Like all good stories, this one begins over a couple of cold beers.
Three Floyd’s Brewing Co. has released a new comic series entitled Alpha King, which is a take on the mythos of the brewery’s characters and beers. Brewmaster and founder Nick Floyd teamed up with veteran comic writer Brian Azzarello and artist Simon Bisley to bring the comic to fruition.
“One of our former brewers at the time suggested we write down the mythology of all of these characters. That was about ten years ago,” Floyd said.
That former brewer would much later run in to Azzarello at Hop Leaf in Chicago while he was drinking an Alpha King, mentioning the idea of a comic to him and eventually brining the two together.
“We needed someone to help us write the mythology and I though (Azzarello) was way out of our league,” Floyd said. “He said ‘Why not me?’ and we thought Hell yeah! It helps that he’s already been drinking Alpha King.”
Azzarello is best-known for his work on 100 Bullets, but has also worked with DC Comics’ relaunch of Wonder Woman, Batman and many more work for DC.
“I thought that would be fun and I really love their beer,” Azzarello said. “I thought that working with them and telling the story of all these characters would be cool. They already had a mythology to all these characters and Nick knows the background to them all.”
Three Floyd’s – located in Munster, IN. – is a brewery like no other, and the comic is an extension of that uniqueness. Each beer they make is based around a character they created, such as the Alpha King or Gumballhead. And every bottle has an illustration of it’s respective character on the label.
So what is Alpha King about?
“It’s a quest,” Azzarello said. “It just so happens that our hero is named after a beer.”
The story begins in the underworld, with a group of demons plotting some sort of attack in a quest for revenge. After the first few panels, the story shifts to a garage in Munster, Indiana where a home brewer is working with his girlfriend – and their cat, Gumball – to make a new beer. After some kids try conning the man into giving them a sample, the couple are approached by demons working for their King. The demons kill the man and the cat, kidnap his girlfriend and the story unfolds in the Hell beneath Indiana – fitting.
The story continues with the man and Gumball on a quest to save his love and avenge his death in that underworld.
Three Floyd’s Brewing currently has 20 beers, each dedicated to a character in their mythos, and both Floyd and Azzarello made note that all of the brewery’s characters would appear in the Alpha King series.
The art by Bisley is dark and haunting, graphically detailing the carnage we see in the first issue. Floyd serves as co-writer, lending his assistance to the overarching stories in the series while Azzarello refines the stories and brings the dialogue to life on paper.
A story 10 years in the making has finally come alive, and it’s the perfect reading material while drinking a beer of the same name.
