Comic book colorist and filmmaker Chris Walker has transformed his life as a comic book geek into the video series, Anti-Matter, a web-based situation comedy set in a fictional New York City comic book store. The show follows a nerdy cast of characters throughout their comic-book filled working day, mixing the comic personal interactions of staff and customers with the funny details of life working in a comic book shop—from annoying customers to the drudgery of bagging and boxing comics to highly animated (and antagonistic) conversations about Green Lantern.
“I think that’s across the board, from being on the other side and working for the companies, and the fans, the retailers,” Walker told PW Comics World. “There’s this kind of accepted handshake of like, ‘okay things are a little crazier in our world,’ so you’re like, it’s comic books, whatever!,” said Walker, who produces the show, which is based on a story by Walker, Matt Bird and Douglas Mangum.
Walker dreamed of and prepared himself to be a filmmaker and eventually conceived of Anti-Matter while he was working at Marvel and DC, developing it with two friends. The original idea was for an eight-episode web series that could be joined together as a longer television pilot or DVD. That never happened—his partners moved on and the idea sat in a drawer. A couple years later Walker went back to it, rethinking it in pure web terms. He realized he had no excuses—he just needed to get to work.
“I said to myself ‘You’re in New York, there’s a lot of talent, the comedy scene is great, and somebody’s bound to let you shoot in their comic book store so there’s absolutely no reason for you not to do this,” Walker said. “Oh and I actually owned a camera for once in my life. I’d always had to borrow other people’s cameras. And I had a microphone, and lights from doing the job for Starz media, so at this point there really was no excuse.”
Indeed the show is shot at Jim Hanley’s Universe in midtown Manhattan, one of New York City’s best comics Shops. Walker gathered a cast that also had a little bit of geek in them as well, particularly lead Justin Tyler, who plays Mike, the Anti-Matter store manager, who in real life also does interviews for the comics news site Newsarama and is a regular member of Comic Book Club, a live improv comic book talk show and podcast recorded at the People’s Improv Theater in Manhattan. Other actors cast in the show include Kirstan Perry (who plays the store’s senior manager) and Julie Katz as Ginger, the store hottie and hipster chick. Despite the focus on comic book culture, Walker was careful not to drench the comedy in just that, instead opting for wider appreciation.
“I really try to concentrate on character archetypes so the actors are playing the archetypes and not the comic nerds,” he said. “I wanted to make it so that if you had never read any comic books it would be something that would appeal to you, but also put in the details for the comic book fans. And especially if you had ever hung out in a comic book store there would be this extra layer of meaning to it,” Walker said.
The challenge, he said, wasn’t just finding elements that would appeal to an audience outside of the cloistered comics universe, it was figuring out a way to make sure each segment offered just enough to grab viewers without losing too many by expecting more attention than most viewers have to give. So the various episodes of Anti-Matter touch on the interpersonal relationships and hijinks of the staff, all drenched in the nerdy culture of the comic book store and its extended family of pop culture victims.
“I see the web as something you do while you’re doing other things,” Walker said. “You always have to be aware that while somebody’s watching web content they might be washing the dishes or reading an email. It’s not only a short attention span, it’s a fragmented attention span, so you’ve got to hit them quick, give them a lot of stuff and get out of there.”
Walker planned out 25 script ideas for a season and then decided he would shoot 15 of those. He ended up shooting a total of nine, with six currently available on their YouTube channel. This leaves enough material for a second season, which Walker hopes to be able to film. The first season of the show (about seven episodes) cost him about $5,000 to produce.
Currently Walker is working on a new web series—an indie soap opera set in Brooklyn that he compares to Gossip Girl—and hasn’t yet scheduled a second season of Anti-Matter, though he’s working on it. He told PWCW he was, in “talks with a few geek celebs and comic artists for season two,” and added that, “we're wrapping up season one with a last episode and may have a New York Comic Con Episode to show over the summer.”
And though he dropped the notion of configuring the episodes to work together in a larger pilot, he hasn’t entirely dropped the idea that it might find a home at a place like the Cartoon Network or gain further audiences through a DVD release. Either of those options might also offer him the chance to create a longer story arc.
But that’s not the point of the project for Walker, though—his work on Anti-Matter is reward enough for him. “It’s a labor of love,” he said. “I did it based on what I could do at the time. There wasn’t $3,000 [to spend] per episode, it was like, hey, I worked this long, I have some money and I have a month that I can not take on other work and I’ll just be very poor while I make this.”
[Additional reporting by Calvin Reid]
