Al Julian has a hard time sitting still. This is evident in the animated gestures accompanying his rapid-fire description of his favorite projects, and it’s representative of a life spent in consistent reinvention. He began his adult life as an artist, acting onstage in college and writing short stories throughout sixteen months of world travels thirty-five years ago. Though he had enjoyed the creative arts, his initial professional path was as a psychologist, and he later went to law school to develop skills for forensic practice and criminal interviewing. Since retiring from forensic work four years ago, he has produced an explosion of material in the visual and performance arts. In many ways, he is working more than he did before retirement, and he laughs, “this is the first time I’ve really enjoyed what I’m doing!”
His work has included a pair of teleplays with Wake Media that have found audiences in “about two dozen festivals” including recent screenings in Carrboro, North Carolina, and Las Vegas, Nevada. These teleplays have “a Twilight Zone” feel to them, and he anticipates collecting them as an anthology with a third teleplay under a title of Fever Dreams. Challenged by his college-aged son, he has created short films in genres as diverse as film noir, paranormal crime fiction, and a female-led comedy. He pulled from his experience with a group therapy for murderers in a state hospital for his horror short, The Session. His most recent work, Climbers, is a science fiction feature that has gotten encouraging feedback on the professional network Blacklist.
Despite the frenzy of activity, Julian had one science fiction script that finished in the Quarterfinals of Scriptapalooza 2011 but could not find production. This was Retrograde, a science fiction story that came to him as he was falling asleep on a plane. In this story, a government team seeks to locate an abducted test pilot and finds themselves captured in the belly of a bizarre spaceship. Their explorations of the ship lead them to a number of captured dogs, then a menagerie of monstrous aliens with vaguely canine features. Later, aliens reveal that Earth’s dog species has been engineered as a retrograde prototype of this extraterrestrial race. By the time the story closes, the team has fought through a series of perils and learned a shocking secret about the evolutionary origins of humankind.
Though Julian loved this story (“I love dogs! I put my Jack Russell in a man-and-dog story explaining the origin of the relationship.”), he was told that his idea was going to be prohibitively expensive to film. Thinking back to the Heavy Metal serial collections of graphic novels he loved in his childhood, he found Ken Bastard on a Facebook group for graphic artists. With similar ages and backgrounds, Julian and Bastard found a collaboration that could evoke the classic Silver Age science fiction comics while incorporating the team’s modern sensibilities. They spent a year and half adapting the script into a graphic novel.
As Julian has sought printing for this work, he has tried out a variety of sources for funding. His Kickstarter campaign did not achieve funding goal, so he has launched an IndieGoGo campaign. One significant benefit to this second avenue is that backers have more flexibility in their pledging, using PayPal or directly using a credit card, and he hopes this will appeal to a broader audience. The campaign runs until October 17 and has achieved about a third of its goal at time of writing. Backers can secure perks such as digital and print copies of the novel as well as related posters of various sizes. At the highest pledge level, a pair of backers will see their own faces in one of the comic’s panels. Meeting the funding goal will allow 500 copies of the graphic novel to see print, and Julian hopes to distribute this to comics retailers and also support proof-of-concept for potential filming.