A Townsville Fairytale

Andrew's A Townsville Fairytale comic was produced in a number of different formats. It was published in a Sunday newspaper style for the Townsville Bulletin Entertainment magazine Savvy in 2010. It was a web comic and printed comicbook.

Many of the works can still be found on the facebook page.

The following is Andrew's newspaper pitch:

THE PITCH

A Townsville Fairytale is an ongoing comic strip aimed at a 18-45 demographic, and designed for Australian audiences. It's written and illustrated by Australian comics artist Andrew Sorohan.

It's literally set in the city of Townsville in North Queensland, and talks about Australian issues, Australian popular culture and Australian stories – through the lens of fantasy and fairy tale story structures.

The comic made its newspaper debut in The Townsville Bulletin's supplement Savvy Magazine in October of 2010 and is now set to take the world, or at least Australia, by storm.

THE SETUP

A Townsville Fairytale does what it says on the box – it's a comic set in the North Queensland city of Townsville. This is a Townsville reimagined as a fairy tale fantasy land but which still retains the most recognisable features of the real Townsville.

The main character, Thomas Hannigan, is a typical Aussie bloke, with a less than typical life. He works for a mad scientist, he desperately wants to get himself a magic sword all of his own, and one of his best friends is a living garden gnome!

There's a huge cast of characters in A Townsville Fairytale, but they're all grounded in the kinds of real people who are familiar to Australian audiences. There are womanisers, heroes, losers, bosses, girlfriends, and even those weird dudes who you know, but you're still not quite sure why you're friends with them.

STORYTELLING

The storytelling in A Townsville Fairytale uses a combination of techniques used in traditional newspaper comic strips and the cliches and structure of traditional fairy tales.

Unexpected characters fill roles of fairy godmothers and evil trolls and beautiful princesses. The realistic Australian settings like Queenslander-style houses or park playgrounds become fantasy settings filled with monsters, ghosts and hidden kingdoms.

The comic is a comedy at its heart, with the goal to make people laugh. But it’s able to get political, to comment on the human condition and to speak directly to adults using themes that are really familiar to them from their childhoods.

A MODULAR DESIGN

A Townsville Fairytale is designed to be as modular as possible, to suit the needs of the newspaper publishing it. It can be presented in a variety of formats.

Prestige Format

In The Townsville Bulletin it’s printed in a 26cm x 22cm format, with the main strip, accompanied by website links and a small editorial blurb.

In this format, the comic is completely unique in newspaper publishing – an ongoing art feature unlike any other currently published by Australian (or even international) newspapers. It’s great for magazine inserts, or publishing alongside large, dry, regular features like the Saturday employment section.

Three Panel Strip Format

The strip can also be divided up to be used in a more typical comic format, similar to other three-panel comic strips.

Each line of panels ends in a punch line, allowing them to be used as a more traditional ‘daily’ comic strip like Garfield or Footrot Flats.

This modular design means that the strip can be used in different ways for different newspapers. As a daily strip A Townsville Fairytale can appear alongside normal comic strips – or simply appear three times a week.

CHANGING THE SCRIPT

Text and dialogue are placed digitally, so they can be changed to suit a newspaper’s needs very quickly and easily.

Language that might be offensive to certain audiences can therefore quickly be modified. The colour or tone of a joke can quickly be changed too. Also notice that the speech bubble changes size too, so the editing doesn’t become obvious or tacky.

IN LIVING COLOUR

A Townsville Fairytale is not currently presented in colour, but the strips are perfectly ready to be coloured should a newspaper require this.

THE INTERNET AND INTERACTIVITY

There is an internet version of A Townsville Fairytale, which updates every Wednesday. It has completely different content to the newspaper version of the comic but both are interactive, and feed one into the other. You don’t need to ever read the internet version to appreciate the newspaper version, but as both versions grow in popularity they’ll each feed the audience of the other version.

The newspaper strip is also designed for internet publication on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday or similar three-day-a-week rotation. As an internet publication the dialogue could be slightly modified, to create exclusive content, slightly different to the newspaper version. When online the comic could also be archived, allowing readers to start reading right from the beginning.

THE LOGO

The A Townsville Fairytale logo is a separate element which can be attached at the top of the strips before being sent to the editor for publication – or which can be added by the newspaper to fit the format of their book.

Here is the raw logo, in colour or in black and white. Each part of the logo is a different element that can be moved around to suit the purposes of the newspaper.

The logo elements also include a declaration of authorship, and a copyright notice:

The logo can be part of the strip when it’s delivered to the editor, or the elements of the logo can be sent to the paper for use so that it can be redesigned to suit the general design layout of the newspaper.

Here is an example of an integrated version of the logo:

And here’s an example of a version of the logo produced by the newspaper to match the logos used elsewhere in the paper’s design, taken from Savvy Magazine.

THANK YOU

Thank you for reading this pitch and considering it for your newspaper. I hope that at the very least you got some enjoyment out of what you’ve read so far and will consider the comic for the future.

--Andrew Sorohan