ShiftyLook—the Namco/Bandai venture that’s resurrecting long ago console video games as webcomics—just announced another series, this time a big one: Dig Dug, the old tunneling game that everyone played back in the day. And to make it even more intriguing, ShiftyLook has enrolled a who’s who of webcartoonists to celebrate the games 30th anniversary. you can see the whole list below, but it incluedes Scott Kurtz, Ryan North, David Malicki, Tycho & Gabe and many many more.
“Dig Dug is one of those iconic games that means a lot to retro gamers, especially those of us who grew up constantly trying to inflate many a Fygar, so we wanted to do something very special for the webcomic,” said Rob Pereyda, Producer & Editor-in-Chief of ShiftyLook for NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. in a statement. “And I think we just might have the comics team-up of the summer and a must read for video games and webcomics fans alike.”
Pereyda had more to say in an interview at CBR:
The list you sent out contains 33 different names for creators that will be working on the “Dig Dug” project, some of whom work on ShiftyLook comics already, but the vast majority do not and many of them seem to be pulled from the stable of webcomics talent. What was the impetus to reaching out to webcomics creators as opposed to the established print comics talent you’ve been using so far?
I think what’s important — and I don’t know if it’s a hot topic, but I feel it’s a hot topic lately — but there’s a debate over, at least I talk to people about this, webcomics versus comics on the web. So when you get to that topic, who is best doing webcomics? Well, people who have been doing this for a while are really good at this medium. Of course, we’re still tapping into comics veterans as well. I want to be very broad, I want to be as inclusive as possible but at least in our first run of ShiftyLook, we focused on comics veterans who actually have been fantastic at adapting from comics on the web to webcomics. That said, for “Dig Dug” let’s add in some more comics veterans like J. Torres, but let’s also go over some webcomics folks too. I just wanted to broaden the diversity of what we’re doing. Something that’s very important for me is making sure we’re doing webcomics and not comics on the web.
This webcomics/video game team up is such a natural, we’re surprised more video game companies haven’t done it directly.
Each creative team will craft self-contained Dig Dug stories, with a different angle brought each time. A partial list of talent is as follows (additional talent to be announced):
• Raynato Castro (Buttersafe)
• Jeff “Chamba” Cruz (ShiftyLook’s Sky Kid)
• Javier Charro (Soul & Sword)
• Brian Clevinger (Atomic Robo)
• Mike Costa (Smoke and Mirrors)
• Alex Culang (Buttersafe)
• Omar Dogan (ShiftyLook’s Wonder Momo)
• Joey Esposito (Footprints)
• Greg Fisher (Vivian)
• Dax “D-Gee” Gordine (ShiftyLook’s Bravoman)
• Dean Haspiel (ShiftyLook’s The Five-Di
