rockstar pizza

Another nice review up on scaryminds.com, this time a bit of a blast from the past with ROCKSTAR PIZZA (2006):

http://www.scaryminds.com/reviews/2010/comic014.php

Eight stars–that makes me feel good. The reviewer has a lot of nice things to say, and he’s even charitable to my own artwork (I was so unhappy with that story that I stopped drawing for years after finishing it), but what impressed me was this:

"While the only story in the collection that can be considered pure horror is Peas, each of the other three have a dark underpinning recognisable as a denizen of the dark genre forest. Jason Franks, as a writer, presents a world view in rockstar Pizza where there is no safe underpinning and where at any moment the floor might give way, spinning things into a vortex of chaos and unexpected outcomes."

That is a really nice encapsulation of my attitude to storytelling. In the books I did prior to KAGEMONO I didn’t give any thought to genre. I did not, in my head, make any genre distinctions when I was writing them, I just wrote the stories I wanted to. After the third one came out and I got tired of hearing "What’s the theme?" and "These stories are all different," that I decided to focus KAGEMONO on horror stories.

Ask me twice and I’ll tell you that everything I write is, in one respect or another, a horror story.

Scaryminds placed a large order on the Blackglass website a few weeks ago and they are working their way through it, so expect a couple more of these in the weeks to come.  Also, if you are a fan of horror or dark fiction and you’re interested in what’s going on in Australia and New Zealand, please take some time to explore the site: they have great coverage of books and movies as well as comics. 

Cheers,

— JF