Paul Scheer, Nick Giovannetti Give Their First Comic ‘Aliens Vs Parker’ Digital ‘Creators Cut’ On Macroverse

The 2013 comic-book series Aliens vs Parker began as an unlikely adaptation of a too-expensive movie script, goofing on classic sci-fi movie tropes as it followed the misadventures of some delivery guys in space. The comic that resulted had a modest first life but also paved the way for its creators, actor-producer Paul Scheer and writer-producer Nick Giovannetti, to write high-profile comic projects such as Deadpool and Spider-Man for the industry’s biggest companies.

Now the pair are getting the chance to polish and tweak that first comic series, giving Aliens vs Parker the “creators cut” treatment – think remastered music album, or director’s cut of a movie – courtesy of the digital-comics app Macroverse. It’s the first time the relatively new Macroverse has tried such a “remastering” approach to existing projects.

“Years have gone by, Paul and I are better writers now,” Giovannetti said. “So, sometimes you want to make those little tweaks along the line. But I think it’s also just about the realities of when you’re putting stuff out in print. At the time we were doing it, there was places called Barnes and Noble
BKS
bookstores. You have to make adjustments to be able to be on those shelves. And those realities are now gone. So there’s maybe a joke or two, or something that we wouldn’t have been able to do then that we can do now, which is fun to put that back in.”

The pair worked in more adult humor, so the book is “definitely the R-rated (version) that early on we weren’t really able to do,” Scheer said.

Other tweaks included tightening the writing, and updating some jokes that broke basic comedy rules, Giavonnetti said.

“There’s like at least three jokes in this that have bothered me since the day we printed that,” Giavonnetti said. “We’ve gone back and replaced those. And for years, they had these rules in comedy like, ’Don’t make pop culture references. You want it to be timeless. You want it to be this and this and this.’ And you know, we were of the generation that was like, ‘Who cares? Why have that rule?’ And you know, when you revisit something seven years later, you go, ‘Whoo, yeah, that doesn’t age (well).’”

Scheer (Veep, Black Monday, The League) said he’s a hard-core comics fan, though family life and the pandemic have pushed him (and many others) into routinely using online apps and services such as Comixology and the digital DC and Marvel experiences to keep up with favorite titles. But those digital experiences have limits.

“They’re all amazing, but they’re basically a guided read,” Scheer said. “You know where everything is going to go. Iit’s almost like reading a storyboard. It makes it so you don’t look. What Macroverse is able to do is it allows you a little bit more personality in the guided read. When you see a character who may have three thought bubbles, you can read them one at a time, they don’t just gloss over them. It’s revamping the way that we’re used to reading comics and making them a lot more interactive than just having a really nice engine over an already beautiful -looking page.”

Macroverse relies on what it calls a “TapStory” format to navigate through a comic on a mobile device. Ultimately, that means the image in the bottom right-hand corner of a traditional comic doesn’t have to focus on “the page turn.” Those mini-cliffhangers entice you to go to the next page, but also can draw your eye away from every other panel on the page, Scheer said.

“We got to be a little bit more of a director,” Scheer said. “I described it as we get to be a conductor here. We get to tell the audience, ‘Now, look at this. Now, look at this. And now we’re going to give you this like this and this and this’. So that, to me, was fun.”

The connection with Macroverse was something of happenstance. Adam Martin, a first assistant director on Showtime’s Emmy-nominated dark comedy Black Monday, knew Scheer from a previous project for Hulu. Martin is also a co-creator of Macroverse, and the two got to talking about possible projects after Martin showed Scheer a pre-release version of the app. The Creators’ Cut of Aliens vs Parker resulted.

“It was really right place, right time,” Scheer said.

The pair’s next project, or at least the only one they can talk about publicly, is a Disney+ documentary series exploring some of the lesser-known Marvel characters, Scheer said.

And who knows, in the very different content-creation and -distribution world of 2020, perhaps they’ll also have reason to dust off and find a home for that original Aliens vs Parker movie script, nixed by their agents as too expensive to make back in the day when they were less well known.