A dream come true.
A universe very closely related to gaming is comics. Over the last 20 years, gamers have seen their beloved comic-book / graphic novel characters come to life in the form of AAA game titles and movies. To an extent, comics are the genesis of the deep-rooted connection gamers have with certain characters in pop culture today.
Lenovo Legion aired a TVC at the beginning of 2019, where they showcased 3 custom characters of their own. While the characters looked great in terms of design and final rendition in the film, they didn’t have a back story explaining why they existed and look a certain way.
In January 2020, we received a brief to launch the Lenovo Legion Instagram channel targeting PC gamers. The question was, how do we establish the channel and garner followers on the new account?
Almost instantaneously, we found an opportunity to start cultivating a community of gamers/comic-book enthusiasts.
The idea was to co-create an origin story of one of the lead characters from the TVC in the form of a one-of-a-kind user-generated comic book using Instagram Stories as a format.
In hindsight, it was a no-brainer.
Our in-house design, illustration, and copy team partnered with a concept artist and a friend Ashish Boyne to create the rendered artwork for the comic in near real-time. The suggestions would be gathered on Instagram using AMA, polls, and comments.
Every Wednesday, we released a few pages of the ORIGIN STORY, followed by an engagement unit that asked our viewers how the story will unfold in character descriptions, dialogues, and overall direction of the narrative. The incentive? Legion merchandise and credits in the actual comic, which we planned to print and distribute nationally.
Count me in.
The mechanics to deliver something like this were relatively simple. We would look for fresh suggestions and finalise within 3 days of the pages going LIVE, followed by thumbnail sketches that I’d draw (within 24 hours) to visually outline the story for Ashish to render.
The number of pages would depend on how much time we decided to spend on that part of the narrative. It ranged anywhere from 2-6 pages every week.
The results, of course, were nothing short of what we were expecting.
We amassed 40k followers combined with highly qualitative responses from the fans within the first 30 days of going LIVE. While the media money spent on the campaign did its job to bring people to the page, our artwork paired with the story kept them hooked.
At last, as an illustrator at heart and a comic book enthusiast, this was a dream come true. There are a few perks to being the creative director on projects like the Origins. Apart from orchestrating the origin story and the world design of each of these characters, Icing on the cake, I got to conceptualise, illustrate and render the cover artwork of the Legion Lichen Origins. ilil