Comic book comes alive

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Tags: Arts, winter-2009

Yalin Ozucelik as Burger Force character Mercury

When pop culture is in danger, you need the right team to rescue it: Burger Force, the guys who serve justice with a side of fries.

The creation of UQ graduate Jackie Ryan, Burger Force is a comic that follows an espionage agency located beneath a fast food store.

Its operatives are tasked with protecting the perilously delicate balance of pop culture.

“The agents serve thickshakes and fries by day and thwart diabolical masterminds by night,” Ms Ryan said.

“There are two defining moments in my pop culture life: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers (Diana Rigg period).

“Burger Force, to my mind, is what would happen if these two entities met up on a dark and stormy night.”

What makes Burger Force different to many other comics is that it stars real people – using graphic design software to transform photographs into comic book-style images.

“From a practical point of view, real people and locations can be ‘comified’ through a laborious combination of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash,” Ms Ryan said.

The pop culture theme made comics an obvious outlet for the Burger Force story, and it was also a more affordable format than film, she said.

For someone with a background in cinema, creating a comic strip meant Ms Ryan had to approach storytelling in a new way.

Instead of having ongoing action, as is the case in film or theatre, she had to choose discrete points in time to tell the story frame by frame.

“The actors are faced with the challenge of communicating the emotional amalgam of a line or situation in that frame,” she said.

One of the actors, Ms Ryan’s friend and fellow UQ graduate Yalin Ozucelik, said Burger Force was different from anything he had been part of before.

Having studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and acted in plays around Australia, the prospect of starring in the “intelligent and laugh-out-loud funny” comic was an appealing change of scenery for Mr Ozucelik.

“I know that Jackie conceived the idea of Burger Force many years ago and has been writing the series ever since,” he said.

“We reconnected last year and she told me of her brilliant, dastardly plan to turn it into a comic and asked me if I wanted to play Mercury: a hapless, lovelorn, nerdy uni student-turned-secret agent.

“I saw more than a little bit of me in Mercury I think, so I happily donned a fabulous wig and slumped nerdily in front of the camera.”

Burger Force goes online in June and will become available in print later in the year.

Visit www.jackieryan.net for more on Burger Force and other projects

By Tegan Taylor

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