‘Willy’s Wonderland’ Writer Launches ‘80s-Tinged Comic ‘Beast of Bower Boulevard’
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Growing up in Lake Tahoe, Calif., writer G.O. Parsons sometimes wondered what it’d be like if something totally unexpected happened in the secluded town. Then a few years ago, he started dreaming up ideas.
“My brain immediately went to robot dinosaur,” Parsons tells The Hollywood Reporter.
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The result of that idea is The Beast of Bower Boulevard, a three-part comic debuting on digital this week that Parson’s funded in part via Kickstarter. Set in a secluded ski town, it kicks off with a sheriff’s deputy and his family dispatched to investigate after the town goes quiet. When they arrive they discover that the town is under siege by a robot dinosaur created by the military.
Parsons worked with his artist Carlos Rod to create a look harkening back to the ‘70s and ‘80s.
“We wanted it to kind of look like if you found this thing, 40 years ago,” says Parsons, known as the screenwriter behind the 2021 indie Willy’s Wonderland, which stars Nicolas Cage as a totally silent man who must battle possessed animatronic creatures to survive the night.
He originally penned The Beast of Bower Boulevard as a screenplay, but ultimately settled on a comic book after working with publisher American Mythology on Willy’s Wonderland books. After all, it’s a lot less expensive to have an artist draw a rampaging robot dinosaur than to convince a movie studio to pay to put that on screen. Though naturally, there’s always hope the comic could be optioned in the future.
Says Parsons: “The same cost of having a character talk to another character on the page is the same exact cost of having a dinosaur rampage through a ski resort.”
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