Anthony Sweet

Just a note: The above video talks about creating Season Two of Grand City as our goal, which was directly related to the 3 to 1 funding. Since we are no longer in the running for 3 to 1 funding, we have adjusted our plan to instead create the Grand City Prologue, a short animated comic. For more details about Plan Still Awesome, check Update #2 or the project description below!





Not a day passes without the bold-typed headline of another brutal murder somewhere in the Spread, or a brazen payroll heist on the Northside shore. The organised crime families are pushing their boundaries and butting heads, leaving bodies in the streets and the promise of more violence on the morrow. It’s a time of unrivalled indulgence and corruption, vicious vendettas and shifting allegiances; and as some folks are about to find out, it’s a dangerous time to be in the crime business...

Grand City Tales is a digital crime fiction project, and we’re here to crowdfund for our animated comic vignette. We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s take a walk…



Grand City is a 1940s crime fiction setting overflowing with gritty characters, tense stories and a bloody history. Grand City Tales is the digital part of the project, and we’re making the stories in as many ways we can - comics, short fiction, animation, poster art, music and more. With Grand City I am aiming to create one of the most engaging and comprehensive crime fiction projects on the internet, with the grit of a good noir film and the scope of an epic fantasy.

The great thing is, we’re already well underway in developing our first season. (You can see an art preview from the first issue HERE!) By March, we’ll have the very first 24-page full colour Grand City comic online, ready for your reading pleasure, plus a teaser taste of short fiction, lore and characters to explore. And all for free.





It’s true that we’ve got some killer comic art coming your way soon, but season one is just the tip of the iceberg. The plan for Grand City is much deeper than just a single story.

With your help, we want to make the Grand City Prologue, an animated comic vignette that pushes the stylistic boundaries of digital comics and animation. The Prologue tells the pivotal moment of Donny Hallaran that turns him from a mid-level career criminal, to the most dangerous man in Grand City. It will be the very first thing everyone sees when they come to Grand City Tales, and will set the scene for the stories that follow.

So what’s an “animated comic vignette”, you ask? To explain, it might be worthwhile talking about where we’re coming from. We’re fans of comics, and especially of the digital comics movement that is pushing the boundaries of visual storytelling and technology. We’ve been inspired by Mark Waid’s Thrillbent and Ryan Woodward’s Bottom of the Ninth, and think there’s a huge potential in this emerging - yet familiar - art-form.

We want to explore this hybrid of digital and traditional storytelling, and find that right mix for our crime stories. The Prologue will be an eight “page” animated comic that introduces the world of Grand City and leads into the season one digital comics.

The $6,500 will be used for production costs of the animated comic; sound design, musical composition and effects polish. In reality, an animated vignette would take closer to $12,000 to make, but Anthony & Anthony are throwing their hats down and preparing to work on producing this themselves once they’ve finished the season one comic (due in March).



Grand City is a fictional city set in 1940’s America. Things are looking pretty plentiful for Grand City's denizens in 1946 - the war is well and truly over, the trade economy is on the up, and generally speaking, folks are having a good time.

Under this greasy film of complacency, three dominant crime organisations are running rampant. On the east of the Witellman River, the Manessi family is about as genuine casa nostra as you can find these days. They’re holding onto the old ways of the mafiosi and never letting go. On the west side of the Witellman, lodged firmly in the Forchester Docks and the surrounding immigrant population of the Spread, the disgraced Scarpaglio family is the largest and most prolific organisation, but tensions between the father and son hierarchy are threatening to implode their expansive empire. And amongst all this, the LaCace consortium of business operators and political influencers are rubbing shoulders with the social elite, finding new ways to extort, blackmail and generally make life miserable for everyone else.

At the centre of this, when it all starts to break down, is the father and son hierarchy of Donny Hallaran and Matthew Scarpaglio. The season one comic focuses mostly on young Matthew and his ambitious plans to rob the Central Bank, but this Prologue vignette will be focused squarely on Donny. We’ll be exploring the circumstances that created the most dangerous man in Grand City, and why his son and wife are now so adamant to see him knocked down from the top of the Scarpaglio organisation.



We're very excited to have lined up a range of exclusive rewards for all of our Pozible backers, ranging from early bird first glimpses of season one, to limited edition signed and numbered A3 prints of art straight from the comic.

Want to know more? Then read on...


:: Early-bird preview of Season One ComicEvery backer will get exclusive early access to the season one comic as it's completed, well before the full season launch. You will also get access to our backers-only "Making Of..." series of updates.

Barbara Connell - Barbara Connell is a screenwriter, script analyst and the WA State Chair of the Australian Writer’s Guild. Her project credits include writer and co-producer on the US independent feature film Landfall. Her screenplay The Unlikeliest Hero won the prestigious INSITE award in 2011.

Chris McCormick - Chris is a freelance software development guru. He's ace at open source and internet technologies; makes apps for mobile, desktop and everything in between; and also makes bleeps and bloops into catchy chiptunes.