Fury of Solace: Doing Evil So You Don’t Have To

Emmett Furey, co-creator of the web-series Bumps in the Night and a staff writer for Comic-Book Resources wondered, “[d]id Bruce Wayne become Batman because he saw his parents murdered in an alley, or were his parents murdered in an alley to facilitate him becoming Batman, the protector that Gotham needed?” To explore the question, Furey donned the villain’s mask, assuming the titular role in Fury of Solace, a transmedia superhero experience.

Furey and his team released the first episode as a musical video entry to Dr Horrible’s Evil League of Evil application video process. The video introduced Fury of Solace, a supervillain who learned from an oracle named Augur that a young girl would save many lives as a superhero, but only if he killed her parents. By getting his hands dirty for the greater good, Fury of Solace helped create the superhero The Orphan (played by Laurel Rankin).

Episode 1.5 brought the audience into the action through an alternate reality game: Fury of Solace kidnapped Max Mason (played by Todd Livingston), the president and CEO of Mason International, and the video with clues to his location was password protected. A photo of a mysterious belt buckle helped players piece together the clues and unlock the newest video, where Fury of Solace listed out Max Mason’s many crimes. The adventure was concluded in Episode 2, an eight page online comic.

Fury of Solace masterfully balances the transmedia elements to advance the story. As Furey explains on the production blog, “not every episode is going to be live-action, some will be 8-page online comics. In addition to the episodic video and comics, we’ll periodically be releasing short, live-action minisodes . . . [y]ou can interact with all the characters on their twitter accounts, and some of their tweets will have a direct bearing on the ongoing narrative.”

Future episodes will introduce Los Angeles Police Detective Katherine Czerny (played by LonelyGirl15 veteran Katherine Pawlak) and Max Mason’s mysterious bodyguard, Mason Vixen (played by Sara Jo Elice). Episode 3 will feature the ensemble’s second musical number.

Click Here to learn more about the Fury of Solace experience.

Image by Evaun Wallington