Welcome to Unlicensed
Hi! I’m Ryan Estrada.
I write and draw lots of creator-owned comics like Broken Telephone, The Kind, and Aki Alliance. I love creating new worlds, developing characters, and telling unique stories that only I can tell. But this new blog, Unlicensed, isn’t going to be about that.
This blog is about licensed projects.
What are licensed projects?
Licensed projects are comics, movies, TV shows, cartoons or other creative endeavors based on someone else’s work. It’s when new creators, with permission, continue the stories and characters created by someone else. Often in a different medium.
I know, I know.
Licensed projects have a reputation for being terrible. And often they are!
But they don’t have to be.
Seeing A Goofy Movie for the first time changed me.
I didn’t expect that. I was an industry-savvy 15 year old. I read all the trades. I knew the difference between a Disney animated feature and a Disney MovieToons production. I knew that the latter was the cynical cash-grab division that was about to flood the market with direct to video sequels. I knew that it was based on Goof Troop, which I knew was already garbage to begin with. And this was coming from someone who loved the Disney Afternoon so much he had gotten in trouble for singing the Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers theme song too much at school. I knew that the movie was going to be terrible. It had no reason to exist.
I was wrong.
A Goofy Movie is the seventh greatest god darned movie ever made. I laughed. I cried. I still cry. I watched it last week and I cried. Somehow, this movie was good. Something had happened. Someone… had cared.
That’s all it took, for someone to care. About the movie, the story, the characters and world. They didn’t reboot Goof Troop, ignore what came before, or turn it into something it wasn’t. They didn’t rehash what hadn’t worked previously because that’s all they thought it deserved. They took what they had and used it to tell a new story that stood on its own. They made something that deserved to exist.
Ever since that moment, I have dreamed of doing the same thing. Adapting a property no one thinks would work, and blowing people’s minds.
There are lots of people doing amazing licensed work today.
Noah Hawley turned Fargo: The Series from what seemed like a joke into one of the best series on television. Creators like Ryan North, Jim Zub, and Katie Cook have shown us how good licensed comics can be. Phil Lord and Chris Miller have made a name for themselves as the guys who can make any hard-to-adapt movie work, be it about Lego Minifigs, a forgotten 1980’s Fox cop show, or a storybook about food.
Yes, many publishers and studios rely too much on rebooting and revamping old properties.
Yes, they rely on name recognition instead of interesting ideas. But these projects are going to keep getting made. So we can at least make sure that the ones that do exist have a reason for existing. And that they’re lead by someone who cares. Because I care.
And who am I?
I’ve done a few of what could be called licensed comics, but always for strange internet things. I did five issues about the LiveJournal mascot Frank The Goat. A four issue series about the life-in-a-videogame-store blog Acts of Gord. I wrote the travel-based sequel to the living well on less how-to guide Poorcraft.
But I want to do more.
So in order to exercise my creative muscles, and dig into the creative process, I’m going to try an experiment.
You suggest ideas for licensed projects that have no reason to exist. I’ll figure out a reason for them to exist. And I’ll write a pitch for the version that I would make. I’ll draft outlines, I’ll do concept art. Every Monday, I’ll post a new pitch.
So what would you like to see?
A Bringing Out The Dead animated series? A Good Burger sequel? A Die Hard licensed comic? A line of Robert Langdon children’s books? An Ernest P. Worrell relaunch? An Infaceables reboot? Well, all of those are already on the way. So e-mail or tweet me suggestions for what else you’d like to see! My dream is to be a fixer… the go-to guy for publishers that are saddled with properties no one thinks will work. So the bigger the challenge, the happier I’ll be.
email or tweet me your challenges.
Welcome to Unlicensed.
