Fishtown - Mobile Edition

Comics News
Fishtown
By The Editor
October 12, 2008 - 14:06

Writer(s): Kevin Colden
Penciller(s): Kevin Colden
ISBN: ISBN 1-60010-273-8

In 2003, the city of Philadelphia was shocked by an act of violence so brutal it almost defies description. The ensuing trial and intense media scrutiny unearthed the story of the murder of 16-year-old boy who was led into an empty lot in the city’s Fishtown section by his girlfriend and beaten to death by three boys he knew—one of them his best friend.

In IDW Publishing’s upcoming, fact-based, fictional hardcover graphic novel Fishtown, author and Philadelphia native Kevin Colden examines the motives of the murderers through loosely-based characters, imagined conversations and confessions directly aimed at the reader.

Inspired in 2005 by newspaper articles, television coverage, and snippets of trial testimony, Colden originally intended to create a more fact-based account of the story, but hit a roadblock due to inaccessible trial transcripts and ongoing litigation. Says the author, “At that point, I began to think about the reaction the public was having to the story and wrote the events how I imagined they occurred. When I finished the script I realized I had hit on a deeper emotional truth than the facts alone could have shown.”

In March 2007, the first chapter of Fishtown was awarded a self-publishing grant from the Xeric Foundation which Colden declined in order to publish the piece as a weekly webcomic at www.ACT-I-VATE.com, a web-based collective of established and up-and-coming cartoonists. “I mistakenly put Fishtown online before hearing from the Xeric committee. It turned out there was a conflict with their policy regarding simultaneous web and print release, so I chose to decline the grant money and take my chances with the limitless potential of the web.” The Xeric Foundation remained supportive of Fishtown, and in 2008, partly as a result of Colden’s decision, reversed their policy and now support concurrent web serialization for grant recipients.

Fishtown presents a chilling portrait of teenage angst gone horribly wrong by threading fact with fiction, reality with fantasy, and weaving a tapestry of connected vignettes that add up to a devastating treatise on the human condition. In its yearlong run at ACT-I-VATE, it garnered near universal praise for its confrontational and unflinching dramatization of the events leading seemingly average kids to turn into vicious killers.

Fishtown, a 120-page hardcover-with-dustjacket (ISBN 1-60010-273-8, Diamond order code SEP08 4143) will be in stores on November 12.