We asked SLG publisher Dan Vado what he was excited about at Comic-Con, and he immediately launched into a description of the SLG original graphic novel Pinocchio the Vampire Slayer, due out in September, which is getting a lot of early attention.

What are you excited about for the fall from SLG?

Pinocchio:  Vampire Slayer.  It’s real simple to understand what the concept is--a little wooden boy that kills vampires, right?  The conceit being that vampires killed Gepetto before Pinocchio could become a real human boy, so now he’s out for revenge.  That sounds like it could be kind of trashy but it’s actually really good. 

So does Pinocchio sharpen up his nose for a weapon?

Yeah.  He breaks it off and he has to tell a lie to get a new nose.

Who’s doing it?

It’s two guys, Dusty Higgins and Van Jensen.  I think this is their first published work.

Page count, price?

$10.95 is the price, 128 pages.  Black and white. 

What’s the response been like?

We put up trailers for all our stuff on YouTube.  For the useful life of a trailer, which is that three-week period when people are ordering it in Previews, we typically get a thousand or fifteen hundred looks; it’s just our regular web traffic.  After the press release came out on Pinocchio Vampire Slayer, the traffic skyrocketed and in three weeks we’ve had 8,000 looks.  We’re still getting 500 people a day coming in and taking a look at it.  The preview page on our website is the number one page visit after the home page.  A lot of people are really into this thing.

Where’s the buzz coming from?

There was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan group that posted a link to the trailer.  And then it got on Tumbler, and Stumbleupon, and a couple of other things.  So it’s just kind of built up like that because it sounds cool.

We immediately got it.

Essentially it is like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac in that regard--you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what’s in this book.  It’s the same thing: Pinocchio the Vampire Slayer.  If you know who Pinocchio is, you go “That’s brilliant.” 

My first thought when I got the proposal was “How has this not been done before?”  And my second thought was that this is actually really good.  I thought it was going to be kind of a jokey thing, but these guys are really good.