Be My Valentine

Making waves among dedicated digital comic fans is Alex de Campi’s new graphic novel series for wireless devices, Valentine, featuring art by Christine Larsen.

Film maker and Eisner-nominated comic book writer Alex has been working hard to ensure this comic is available on a variety of digital platforms (and different languages) including iPhone, Android and iPad - and a print edition is also in the works.

Valentine tells the tale of a cavalry lieutenant, lost and dying in a snowstorm during Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Russia, who stumbles across an ancient conflict between beings more powerful than humanity can imagine, a conflict which now threatens to consume the Earth and all upon it – because those who have stood in the horror’s path, the few bastions of light, are going home.

Alex de Campi has published graphic novels in both America and France. Her quicksilver imagination takes us, in finest pulp thriller style, from the stormy wastes of the Russian steppes to worlds and futures that, like all great fantasy and science fiction, comment obliquely on our own.

She's been planning wireless comics since 2003, and her cinematic eye and inventively literary style is a perfect fit with the medium. Her ambitious serial, available in 13 languages and counting, in a multiplicity of formats, across multiple platforms, is the first truly professional wireless comic, raising the medium out of its infancy along with a number of other enterprising creators who've embraced this new digital comics world with open arms.

In Valentine, 23-year-old country boy Valentine Renaud and his best friend and superior officer Oscar Levy are thrown into a world of peril they barely understand, filled with miraculous and deadly actions. Their simple attempts to fulfill promises unexpectedly cause them to be branded deserters by their own army.

Valentine in Japanese

Their problems only grow from there, as Valentine returns to France to look for a woman who had saved his life, and in doing so unleashes a plot by the last remnants of a malignant race, their magic drained and stagnant, to wreak their revenge upon the world.

The format of Valentine is, possibly, best compared to manga as it is serialised in weekly, 30-page chunks in Japan. Fans of suspense and thrillers will be drawn to the story's action-packed, visually stunning tale of a world where magic has departed, but evil is here to stay.

Alex de Campi has published the Eisner-award nominated graphic novel Smoke (published by IDW), middle grade manga series Kat and Mouse and Agent Boo (both released by Tokyopop) and, in France, the fantasy-adventure middle grade series Chromaland and the teen sci-noir thriller Messiah Complex (published by Humanoids). Her music videos and short films are festival favourites worldwide, having been shown at SXSW, Flanders, Synch (Greece), SFIndiefest, Marfa, Renderyard and a dozen more.

Music fans will know she  had a worldwide number-one music video on Youtube, “Those Rules” for The Schema, filmed on a mere £500.

Alex de Campi

After 15  years spent mainly in Hong Kong and London, she has recently returned to New York. She snuck across the Russian border when she was 19 and, in her early 20s, raced offshore yachts across the South China Sea.

"The multiplicity of languages was a primary reason we chose to release Valentine as a wireless project," says Alex. "I have a lot of friends in a lot of places around the world. Most of them like comics. Some of them have very little access to comic stores. All of them, not unreasonably, enjoy reading comics in their own language. So because of the nature of Valentine, with us not having to do a separate print run or sort out distribution for 'foreign language' editions, it became super easy for me to just whack something up on Twitter and Facebook and say, 'anyone want to translate my comic?' I believe the fancy term for that is 'crowdsourcing'.

"Before I knew it," she continues, "we had 13 languages, and translators who include one of Rolling Stone's writers in Brazil, a British pop starlet, a Los Angeles film composer of Polish descent, a Serbian artist. Each translator gets half the earnings of the book in their language.

Valentine in Italian

"One of the wonderful things about comics has always been its participatory nature, the interaction between readers and authors (something to which the book publishing world has only cottoned on recently)," Alex feels, "and Valentine uses that participatory element to create something that, well... that big publishers could never do. Immediate, multilingual editions.

"The thing you also need to keep in mind is that comics overseas are far, far bigger than they are in America. In France and Japan, there are single issues of a bande dessinee or a manga tankubon that regularly outsell in volume the entire US comic industry’s output for the year."

And the format thing? Valentine is available on an impressive number of formats already, considering it only launched recently.

Valentine on Kindle

"Well, frankly, that's just showing off," she says, obviously with tongue firmly in cheek. "No, seriously, as I was talking to people about Valentine, everyone was like, 'Oh, I read on Stanza, can you have it for Stanza?' and 'Could I get it on my Kindle?' and 'But, I have a Sony e-Reader'... and the joy of doing one panel per screen is that it makes the format very adaptable, both for different size screens and for right to left languages.

"One panel per screen may not be the way of the future, as technology evolves on an almost moment by moment basis, but it has worked very well so far for Valentine."

• For more information, check out the brilliant Valentine web site at: www.valentinethecomic.com

How to get Valentine...

• iPhone: Comics by Comixology (all 14 language editions); Robot Comics (Chinese, French, English and Spanish only); Ave! Comics
• iPad: Comics by Comixology (all 14 language editions)
• Android: Robot Comics (English only); Ave! Comics (coming soon)
• Kindle: Kindle Store or the Valentine comic web page
• e-Reader: Valentine Comic store
• Laptop/web: Comixology
• Printed book: Volume I (collecting Episodes 01-08) due out from Image Comics later this year.