Category: Comics and Illustrations

Slums of the Empire City

An adult comic written by Ryan Curtis and illustrated/colored by Caio ROB and Kayro Rocha

About the Series

What if the 1995 film KIDS was set during Gangs of New York?

With inspiration drawn from possibly real-life characters, Slums of the Empire City is a crime adventure story for an adult audience, filled with suspenseful, disturbing, and often hysterical views from the everyday life of street criminals in 19th century New York. We get to know the criminal way of life through three distinct points of views, Sadie the Goat, Dutch Herman, and Walt Whitman.

Although they don’t know it yet, each of our characters are tangentially connected to a growing mystery that is spreading through the city like a sickness. Orphans are going missing; vanishing from right under everyone’s noses! Where are they going? Who is taking them? And more fightengly what is the fate of these poor children?

Three colourful people, three interlinked stories, bound together by fate and the need to do some good, collide. The missing orphans aren’t the top priority of city officials, so it is up to those, who call the streets home, to do something to protect them. As the story progresses, our would-be heroes are pulled into the mystery, starting in the filthy back alleys and overcrowded tenements of 19th century New York City and taking us on a journey to the top level government offices. This is Slums of the Empire City.

About the Team

Writer: Written by Ryan Curtis, a filmmaker and first time comic book writer, Ryan has spent the last decade on film sets supervising Visual Effects for major television shows including, Superman and Lois, Van Helsing, Lucifer, and Supernatural, to name a few. Ryan branched out into writing and directing his own projects and used the break during the pandemic to adapt the Slums of the Empire City comic from a TV pilot script conceived and written many years before.

Artist (Art and Letters; Color – Issue 3): Brazilian artist Caio ROB broke into the comic industry in 2015 and has since worked on several indie projects featuring the European original graphic novel “The Gospel of the Wandering Jew”, and has worked as a concept and environment artist for films, games and animations, including the studios: Raccord (BR), IION Games (US), Cyborg Ant (US) and Nucleo Zero (BR). He’s also the author of the brazilian comic series: “Depois do Fim do Mundo”.

Color – Issue 1,2: Kayro Rocha is a Brazilian artist, graduated in marketing with specialization in graphic design.  He worked as an art director and creative director in advertising agencies for 15 years, in addition to developing several brands, visual identities, book covers as a graphic designer, always using illustrations in his work.

Inspiration

Realistically, this project began way back in 2012 with a Reddit post about the last female pirate of New York – the tale of Sadie the Goat. This was a story that needed to be told to a wider audience. Originally published in Herbert Asbury’s novel Gangs of New York, Sadie the Goat was purported to be a real person, and seemed like the perfect protagonist for a television series. Ryan, with friend Jules Wilkinson, battered around a spec script, but it eventually became clear to the pair that it would require an enormous budget to make the project a reality, so the script went cold.

However, Ryan was haunted by the legend of Sadie the Goat. From time-to-time he would revisit the character, researching, studying, poring over articles and papers, trying to find evidence that this larger-than-life-character actually, truly existed in history. Although research turned up very little connected to her, Ryan was able to find many interesting people and events hiding in centuries-old newspapers.

Pulling together these stories started to fill out the world in which Sadie was believed to live, and soon another protagonist appeared – Dutch Herman. Dutch, a German-born safecracker who once proclaimed he would only talk to the police through the mouth of his revolver, seemed like the perfect B story protagonist and while we get to know him in the first three issues, he will be the main subject issues 4,5, and 6 (although we play him as more of a heart-of-gold scoundrel versus the historically violent thug).

Many of the crazy, mad-capped events and characters in the comic series came directly from newspaper headlines from the period, and in each issue of the comic we’ll highlight the true story aspects in the front cover, so you get some of the historical details about our heroes and a little slice of history with your comics.

Rewards

We have many different tiers of rewards for our GANG MEMBERS.

EARLY BIRDS (before July 4th)

If you buy a single issue or 3-pack before JULY 4th you will get a digital reward of the VARIANT cover of issue #1 delivered to your inbox on July 4th. PLUS, you’ll get regular delivery for the complete issue when it’s sent to everyone.

Gopher Gang Tier

• Digital comic issues 1,2, and 3
• Your name in the SMALL print on the thank you page (print copies).
• Access to the WIP folder to see how the comic was built.
• Exclusive access to the 3 minute motion comic.

For those looking for Printed comics you’ll want to check this out.

Charlton Street Gang Tier

Join Sadie the Goat’s gang

•  Issues 1,2,3 of the printed comics, shipped.
• Issues 1,2,3 of the digital comics.
• Your name in LARGE print on the thank you page (in print)
• Access to the WIP folder to see how the comic was built.
• Exclusive access to the 3 minute motion comic.

Put YOU in the Comic

You can select the tier and we’ll put your likeness in our next run of Slums of the Empire City comics (4,5,6).

• You provide a photo and we’ll put you in there somewhere.

Become a Character

This is our most exciting tier! We will add your likeness, use your name (or alias, if you want) and give you lines to interact with main characters of the book.

 Take a look a the books