, full of mystery, forgotten places and ancient secrets. I hope readers will continue with me on this journey.”

The Kickstarter campaign actually launched ahead of Comic Con late last month, but more recently, they have added a second book and also an audiobook.

The campaign has a little less than a week left, and they’re shooting to raise about another $2,000 to complete the audiobook component, which was a stretch goal added after the campaign itself was successful.

If funded through Kickstarter, pledges will be delivered to backers this fall. The SILVER Volume 3 Kickstarter campaign is live as of July 10th and runs for 30 days. For updates, follow Dark Planet Comics on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

WHAT IS SILVER?

It’s been over 30 years since Professor Abraham Van Helsing visited Dracula’s castle. Now his descendent, the mysterious vampire hunter Rosalyn Van Helsing, is teaming up with a ragtag group of con men for a high stakes heist to rob Europe’s richest vampires. Welcome to the world of Stephan Franck’s Silver, a globe-trotting graphic novel series that mashes up the world of Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula with action, adventure, humor, pulp storytelling and modern sensibilities.

Having previously funded the first two volumes of SILVER via Kickstarter, Franck and his company Dark Planet Comics are launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund the third volume of SILVER and help bring the first two volumes to a wider audience.

“I started Dark Planet Comics because I had to tell the story of SILVER and wanted to forge my own way, without having to answer to a corporate overlord,” said Stephan Franck. “Kickstarter has allowed me to connect with an audience, print the book, attend comic conventions and, most importantly, tell the story the way I wanted, with action, adventure, mystery, humor and plenty of vampires. I didn’t have to sell a publisher on doing a period story or justify my decision to do a black and white comic because I went straight to the audience.”

In SILVER, a group of cons discover the late Jonathan Harker’s secret ledger, which discloses the existence of an exotic treasure of silver hidden in Dracula’s castle. Finnigan, the group’s leader, may be ethically challenged, but he knows a retirement plan when he sees it. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to pull off the heist of the last ten centuries, even if it means allying with a beautiful, sword wielding vampire hunter…. who just happens to be a descendent of Van Helsing.

When he’s not writing and drawing comics, Franck is the Head of Story for the PLAYMOBIL Movie for Lionsgate. Previously, he worked as a supervising animator on the cult classic film THE IRON GIANT and as a key story contributor to DESPICABLE ME. Franck also co-created the award-winning animated TV Series CORNEIL & BERNIE (Nicktoons, Hub Network), and received an Annie Award nomination for Best Director in a TV Program, for the special SMURFS: THE LEGEND OF SMURFY HOLLOW, the first ever hand-drawn version of the beloved characters done at a feature-animation quality level.

Now Franck is back with more of the SILVER story, and in Volume Three the con is in full swing and James Finnigan’s uniquely talented band of grifters is deep undercover. But talent comes at a price. Secrets and agendas emerge, and characters are pushed past their breaking points. While Finnigan struggles to keep his team on track, thrilling action, suspense, and drama ensues in the most intense and gothic volume yet.

ROSALYND

Rosalynd is a one-shot 244-page Hard cover which dives deeper into the Silver Universe, and explores the mysterious past of one of Silver’s most beloved characters: Rosalynd “Sledge” Van Helsing. Secrets about her family will be revealed, as well as Rosalynd’s first-person account of the events that put her on the road to becoming the acerbic vampire-hunter from Silver that we know and love.

Whether you are already fan of Silver, or discovering Rosalynd as a brand new character, you will enjoy this story that is both earnestly moving, and Pulp to the max!

Sometimes, a story just wants to be told. It doesn’t care if you have other plans or an already busy schedule. It burns its way through your psyche until you have no choice but to just let it out into the world. That’s what happened to me with ROSALYND.

One of my favorite sequences in Silver Vol. 3 is a flashback. Sledge gets into a trance and is taken back to her childhood’s defining moment—the moment that changed her life forever. Because I wanted to immerse the reader in her surreal experienced, I treated those pages in a style different from the rest of the book—a more deconstructed, stream of consciousness approach. By the time the sequence was completed, a door had been opened into the past, and into this character. And I wanted more.

After months of mental build-up, it all came out as a fever dream. Most of ROSALYND was created during one single business trip out of town, during which I ended up steealing every possible moment, and not leaving my hotel room for entire days of non-stop writing and drawing. I came back from that trip with almost a hundred pages of text and art. It was as if I—just like Sledge herself—had gone into a trance. And something really unexpected happened. Rosalynd became even more personal to me than I thought was ever possible.

My maternal family were “wandering Jews” from Bessarabia–the East just beyond the East that Bram Stoker writes about—who fled across Europe throughout the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, and who practiced the dark arts of vodka-making, professional gambling, and dentistry. Theirs was a life perpetually lived as strangers, never knowing when the community they had just settled into would eventually turn on them. And it always did. Yet, they managed to find happiness in family life, during the brief moments that History would allow. And like Van Helsing, my grandfather’s name was Abraham—Abram, actually in the original spelling. He was a badass in his own right too, who escaped from Auschwitz TWICE. And so just like that, the Van Helsings became a family like mine–only with one extra dark art of vampire hunting. And maybe, over time, the hunter would have become the haunted and they would have found themselves a family on the run, hoping that if they didn’t attract attention from the living, maybe the dead would forget about them too.

Following my grandparents’ deportation (from which Abram returned but Sara never did), my mother (then 9) and her siblings became “hidden children,” and, often left to their own devices, lived many adventures, in which the evils of the world were processed through the eyes of children. My mother’s childhood accounts of her family being torn apart, a testimony to the whimsical yet unsentimental resilience of children, also somehow became the story of Rosalynd Van Helsing.

Lastly, on an even closer note, Rosalynd is about the special magic of sisterhood. I have three wonderful children, and two of them are daughters. Not only are they incredibly powerful young women, but they are SISTERS. So of course, Rosalynd and her sister Bernice are them. I mean, of course, they are not them. But they are THEM. You know what I mean. They’re them.

THE AUDIOBOOK

If the Kickstarter campaign reaches $15,000, Franck will launch a new stretch goal: an audiobook.

Franck wrote to supporters that he wanted an audiobook “Because Rosalynd is about a singular voice. A unique point of view, we thought that developing it as an audio book–Rosalynd’s voice with music and sound effects–would offer another immersive and compelling way to experience this story.”

MORE LIKE THIS

You want more indie comics? Well, you’re in luck.

ComicBook.com has had a good deal of coverage of indie comics icon Terry Moore, and his upcomign plan to bring back Strangers in Paradise and Echo in the next two years.

Between the panel, the conversation at his booth, and the fact that we have been tracking the Strangers in Paradise revival longer than anybody else, there’s plenty more to read.

Moore had plenty to say that didn’t even make it into this, so check out his (mostly) full Comic Con panel, in which he discusses a lot of this stuff, below.

Meanwhile, stay tuned to ComicBook.com for much more information as January 2018 draws near.