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Bobby Chiu and Jim Bryson, the creators of the Emmy-winning Niko and the Sword of Light, are back with Magrid’s Magic Shoppe, an interactive project billed as “the world’s first infinitely zooming playable fantasy comic” that lets readers zoom into the art to find clues and solve puzzles. The duo launched a Kickstarter to fund their latest passion project, which ends on November 6.
Built on Bryson’s hand-drawn artwork and the new interactive creator platform An Infinite Story, Magrid’s Magic Shoppe lets audiences explore the art panel by panel, uncover hidden details, find clues, and solve puzzles. Bryson describes the result as “somewhere between comics, animation and games.”
The idea grew from a childhood dream of discovering what’s hidden inside a comic page. “I can sketch out an idea for a sequence and have it working interactively within minutes,” Bryson says. “Watching a drawing develop into an experience you can explore still feels a bit like magic.”
Chiu and Bryson made history with their previous collaboration on Niko and the Sword of Light, an animated comic book app that was adapted into an animated series for Amazon Prime Video. The show was the first pilot to win an Emmy Award before the series had even premiered.
Chiu co-founded An Infinite Story and has more than 20 years experience in film, animation, and art. He worked as a character designer on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and founded LightBox Expo and Schoolism. Bryson is a founding member of StudioNX, a visual development studio whose clients include Marvel, Disney, Amazon, and Nickelodeon.
The Kickstarter campaign also serves a bigger goal. Funds will help develop An Infinite Story into a toolkit that lets independent artists turn existing artwork into interactive, monetizable experiences without programming skills or a large studio. “Artists have more ways than ever to share their work, but it’s still super hard to make a living from independent art,” Chiu says.
Rewards include digital artwork, early access to the interactive experience, physical art books, signed collectibles, original art and even the chance to be inserted into the story as an illustrated character with dialogue.
Magrid’s Magic Shoppe is on Kickstarter now.
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