'A Comicbook Orange' Is Back For Star-Packed Season 3

Comic geeks, the wait is over—A Comicbook Orange is back. After a stint on NextNewNetworks‘ Pulp Secret channel, the popular weekly comic book web series from creators Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan launches its third season today. McKinnon returns as host of the four minute episodes, which are chock-full of lightning quick news from the comic world (you might have to watch each one twice to catch it all) and interviews with the top creative names in the industry.

The Canadian natives McKinnon and Jahchan make up 8Bit Brownies, the production company behind the pair’s well-received sci-fi sketch comedy web series Galacticast. In fact A Comicbook Orange itself is a spinoff of sorts from Galacticast, where it first appeared as segment back in May of 2006. It wasn’t until June of 2007 that the series debuted on its own, picking up a loyal following of comic book enthusiasts.

For season 3, they have left the apartment green screen stage behind and set up shop at NAS Productions, with Josh Allard directing. After a year and a half hiatus, the series is back and fully independent once again following its six-month licensing deal with NNN.

We caught up with McKinnon, who shed some light on the ambitious production schedule and what they have learned from their previous seasons. “The new series has only one review a week and has an unscripted interview, which takes away a lot of the writing burden we had before,” she told us.  “Now that we’re doing interviews, I’ve been able to shoot a lot more in advance and I’ve got most of the first 7 episodes of the season in the bag!”  We’ve also been able to get ahead on our schedule by shooting the intros/outros of the first 5 episodes in advance.  All that’s left, then, is editing and finishing up the reviews.”

The latest episode (above) takes a closer look at Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye from Vertigo along with a one-on-one interview with comic writer-artist Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night). As we’ve come to expect, there’s still sketch segments of the versatile comic-geek McKinnon in various characters, like this week take on Seaguy’s would-be love interest, ‘Seagal.’ Adorable.

I asked McKinnon if she’s excited about the return of her series after the extended hiatus. “Most of my excitement comes from making content again… indie or not, I just want to entertain people,” she said.  “It’s actually a difficult relaunch because our previous audience is still subscribed to Pulp Secret and may not even know that we’re back.  As a result, we’re rebuilding our brand from scratch just as we did 2 years ago, which is not an easy task.  Thankfully, we have some amazing geeky friends who are tweeting and blogging about the show to help us get our numbers back.”

The release plan for the 10-episode season includes one new episode every Wednesday on site and on YouTube for the first five weeks, then a two week break, and finally the remaining five. The team will head down to Comic-Con in San Diego next month to bang out a number of interviews which will be banked up for Season 4.

Mckinnon also shared the list of upcoming interviews on Season 3:

• Marc Guggenheim (TV/film/comics writer – not only an accomplished comic writer, but also wrote Eli Stone and is writing the new Green Lantern movie)
• Paul Jenkins (comics/film/video game writer – Eisner award winning writer)
• Percy Carey (rap artist/comics writer – wrote a powerful autobiography about his life, getting shot and being in a wheelchair)
• Chuck BB (illustrator and character designer for 3d animation – won an Eisner award and did all the character designs for this adorable web video)
• Jim Mahfood (comics/mural artist – drew Kevin Smith’s Clerks comics, painted murals for Sarah Silverman’s TV show)
• Mark Sable (TV/film/comics writer – stopped twice by TSA for his scripts relating to 9/11)
• Christos Gage (comics/TV writer)