AMBER GANT's RLSH COMIC BOOK

ART APPRECIATION WEEK

The cast of RLSH: A Comic About Real Life Superheroes without their RLSH attire.

Amber Gant is in her third year of college, where she is studying sequential art in Savannah, Georgia. She will soon move to Atlanta, where she’ll undertake an internship with an inker who works for Marvel comics. She first heard about real life superheroes in a Psychology class.

“My first thought was 'sweet, I wanna do that.' Then I realized I'm 120 pounds and not too tall. I'd probably get my ass kicked." Amber told me. "Instead I wanted to do my own in helping get the word out. I think I really got the drive to go on it when I first saw the Kick-Ass comic. I don't think I would have known it was RLSH related, except someone brought it up in their interview. I read the first few issues and was just sick because everyone I had talked to told me the opposite of what was going on in the comic.”

Amber decided to craft her own six issue comic book series, titled RLSH: A Comic About Real Life Superheroes.

To prepare for writing the script, Amber read up and also interviewed ten RLSHs (and three real life supervillains). I have spoken with Amber over the last months on a several occasions, and she gave me the privilege of reading the script for all six issues of the series. She is now hard at work on drafting the artwork for the comic.

I think Amber has very accurately captured the ideas and personalities of the RLSH while adding some drama to help move the story along. I found myself reading it and being like oh yeah, this reminds me of so and so RLSH, and this she obviously got the idea from such and such RLSH's patrol.

Many things in the story were a believable take on things instead of ridiculous, over the top, slice and dice, Kick-Ass style stuff. Some of the conflicts are “what if” scenarios which have long been discussed by the RLSH community.

Amber presents these worst case scenarios with sensibility. I don’t want to ruin any surprises, but some of the issues the fictional RLSH run into include government intervention, double crossing, negative media hype, and a suave, plotting supervillain.

Amber plans to make the comic web-based (to tie in with one of her classes) and should have an early installment mid to late May at www.rlshcomic.com.

In keeping in the spirit of her subject matter, a portion of proceeds made on sales of the comic will be donated to charities.

I will be sure to update here with developements.