Growing series
Sam Noir spends his days sitting behind his desk, smoking cigarettes and drinking sake. He’s a hard-boiled detective, armed with his trusty samurai sword and a large cache of smart-mouth clichés.
One day he’s hired to follow Jasmine, a dame with a heart of gold. Sam falls head over heels for her, and of course, she is soon murdered, killed by three throwing stars in her back.
Presented by Shadowline, a division of Image Comics, Sam is the main character of the comic book series, “Sam Noir: Samurai Detective.” Created by local comic book writer Eric Anderson and illustrator and writer Manny Trembley, the comic’s first series of three comic books sold out.
Anderson, 30, and Trembley, 31, met in art school in Minnesota. Trembley had dreams of writing comic books from an early age.
Anderson got a job at Cyan Worlds, a Mead company that created the video games Myst, Riven and Uru Live. He moved to Spokane in 2000.
Trembley followed Anderson to work for Cyan Worlds in the fall of 2004, and soon the two created PandaXpress.com, a Web comic that has been updated every Monday and Thursday since early 2005. The Web comic is the story of a girl and her panda, is family friendly and Anderson and Trembley’s wives love it.
The comic creators said that the idea for PandaXpress started as a joke, but now they have more than 140 pages of content on the site.
They don’t make a lot of money from it, but they get enough donations from the site to pay for their coffee.
The site not only includes the comic, but side projects as well, such as imaginary advertisements for products their characters might endorse, back stories of the characters, Christmas specials and a forum for fans to discuss the Spokane anime project.
Trembley said that the Web site helped them believe that they could make a comic book for print.
Sam is now embarking on a new adventure for fans in “Sam Noir: Ronin Holiday.”
He’s avenged Jasmine’s death, and is resting peacefully in a hammock on a tropical island, sipping a drink with an umbrella in it when the ninjas show up to try to kill him.
“The book is actually a comedy, even though it’s ultra-violent,” Anderson said.
“We tend to do things that are funny to us,” Trembley said.
The two said that the idea for Sam came from the ronin samurai, which is a samurai without a master. They noticed the similarity between them and old private detective stories.
The name of the series is a play off of the old Audrey Hepburn movie, “Roman Holiday.”
“This isn’t original at all,” Trembley joked.
“It’s one cliché after the other,” Anderson agreed. “To us it’s one big gag.”
Anderson and Trembley meet at coffee shops on Saturday mornings to discuss ideas for their comic.
They toss ideas back and forth and soon digress into bad puns. Once they start groaning at their own jokes, they know that they need to include them in the comic.
Once the script has been written, Trembley starts sketching his ideas for pictures with blue pencil on copy paper.
He’ll add an ink outline and scan it into a computer to fill the pictures in with black ink.
The first installment of Sam’s Ronin Holiday came out last month. The two signed copies of it at Merlyn’s on Feb. 9. The “Ronin Holiday #2” will hit the stores in March and the third installment in April. The two hope to create a third series of stories for Sam Noir, but first, Trembley is working on an independent project called “Sarah Pumpkinhead.”
Anderson and Trembley have no plans to work on comics full time in the future. For now, they are happy producing Sam and PandaXpress.com just for fun.
Although Shadowline publishes the comics, the two writers still own the rights to Sam Noir, so if down the road, someone wants to make an animated cartoon of him, they will benefit.
“The nice thing about publishing your own book is there is room for growth,” Trembley said.