Ed Brubaker (Eisner Award-winning comic writer behind The Immortal Iron Fist, Incognito and more) has a new live-action original web series which premiered last week: Angel of Death (beware: autoplay — the link is to the main Angel page at Crackle.com, but their annoying Flash video interface starts playing the first episode automatically).
It stars Stunt-Goddess Zoe Bell (who featured prominently in Tarantino’s Grindhouse segment, Death Proof, where she spent most of her time on the hood of a car…) as a cold-blooded assassin who suddenly develops a conscience after being stabbed through her skull.
In an interview, Brubaker said he was inspired by medical reports he saw about a Texas man who walked into an emergency room with a hunting knife jutting out of his skull. “Then I had this image of this assassin standing, like, in a doorway holding a gun with a knife sticking out of the top of her head and blood trickling down her face,” Brubaker said. “They green-lit it before I even wrote it, and they started filming two weeks after the final draft. I guess that’s the world we’re living in right now.”
The web series premieres new 7 to 10 minute episodes every weekday. There are 6 so far. An eventual DVD release is planned.
I find this of extreme interest, due to some web-series concepts I’ve got floating around right now. I think that especially for fandom-based genre shows, this really is the future model of delivery. Almost the video equivalent of the webcomic — you offer streaming episodes for free, and then offer higher-quality video for purchase, as well as fan items like shirts, posters, soundtrack, etc.