Furious Comics Logo

One of the major benefits of Twitter is networking. In addition to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites that are based on people you already know, twitter is a great tool for interacting with people you don’t know. Because of the comic, I have a following on twitter of people that are surprisingly interested in my 140 character thoughts, and having instant access has proved valuable in a couple of instances.

The instance related to this brand was when I went looking to form a new D&D group, after my first one dissolved half an adventure in. I put the call out for Toronto nerds looking for the game, and got a bunch of responses. One of them was from Phil McClorey, a teacher by day and horror comic writer by night. Our DM was incredibly impressed with his nerd-cred, and was really excited to have him join our game. And it proved worth it, as he’s a consistent player with dice that never seem to let him down.

McClorey has been paying artists over the years to draw the graphic horror stories he writes, and has been posting them as webcomics as well as collecting them into printed books, up to issue #3 at the time of this post. His stories are engaging and have evolving, and I really wanted to work with him on his ‘brand’ and get him moved into a better place. I offered to do him up a logo to make his presence seem a little more polished.

The operating name had been ‘Furious Comics’ – in honour of his grandfather, who has a particularly awesome name – Anthony Furey. I think the only way that a last name could be more awesome is if it was the word ‘Awesome’ itself. “Hi, I’m Grant Awesome.” “Hi, I’m Anthony Furey”

I offered him up a few graphical treatments. The first one was based on his initial idea – a costume he’d worn at Halloween. It was a Werewolf Warlock, or something of that nature that involved a wolf’s head inside of a cloak hood. I did my best to incorporate something sinister looking into it, giving it a mixture of both an ancient crest like look, with a modern graphical twist. I liked it – I think it has some really strong elements to it. But the overall thinking was that it might be too focused on a ‘genre’ of horror, that it might be narrowing the focus of his writing too much. McClorey writes in a theme of horror, but not in a particular genre on a case by case basis. Some of his newer stories are going in the route of straight up superheroes, with some interesting twists.

The second one was meant to balance out the ‘Furious’ energy of the name. My first instinct was a fist. Rage, Anger, and emotions like that are generally iconofied by a few things: the colour red, fists, gritted teeth, furrowed brows and other expressions of anger. Of all the things I could think of, the fist seemed to be the most fitting. But I needed, or wanted – no needed to take it a step beyond just a fist. What could be more raging than a fist? A fist on fire, is what.

The last option I gave him was a simpler one – I used the ‘classic’ circular shield, and just slapped an ‘F’ into that looked like it belonged to the brand. It’s simple, straightforward, but a little boring.

We opted, after debate and input, to go with the burning fist.

I feel like it was a good choice.