From 'Geek Rock' To Comic Books
Interview with 'Burbank' creators Justin Fisher and Graham Robertson
In early 2019, I attended the premiere of the short film Burbank about everyman time traveler Rock Williams.
I was invited to the event by my old friend and musical collaborator Justin Fisher who had developed the project with his creative partner Graham Robertson. I know Fisher from the ‘90s LA “Geek Rock” scene where he was a member of several bands including Shufflepuck, Nerf Herder (bassist in the “Mr. Spock” video!), and Psoma.
In recent years, Fisher has worked as a Hollywood set dresser which is where he connected with Robertson who directed the first all green screen feature film according to the Guinness Book of World Records, and is the author of Desktop Cinema: Feature Filmmaking on a Home Computer (Thomson Course Technology, 2006).
Given their shared DIY backgrounds, it’s no wonder the two partnered on a creative project. Fisher and Robertson developed the time traveler story together and brought it to life as a short film. Now the duo has their sites set on turning Burbank into a comic book series.
“It’s always about who you know for your support group. That's how we find work set dressing and it’s how we get the word out on our projects. We’re all a bunch of artists out here enjoying our craft. We wouldn’t be in LA if we weren’t. There’d be easier places to thrive,” Robertson told me in the interview below.
“Putting this comic out is just the first step to getting these adventures out into the world, one that we can make happen ourselves,” Fisher added.
They’ve already assembled a talented team including illustrator Jason Masters and colorist Sebastian Cheng who they met through comic book veteran Zach Howard. They also recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to help bring the Burbank comic series to life.
I caught up with Fisher and Robertson by email to ask them about their plans for the comic book series, how their DYI experience in music and filmmaking has influenced their approach to this project, and what’s next for Rock Williams and Burbank.
Justin Fisher and Graham Robertson Interview
Congrats on your new Burbank project. I saw the original short film and loved it. What made you turn this into a comic book series?
Graham: We loved the concept of this guy riding around in a time machine using it as an every-day-appliance like a microwave or Keurig or an Amazon Firestick. He keeps it casual to see vintage sporting events and get awesome birthday presents. When we finished the short we hadn’t found an agent or anyone to represent us and we were thinking, ‘Well, how can we keep this going?’ We’ve got the stories already written—thanks pandemic!—and we talked about how we weren’t quite ready to adapt it into novels (which is the ultimate self-supported form of storytelling), so we decided to do it as a comic. We both loved comics as a kid. I still dabble in them and I had played around with different means of creating my own comics so we went forward with that path. We loved these stories and we wanted to get them out there.
Justin: Ha! Graham’s right, that down time during the pandemic turned out to be really productive for us. Some people learned to play the ukulele, we wrote a ton of fun time travel adventures. We got a really great response from people when they watched that short. Everyone had their own idea of what they would do with a time machine in their garage. While creating the film, Graham and I would constantly be coming up with new adventures for our time traveler, Rock, to go on and what kind of trouble he would get into. Turning those stories into comic is giving us a chance to get the characters and stories out in to the world. It's really a superhero comic based on a dude that’s a regular guy with a cool secret.
“It’s a show that I’d love to watch and I can relate to. Maybe in the way that ‘Stranger Things’ is about a bunch of kids, but it’s set in our childhood.”
~ Graham Robertson ~
How did you originally come up with the concept for a story about an everyman with a broken time machine?
Justin: I always laugh when I think about this. Graham and I work building sets for TV shows and movies. One of the first things that Graham told me when we met was that he had a spaceship in his garage. ‘A what?!’ Yes, for like ten years he'd been holding on to a full-size movie prop spaceship that he found discarded in a pile of junk. We would talk about it every day saying, ‘What do you do with a broken spaceship in your garage?’ Then one day, while working on a show, we saw a rusty old boiler or water tank and thought, ‘Hey, wouldn't be funny if that thing was actually an old time machine and no one knew it?’ Right then we decided that Graham's ship was actually a time machine and we started writing the story of a guy that was trying to fix it up and make it work again.
Graham: We wanted a more fun and maybe immature view of time travel possibilities. Most time travel films of late have been pretty dark and apocalyptic. We wanted something fun. We were working from this concept that Rock really liked where he is and where the world is and he wouldn’t change anything. He wouldn’t risk it.
“In a future issue, Rock takes his dad to go see The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl in the ‘60s only to run in to some cold war era Soviet spies. That's going to be a fun one! “
~ Justin Fisher ~
You just launched a Kickstarter to produce the first couple of issues—a two-part story about time traveling to see the Star Wars premiere in 1977? Why is that the right adventure to launch the series?
