THRILL SEEKER COMICS - About Thrill Seeker Comics

Thrill Seeker Comics is a hard-edge pulp action and adventure series written and drawn by creator Scott McCullar (Green Arrow Secret Files) that pays homage to comic books of every era, classic adventure newspaper strips, Saturday afternoon serials, pulp fiction novels, film noir thrillers, war movies, and B-movie kung fu flicks of yesteryear while retaining a modern bite in the storytelling. The amalgamation of all these influences have been shaken up boldly to deliver a new and unique spin when served.

Writer and friend, Sean Taylor, has often said, “…if Quentin Tarantino was writing a super-hero comics series, Thrill Seeker Comics would be it.”

Mixing action, brutal drama, history and a bit of gallows humor, the two-fisted tales often explore how far one must go before one has a last chance to repent.

The stories from Thrill Seeker Comics take place on an alternate parallel earth that was lost in a crisis and almost forgotten. This world is similar to our own, but with plenty of noticeable differences – including exotic locales not located on our maps and slight changes in world history. There exists a comfortable familarity to the denizens that habitate in this world that makes each archetypal character accessible to new readers.

The legends of masked avengers and defenders of justice have captured the imaginations of common man in this earth. Often is the case with legends of heroic individuals – stories are altered, exaggerated, told wrongly or remembered differently. Various observers of these occurrences commonly told conflicting accounts depending upon their points of view.

An inquisitive award-winning documentary filmmaker joins a group of time-traveling watchers called THE CHRONONAUTS. Their order seeks the truth to unanswered questions posed by the discrepancies of accounts about these extraordinary men and women of mystery. Yet as each Chrononaut searches for the truth to various events, each will find hard hitting repercussions for their entire reality when faced with the answers.

Puzzle pieces fall in place along the timeline in this out-of-sequence saga that thread tales for a bigger picture as each Chrononaut scrutinizes the lives of various key players in their paradoxical time-traveling jumps. Readers of this series watch stories unfold through their eyes as the narrators spill the truth on their thrill seeking adventures.

The catalyst to the discrepancies center around a hard-boiled, Depression-era vigilante called the YELLOW JACKET whose life spiraled down dark paths that consumed his soul. Everyone of the adventures in this sequential art series have a connection indirectly to our fedora wearing gunslinger with the yellow mask.

Many times joining Yellow Jacket on his adventures was the Golden Age EMERALD MANTIS. Like his grandfathers before him, Dr. Xiaowen Li dons the mask of the heroic Chinese protector of the people. In the decades after the Second World War, his own son and eventually his grandson, each skilled in the martial arts, would also bare the Emerald Mantis name upon themselves on to fight for the protection of the common man.

Together, their journeys would cross path with a motley crew of characters, such as:

– a World War II ace fighter/test pilot who later turned astronaut nicknamed CRASH COLTON. He would one day became President of the United States of America in this parallel world to our own.

– a reclusive hot-tempered professor who discovered a mysterious ankh medallion and become a powerhouse hero known as the SACRED SCARAB.

– a gutsy Marine general named CHINO "BULLDOG" LEE who would lead the nation's intelligence agencies .

The origins ofTHRILL SEEKER COMICS™ can be traced back to 1984. Sitting at a bus stop, a 13 year-old boy named Scott McCullar created a martial arts hero named the EMERALD MANTIS™ and pencilled him over and over in his sketch and note books while refining his art skills in Mr. Black's eighth grade art class.

Though drawing comics was put on hold in high school while girls, rock 'n roll and having a good time took front stage in his life between homework assignments, McCullar eventually returned to exploring his boyhood dreams and aspirations of creating a comic book universe all of his own while in his last years of college that would one day becomeThrill Seeker Comics.

Between classroom art assignments and preparation for his solo BFA exhibition, Scott began to further develop the comic book characters he created in his youth while attending Illinois State University in 1992-93. Revising them over and over, he even had his new wife model for one of the new characters he was developing as he began to polish his writing and drawing skills. Working on the "comic book" drawings nearly got him in trouble with his fine art instructors and fellow peers when they saw the artwork and thought he was wasting his studio time and talents working on what they considered low brow drek. Scott's continued interests in wanting to become a comic book writer and illustrator, along with his refusal to give up these aspirations, continued to stiffle some of his relationships with other artists and instructors who viewed this type of work as beneath a serious student (and later as a teacher) of art. In certain circles, his credibility came under attack as Scott unapologetically had a foot planted firmly both in the fine arts world and the commercial art field where he makes his living, refuting that one had to choose to be labeled one over the other.

