"Welcome to Iris Inn! How may we serve you today?"
A project idea for a quirky comedy webcomic. A mash-up of various ideas that come out to have a main cast of animal characters based off the Eastern Zodiac that run a 'Haunted' Inn (on an equally 'haunted' vacation island) that doubles as a costume cafe. Hijinks ensue.
A very unserious comic, its logic, physics, and biology runs entirely on Rule of Funny, Rule of Cool, Rule of Cute, Rule of Scary, Rule of Sexy, and Rule of Romantic. Basically, I can do whatever I want with it, including Breaking the Fourth Wall, creating crazy situations, and adding fantastic and mundane elements as I see fit. Anything, except maybe slipping into the Cerebus Syndrome. No seriousness allowed!
The story starts with the rat-lady Rhea and her best friend and 'employee' the ox-man Orion starting up a business at an old broken down inn. After a behind-the-scenes winter spent cleaning up the place and advertising their eventual opening, Orion can't help but note to the seemingly supernaturally-blind Rhea that the inn they've renovated is haunted. Unable to see any of the spirits or ghosts and explaining away all the strange incidences however, the single-minded Rhea brushes off his observations. As their first real guests experience the 'lovely' Iris Inn however, Rhea is grudgingly convinced that perhaps they could at least try hiring an exorcist of some sort... Enter the tiger-lady Teledice. And so on, as new characters (including but not limited to the Zodiac main cast) are introduced and various senseless plots are induced! The crazy action of invading pirates and zombie invasions interspersed with cute Beach Episodes and fuzzy romantic subplots!
The story is set on a small but beautiful vacation island flourishing with wild irises and fantastic creatures ranging from horror to fantasy to sci-fi. Ghosts, fairies, pixies, oni, elementals, parody-pokemon, defunct-robot-girls, anything and everything that can turn out to be cool, cute, funny, scary, or just plain awesome! This is not the norm for the world however—in fact, for the most part, the world at large is pretty much like ours, mundane and modern. TVs, telephones, help desks, cars, white-collar jobs, and so on. While fantastic elements exist outside the island to a tiny extent, it's nothing so common as on this super-charged spot of land.
Each page is 4 panels, arranged in a 2 x 2 square (like the beginning strips of megatokyo). I originally wanted to try and make this a 'gag-per-strip' comic, but the strict limitations of that were off-putting to me. Still, I try to have any good punchlines end on a page's final panel when possible.
PROGRESS: As of Feb 2010. I'm always slow. I only have some concept art and a cover page for the Prologue. I've drawn rough page layouts for the Prologue (10 pages) and 15 pages of Chapter 1.
I'll be making a list of the tropes that I intend to use in this comic to help myself. This comic will contain examples of:
- Breaking the Fourth Wall / No Fourth Wall: Unsure whether this will go so far as No Fourth Wall, but it will definitely at least break it often enough.
- Cat Girl: Teledice is part-tiger.
- Cosplay: It's a costume cafe, of course there'll be cosplay! Group cosplay, in fact!
-
Genius Bonus: I like to make names, titles, and little motifs to hold a bit of meaning or thematic connections, even if I don't expect the audience to pick up on them. Even for a silly idea like this! Iris is a Greek goddess of rainbows, sea, sky, communication/messages, and new endeavors. Also, all the characters of the Zodiac cast have Greek names with a starting letter that matches their animal (Rhea-Rat) . They are all introduced in the same sequence as the actual zodiac, and their genders are chosen based on the genders applied to the zodiac animals (alternating 'female-male') . Their personalities also take a lot from the zodiac stereotypes.
- Interactive Narrator: Author Narrator
