Comic Preview: The Only Living Boy

Is 12-year-old Erik Farrell the last human alive on Earth?

That’s the premise of the new young adult comic, The Only Living Boy, by Harvey Award Winning Creators David Gallaher and Steve Ellis, which was successfully funded via a Kickstarter campaign. The pair, who collaborated seven years ago on the award-winning series High Moon, will officially launch the comic today, with twenty pages at their website.

“We miss adventure comic books that are chock full of epic worlds to discover and characters who move and fly and sail,” said artist Steve Ellis. “This is our love letter to classic storytelling. As a parent, I want people to read the series and have a huge smile on their face. When they finish a chapter they should feel awesome. After all, this is a series with an insect princess, a mermaid warrior, dragons, and a menagerie of exotic and dangerous creatures. It’s about having fun.”

“Our aim is to create amazing adventure comics that are inspired by the past, but have an eye towards the future,” according to the writer, Gallaher. “For the last seven years, Steve and I have been exploring how to use the digital space to tell the best stories we can–from High Moon to Box 13 to The Only Living Boy. Our new new webcomic is re-affirmation of our digital roots.”

Ellis is perhaps best known for his work for Wizards of the Coast on Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering and for creating storyboard designs and final art for interactive comic role playing games for AMC TV’s Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.

Gallaher has written for Marvel Comics and served as a consultant for Random House, The New York Police Department, and McGraw-Hill. For five years shortly after college, he taught in the Maryland Public School System as a special education teacher.

“Teaching was likely the hardest and ultimately the most rewarding job I’ve ever had,” said Gallaher. “As a former teacher, I’m looking to convey the anxiety and the loneliness of growing up and balance that with amazing world building and magical characters. That’s an ambitious goal of ours and a big part of why we believe readers will come back to visit the world of The Only Living Boy time and again.”