Shannon Browning

Shannon Browning is an Artist and Filmmaker, residing in Sydney's Western Suburbs.
History

Born in 1974, Shannon grew with a love of Science Fiction, Cartoons and old Black and White Comedies. He went through Primary and High School, constantly drawing and sketching in the back of all his notebooks. He even found a way to make a little extra cash in High School by doing drawing of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for people. Shannon's artwork won several In-School awards, but he never felt enough confidence to enter anything in any mainstream art competitions.

With the release of Tim Burton's Batman in 1989, Shannon started developing an interest in Superhero Comics. A lot of his early drawing experiments involve creating and designing Superhero Characters. Many of these were loose knock offs of Batman.

In 1992, he was invited to attend Design College. The invitation came after his father, late one night while Shannon was sleeping, sneaked into his room to grab some samples of his art work to mail off to the college for assessment. This was at the same time that Shannon's interest in Comics truly began. It was also the first time he put any serious sort of study into his art.

After graduating, Shannon spent the next Nine years working as a Graphic Designer in and around the Sydney area. Although he enjoyed the work, he grew increasingly frustrated with the 'politics' involved with his chosen career. In 1999, he took a break from design to participate in a work exchange program in the U.S, working at a Summer Camp in Maine. While there, Shannon first got into painting. Three pieces of his work are still featured at the camp.

Mark Fathom: Diving Detective

Written by Paul Adams, Mark was originally the main character of a single short story entitled "Deep trouble in Ra's Al Khawash", published in Australian Scuba Diver Magazine. The magazine's Editor at the time needed some images to go with the story. Shannon had already established his cartooning abilities in the building with a series of caricatures of the different employees in the building, she commissioned him to do a series of sketches to accompany the story.

In his off hours, he refined his art abilities. One of Shannon's favorite hobbies was creating new characters and then writing their back-stories. This helped developed his writing abilities. In 2003, he began a two-year Fine Arts course. This helped him refine his work to the point where he had the confidence to begin work on his first self-published work.

Welcome to Woodville

Originally done as a 24 hour comic challenge, Welcome to Woodville was a parody of 1950's Science Fiction Films. The 24 hour version remained unfinished for several years, until Shannon decided to redo it from scratch. New references were added, panels updated and artwork improved. Released at Australia's Supanova comic convention in 2005, the comic was a big hit. A "Special Edition" was released in 2006, featuring a new page added at the end of the story, details on the references used in the story and a preview of artwork from the yet to be published sequel entitled Return to Woodville. Woodville's success inspired Shannon to complete the story he'd been working on for several years, a combination of Super-heroics and Warner Bros style cartoons.

Robotoon

ROBOTOON is the story of Marcus Tippet, an amateur actor and comedian, who gets bonded with an alien artifact called the "Ill-reality Matrix". This device armours and alters Marcus, changing him into the image of the rabbit costume he was wearing. Marcus becomes the world’s only 6 foot talking robotic rabbit superhero.

Robotoon’s origins began in 1988. After seeing both the film's "Robocop" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" at approximately the same time, Shannon's imagination came up with the idea of a screwball cartoon character, like Roger Rabbit, getting rebuilt and armored in the same fashion as Robocop. Conceived originally as just a one off sketch that was a joke of the original poster for RoboCop, the drawing was completed after several weeks. Even the film’s tag-line was reworked to read "Part Toon. Part Machine. Complete Idiot". A storyline was attempted to explain the character, but neither Shannon's writing or drawing skills were up to the challenge at the time, so the project was dropped and the character put into storage. The drawing laid dormant for many years, till about 1996, when Shannon was trying to submit an idea for the Australian independent comic publisher, Issue 1 Comics, and their character of Cyberswine. Shannon dug out the old sketch of Robotoon and came up with a brief back-story for the character. The story was rejected by Issue One, but Shannon continued to develop the character.

Over several years, the story was developed and the character redesigned. After several miss-starts, including an almost completed first issue that was abandoned, Robotoon Issue 1 was finally published and released in October of 2007. Sales were dismal to begin with, but positive word of mouth contributed to the book selling quite well. The story is continuing over several issues, the second of which is tentatively scheduled to come out mid 2008.

Ozslaught

Shannon, along with other Australian Independent Comic Publishers Hayden Fryer, Owen and Tania Nichols and Tony Newton are currently working on Australia's first Independent Comic Crossover, OZSLAUGHT. A lead in issue, drawn by all of the character creators, was released at Supanova in Brisbane in 2007. The first issue was released at both the Armageddon Comic Convention in Melbourne and Supanova Pop culture convention in Sydney in October 2007. The book was not well received.

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