Graham: Because Star Wars was such a great influence on our imaginations as kids. We wouldn’t be living in LA if it weren’t for that movie. At least I wouldn’t. It made me love cinema and action and adventure. I grew up in Colorado and I would buy (my mom would, actually) any magazine that had something about Star Wars in it. I was starved for all the information that I could find. Some of the images I’d see would be photographs of Mann’s Chinese Theatre on opening day. All kids my age saw the pics. It looked amazing and the enthusiasm everyone had for this thing that hadn’t come out was amazing. When I first moved to LA I had to see the theatre in person because I’d seen those pics. I even saw the special edition there when it came out to fulfill that childhood fantasy from the pics. So for the comic, two Gen Xers like ourselves are gonna love Star Wars and they’re gonna do what they missed as kids because they were too young.
Justin: We really want people to know that this is going to be a fun comic about time travel. There have been lots of really great scary and dramatic time travel stories recently, but Graham and I miss that fun storytelling that we remember from movies like Back to The Future and Raiders Of the Lost Ark. We want people to think about how cool it would be able to jump back and forth in time to witness awesome all the things they've only heard about. Of course, it's not always going to go as Rock planned, but it's going to be fun watching Rock figure out how to get himself back home in time for dinner.
I find that angle particularly interesting since Justin used to be a member of Nerf Herder, a band named after an insult hurled at Han Solo in Star Wars. Are there any plans for Rock Williams to go see The Beatles at the Cavern Club in 1962 or Guns N' Roses at Raji's in 1986?
Graham: We definitely have plans for all those bands and the different eras. The Sunset Strip is a great place for a 1980s date night for Rock and his wife down the line…
Justin: We're always looking for that kind of real-world historical inspiration to start Rock's adventures. Particular songs and bands are one of the best ways to help describe the era that Rock is jumping to. In a future issue, Rock takes his dad to go see The Beatles at The Hollywood Bowl in the ‘60s only to run in to some cold war era Soviet spies. That's going to be a fun one!
The DIY approach you've taken with the short film and the comic series really remind me of my own experiences in music and indie publishing. How do your varied previous experiences inform this new project?
Justin: Self-producing the Burbank short film and now this comic series feels just like like producing the indie rock albums that I was a part of in the ‘90s and 2000s. You come up with something you think is cool and then go, ‘Well, this project isn’t going to make itself. Let’s see what we can do with it on our own and then see what kind of excitement we can build.’
“It’s like we wrote a few songs in our living room and then The White Stripes showed up and said they’d love to record them for us. Masters and Cheng are both amazing artists and we’re floored every time a new page of the comic shows up.”
~ Justin Fisher ~
The panels I have seen so far look really amazing. How did you get connected with illustrator Jason Masters and colorist Sebastian Cheng?
Graham: It’s all about who you know. I have a childhood friend named Keith Oelschlager who was into comics, he is an illustrator and who was also an MMA jiujitsu fighter. He was also a high school art teacher and after awhile he couldn’t go to work on Monday after a fight with a bruised face so he became an instructor. While training fighters he had a student named Zach Howard who was a professional comic book artist. He’d done Aliens, Venom and tons of Marvel books. Now…here’s the connection—Justin and I completed a pitch deck for the Burbank comic and we shared it with Keith to pass on to any comic people he knew. Zach was the guy and immediately got our IP concept. He loved it and put us in touch with a couple artists to help bring it together—Jason Masters in South Africa and Sebastian Cheng in Malaysia. They’re both amazing and we couldn’t be more stoked.
Justin: We can't say enough about how helpful Zach has been to this project. First off, he's such a heavy hitter in the comic world that it's really an honor that he's taken an interest in the project and it also has given us some real confidence that we're creating something that people will respond to. Both Jason Masters and Sebastian Cheng are industry veterans themselves and when they agreed to join our creative team the comic book really started taking off. It’s like we wrote a few songs in our living room and then The White Stripes showed up and said they’d love to record them for us. Masters and Cheng are both amazing artists and we’re floored every time a new page of the comic shows up.
Can you imagine a world where the short film that became a comic book series eventually becomes a TV series or feature film?
Graham: Oh yeah. That's what we envisioned from the start. It’s a show that I’d love to watch and I can relate to. Maybe in the way that Stranger Things is about a bunch of kids but it’s set in our childhood. So far as ultimate goals, for Burbank and the comic we want to tell as many stories as we can. We did map it out as a television series first so we have the concept down to maybe, four seasons to tell the whole story of Rock Williams and his time machine. Who knows how many comics that’ll take to tell? Probably a lot and I love the idea of doing it.
Justin: Pretty much every day Graham and I talk about how cool it is to see these adventures come to life. Whether it's in a comic or on the screen we love creating places for Rock to go and unexpected trouble that he'll have to figure out how to escape. Our hope is that people will discover this character and these stories and keep wanting more.
Just pledged to the Kickstarter.