Arts & Entertainment

Shrewsbury Resident is on Super-Hero Mission

Chip Perro is the force behind Perro Worldwide Comics.

Chip Perro hopes to start production on five super-hero movies this year.

If things go according to plan, the Shrewsbury resident will premiere the films all during the summer of 2014, “so that we’re bringing, essentially, a comic book event to life.”

Perro Worldwide Comics’ “Team Mission Park” heroes -- Chris Ember, Tessa Faux, Apple Orchard, Timothy Note and Victor Strength – debuted in 2010, in a live-action team-up movie called “Mission Park: The Hero Complex,” Perro says.

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Perro now is telling the characters’ origins in individual comics tied into the movie – and into the movies to come – as well as into a Mission Park Weekly strip on the company’s website.

 “We don’t want to have separate continuities from our comics to our films. We want this to be, ‘You read the comic, that happened, you watch the film.’ It’s a direct continuation of the comic,” says Perro, a 2002 graduate of Natick High School.

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Perro said his featured heroes are “characters that I’ve had in the back of my head for a long time.”

“I knew I wanted to do something with them. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be,” he said.

Perro said he “wanted to bring them to life in film,” however, “comic book and super-hero characters, they all have their roots in comics. And I love comics. I used to read comics growing up.”

“Mission Park: The Hero Complex” had the five principal characters working together and was designed as “an entrance point to get familiar with these characters,” Perro said.

The film was shot in the Shrewsbury area – it was “live action, but we green screened the entire movie, and the backgrounds were inserted after the fact” using Boston footage Perro shot, he said.

Mission Park is “a fictional neighborhood in Boston” that serves as the group’s headquarters, he said.

However, “this is not the Justice League. They team up when they have to,” Perro said.

The heroes wear costumes, but lack heroic and secret identities, he said.

“Most of them, in this world, are professional super-heroes,” Perro said.

The characters’ take on heroism differs from traditional super-heroes, he said. “What we’re trying to do is something that has a lot of the fun that DC and Marvel have. I like the costume element. I like the stylized look of comic book characters. So, we’re bringing that into our projects. But, at the same time, I want something that appeals to more of the adult crowd, because there are so many adult comic book enthusiasts. It’s not just a kids medium,” Perro said.

“Our characters have a real edge to them that I don’t see with other characters. That’s gone over real well with the fan base. My characters are in some ways a little morally ambiguous.

“We have characters that, while they fight crime, are not exactly good guys. The bad guys, I want them to be realistic with their motivations. I don’t want a mad scientist for the sake of having a bad guy with some oddball purpose.”


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