A Haunting European History – ‘Rosalynd’ Is Added To Gothic Heist Story Silver’s Campaign
by Hannah Means Shannon
Today, Comicon.com is happy to announce that the campaign for the vampire heist tale Silver has expanded in a surprising way, adding another original graphic novel to the project. The newly added book is not a stretch goal for the crowdfunded work of Silver Volume 3, but simply an extra based on the attention the project has received and the support from loyal fans of the series.
The newly added book Rosalynd has very different goals from Silver, but is the product of the same mind and artistic genius in Stephan Franck. Franck has been creating the black-and-white and lavish story Silver for some years, and the books have gained wide support on the convention circuit and online through Dark Planet Comics, and turning to Kickstarter, Franck is funding the third volume of the series. While Silver follows the story of several master thieves hoping for the score of a lifetime in lifting a hoard of silver from Dracula’s castle, led by a female descendant of Van Helsing, Rosalynd is an even more personal project for Franck, but is also set within the Silver universe.
Rosalynd is a one-shot 244-page hard cover book which dives deeper into the Silver Universe, according to Franck, and explores the mysterious past of one of Silver’s 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”, Franck says.
Franck explains the genesis of Rosalynd thus:
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.
Here’s an exclusive look at the interiors on Rosalynd:
Franck also connects the creation of Rosalynd to his family’s past in Europe as “‘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 “. Franck says of his family that, “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”.
With their inspiration in mind, he brings readers both Silver and Rosalynd. In fact, Franck’s grandfather Abram actually escaped Auschwitz TWICE, astonishingly. Some of these newly revealed reflections by Franck certainly help illuminate the poetic and emotive atmosphere his books often evoke for his wandering characters. For Franck, Rosalynd is also “about the special magic of sisterhood” as a father to two daughters who he has watched grow as sisters, influencing his presentation of his female characters in Silver and Rosalynd.
With nine days to go in order to complete funding, the Silver campaign has also unrolled new art for fans to feast their eyes on, showing us more about the world of these “broken characters” who battle the “undead”.
Have a look at some more lusciously inked pages from Silver Volume 3:
Tiers of rewards for backers of the campaign include digital versions of all three volumes of Silver to catch readers up on the story so far, and now, by adding Rosalynd, Franck has essentially put four books on the table for noir and horror tradition fans to explore along with his wandering characters.
The campaign for Silver runs until Thursday, August 10th, 2017, with its wealth of offerings.
You can also check out the trailer for the campaign below:
You can find Comicon.com’s initial coverage of the campaign, with plenty of preview art, right here.