But there would be no regrets of pursuing work in the comics as McCullar embraced this medium he truly loved.

Not able to shake the notion of fulfilling a boyhood dream, McCullar began writing while living in Atlanta, Georgia in the mid-1990's. McCullar sketched and planned the premise of an independent comic series originally to be calledThe Outcast Seven that was to take place in the fictional southern city of St. François de Port, Mississippi. The plans were almost completely aborted until the opportunity arose in December 2001 when a group of friends who met on the Internet message board at Chuck Dixon's "Dixonverse" website came together to create an 80-page self-published anthology book. McCullar joined the group of would-be comic creators, all who were writing disciples and fans of Chuck Dixon, in order to work together to publish a book called Shooting Star Comics Anthology.

At that time, McCullar was already working on changing the Outcast Seven book into a new series that was to be calledThrill Seeker Comics that he was going to self-publish as an indy book. (It was also at this time that McCullar was writing for the DC UNIVERSE ROLEPLAYING GAME at West End while also helping Kevin Smith – and later Brad Meltzer – as consultant on GREEN ARROW at DC Comics. Scott also got the chance to write his boyhood hero for DC Comics in the Green Arrow Secret Files issue with a story about Oliver Queen's childhood.)

The firstThrill Seeker Comics 8-page short story appeared in Shooting Star Comics Anthology #1 (August 2002). An archetypal fedora wearing vigilante was put together at the last minute as a "throw away" character to join the Emerald Mantis on a mission set during World War II. That "throw away" character was named the YELLOW JACKET: MAN OF MYSTERY ™ . He immediately became Scott's most popular comic book creation and he led McCullar to revise his publishing plans for the entire Thrill Seeker Comics series. Readers wrote in that they wanted more of the Yellow Jacket. And while plotlines had been thought out for years, the Yellow Jacket – like the character that he is – threw a big monkey wrench into the plans to shake everything up and make an exciting new series as he became more of the focus with his catalyst personality.

TheThrill Seeker Comics feature appeared in all six issues of Shooting Star Comics Anthology as a series of short 8-page black and white stories. The flagship series for Shooting Star Comics went on hiatus in 2005 with the publication being suspended of this particular title. Also, a Thrill Seeker Comics tale called "Beekeeper" appeared in Fanzing Presents: Job Wanted. All seven stories were published in comic books bearing the Shooting Star Comics logo. An unpublished eighth short story intended for Shooting Star Comics Anthology #7 remains unpublished. Scott also had one of his dreams come true when Green Arrow/Warlord/Jon Sable writer/artist, Mike Grell, illustrated a cover with Scott's Yellow Jacket character for SSCA #6. Not only that, but McCullar got the opportunity to collaborate with his favorite comic book artist and color this cover to the comic which featured Mike's artwork.

By the time of the third issue of Shooting Star Comics Anthology, McCullar joined remaining partners to form Shooting Star Comics LLC as a business and true publishing entity. Scott's original plans to spinThrill Seeker Comics off earlier into it's own book were stalled as McCullar kept busy on the business end of things as one of the managing members and the Creative Director. With the business focus taken care of, McCullar is returning in 2006 to work as a comic creator once again.

In early 2006, Thrill Seeker Comics was briefly syndicated online as a weekly Sunday comics webstrip for a few months until problems arouse at Shooting Star Comcs, LLC in running the company. Over the next year, Scott had to put his creative energies onto the back burner as he dealt with health issues and concentrated on trying to keep operations going for Shooting Star Comics, LLC that ultimately ended up being futile as the partners decided to dissolve the company in late 2006/early 2007.

Scott McCullar is planning to return, revive and spin offThrill Seeker Comics once more and is just now starting to pick up pencil and brush again to complete art for new tales.