Pinocchio sticks nose in vampires' business

— Pinocchio, the puppet boy, finds a new use for his ever-growing nose in Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, the soon-tocome graphic novel from writer Van Jensen and artist Dusty Higgins.

The book's publisher, Slave Labor Graphics, describes the 128-page tale as "darkly funny." Slated for release in mid-October, it has "genuine wit and enough bloody action to please The Lost Boys themselves," according to the comics trade journal, Wizard.

Higgins, 28, is a staff artist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Former Democrat-Gazette reporter Jensen, 27, is a comics freelancer and an assistant editor of Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine in Atlanta.

They discovered a shared interest in comics, and Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer grew like a twig from a sketch that Higgins showed to Jensen for a laugh.

"I do these doodles all the time," Higgins says, "just random ideas that pop into my head."

This one showed a puppet boy distinctly unlike the Disney version. Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940) is most people's idea of the character, probably - the puppet who yearns to be a real boy. He has to be rosy-cheeked good in order to achieve his dream, and if he tells a lie, it makes his nose grow.

But the original story of Pinocchio is a children's fable by Carlo Collodi, an Italian writer, published about 1880.

Hig-gins' sketch caught something more like Collodi's thinking, Pinocchio with a mean streak, a puppet carved from naughty pine.

"I thought it was pretty funny as a gag," Jensen says.

They might have forgotten it, but Higgins found himself sketching the same little character in more situations - an adventure in the making.

"The idea circled around in my head," he says. Pinocchio's nose made the bad boy a natural vampire-hunter, armed with a never-ending supply of pointy wooden stakes, another for every lie he told.

"I think I've got something," he remembers telling Jensen, who agreed to write the script.

A novel-length story seemed a lot to make out of a puppet with a nose for evil, Jensen says. But Collodi's tale, like Pinocchio's sharp stick of a honker, pointed the way.

THE NOSE KNOWS

Collodi's Pinocchio "is a true anti-hero," Jensen says, "someone who has good in him but regularly lets his desires and meanness lead him astray. And that's how boys really are, so it's a very true, identifiable character."

In this latest telling, Pinocchio sets his agenda in a terse few words that evenJames Bond might envy:

"I'm Pinocchio. I kill monsters."

But he's still a boy, after all - short of friends, clumsy with girls, hard on crickets.

The monster for the collaborators to beat was a tight deadline of pages to finishon nights and weekends aside from regular work.

Higgins, attempting to draw six pages in one day, sprained his drawing hand.

"I didn't know that was possible," he says.

Alert, now, to the dangers of the drawing board, his goal is no more injuries on the sequel. He and Jensenalready have the next idea whittled into shape, and they imagine a trilogy about Pinocchio.

"The sequel will include huge fights in Rome, a sea battle and gypsy vampires," Jensen says. "I can't wait to see it come to life through Dusty's pen."

Style, Pages 55, 60 on 09/27/2009

Upcoming Events