By Antonis Stroggilakis/ info@eurohoops.net
The First Squad is the first project in the history of Russian sports and European basketball in general which combines the superhero genre and professional sports.
Each player of the team got a superhero alter ego on the ground of his basketball skills. Along with superheroes, the universe of The First Squad is populated by supervillains who are personifications of rival teams.
As Denis Lagutin, head of marketing of PBC Lokomotiv Kuban explained: “Any story is based on a conflict whether it is basketball or Puccini’s opera or Dickens’ Dombey and Son. And a conflict involves at least two parties. So we cannot help but create supervillains as well. At the same time, none of them resemble a current or former player of rival teams. They are generalized characters and personifications”.
A presentation of each supervillain will coincide with a game against a corresponding team in the first half of the season.
In the second half of the season, two comics publications about The First Squad will be released. “Any sporting battle (and Loko’s games are not an exception) is dramatics with an unknown plot, which creates itself. These game dramatics are used as a basis for our comics’ script. So we will have superhero comics about basketball players that are based on a true story strange though it might sound,” Denis Lagutin says.
The leading artist of the project is Stas Saint Yak Yakimov. Stas is a comic artist for American indie-comics, including The Boxmasters for Billy Bob Thornton, an author of Bat is Dead Artbook and his original comics series Skeleton Inspector published by SPB Comics. He is currently working on George A. Romero’s comics tribute.
The colorist of The First Squad is Alexander Malyishev. He has under belt covers for Bubble Publishing House (Mirokhodtsyi), Red Panda comics by SPB Comics, and numerous comics for foreign publishing companies.Denis Laughing, Marketing Director of PBC Lokomotiv Kuban, is an author of the idea and a script writer of the project.
And of course, here are the heroes!
