Warm-Up Sketch Largely Featuring Ice

I did a warm-up sketch to try to get my brain firing today.

With the USA out, I'm rooting for our neighbors to the north today. I figure, they've given us William Shatner, Evangeline Lilly, Leslie Nielsen, Nathan Fillion, Estella Warren and my friend Mark Lutz. For all that, I can give a little cheer back.

Don't spoil it for me, though. I have to watch today's match TiVo-delayed a couple of hours.

Women With Brooms

I'm not normally a fan of the Olympics. I'm glad we have them, and think they're great competition, but I'm just not a fan of the sports. Well, until this year.

Somehow, I got hooked on curling. Some of it comes from my appreciation for Paul Gross, star of Due Southand Slings and Arrows, who also wrote and starred in a movie called Men With Brooms. The movie was about a curling team, and was really enjoyable. Check one, or all, of them out.

The United States' women's team still has a chance to medal. The men have been eliminated, but are still playing out the round robin. I'm sure you can find an Olympic schedule if you're interested.

Darkblade Hangs Up His Cape?

Just to keep it from getting wrinkled.

Wayback Wednesday: Another Swimsuit Story

My good friend and fellow Kubert School student Sean Tiffany has been doing a series of "From the Vault" posts on his blog. In these, he brings out some old piece of artwork from school or early in his career. Always one to steal from someone smart, I'm going to do the same thing here with Wayback Wednesdays. First up is a project from my "senior" year at Kubert. (Kubert was a three year school, but I hate saying "third" or "last" since it sounds like I didn't finish.) This was actually in Joe Kubert's class. We had to adapt a TV show into comic book format, doing a cover and a couple of interior pages. I did Quantum Leap. Innovation was doing a comic at the time, and I figured this might be a nice set of samples to show them. Plus, I was a fan of the show and wanted to do the scene that they could never really afford to do.

Quantum Leap had Sam Beckett leap into the life of another character, usually at in inopportune moment. When he got there, Sam's reaction would inevitably be "Oh, boy." So I threw Sam into a skydiver. Sam leaping into someone who, literally, was leaping through the air was too good, plus the things you could do with Al were too much fun to pass up.

The cover was a parody/homage to the Kathy Ireland Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover, which had come out a couple years before. It was iconic enough, and lent itself well enough that I thought it was a great fit.

As it was The Old Days, the artwork was done on bristol board, the lettering done by hand, and the colors done with Dr. Martin Watercolor Dyes on a photocopy pasted onto a piece of illustration board. Ah, pre-computer color. There's some aspects of actually brushing wet color on paper that I miss, but all things being equal, I much prefer computer coloring.

And, as always, click to embiggen!

Send Me a Postcard

I mentioned the idea of doing postcards for this Con Season. I think I'm committed to it. I'm planning on doing a different card for each day of the show, too. The city photos are comps right now, but will be the full purchased versions when I get them printed. But I figured you might like to see what they're going to look like.

Snowverkill

Can't say what this is for, but it's definitely for something.

The Love and Capes Swimsuit Edition?

I have no doubt that this would totally happen in the Love and Capes universe, if it hasn't already. Hmmm, maybe there's a story in there somewhere.

Trading Card or Postcard?

Once again, I turn to you, the readers of Love and Capes. Con Season is approaching. Heck, there's supposed to even be a Wizard World Cleveland now. Just as long as it doesn't park on any other shows, especially Mid-Ohio-Con, I'll be trés interested to see it. Anyway, for the upcoming year, I'd like to have something new.

First, I toyed with the idea of trading cards. I figured I could sell them at each show, and then make the package available online. I though $1.00 a card might work. Anything less means making coin-change, and I don't know if anyone wants that. But the printing cost is pretty reasonable, and it could be a neat thing to do.

Then, I had another idea, which in a moment of "great minds think alike" also came across my Twitter feed to do an actual postcard. I could feature every city I'm visiting and have Mark and Abby (or Amazonia or Darkblade) hanging out in the city, with a "Greetings from [CITY]!" on them. But, if I did that, I think that they need to be giveaways.

I've got rough mock-ups for both of them displayed here. Click on either to see them embiggened. So what do you think? Do the postcard? The trading card? Both?

The Dog of Steel!

In my ongoing attempt to make this The Coolest Blog in the Multiverse, and with a tip of the hat to Andy Ihnatko, I'm trying out the WordTwit plugin for my blog. Now, blog posts will be automagically sent to my Twitter feed. You'l be up to your eyebrows in up-to-the-minute Thom Zahlerishness If that's your thing.

Here's a commission I did for Jon Knutson's Random Acts of Geekery blog. He's a Krypto fan, so I decided to put Superman's real best friend in front of the Doghouse of Solitude. I'm pretty sure the Doghouse in no longer in continuity, but I'm sure DC will fix that soon.

Is This Really a Big Deal?

I read a lot of commentary about "writing for trade" and "every issue is someone's first" and those battling ideas.

The former refers to the idea that since these six issues or whatever are going to be eventually collected for trade, do you have to worry that The Seige of the Blackest Crisis #3 is someone's first issue? Chances are, they've probably read the first two parts.

The latter is an idea that started when comics weren't collected and were monthly books of indeterminate story length, if any length at all. There were even stories that didn't have a clear start or stop, but just kept on going like a soap opera. And a lot of times there was a flashback panel or two that recounted the character's origin.

Me? I think we all should be able to get along.

Love and Capes is a quarterly comic. That can make getting a narative flow going pretty rough. It's part of why the stories tend to be done-in-one stories. But I did do one hugely continued story, and more than a few others that hung off a plot point introduced previously. On top of that, I do issues of the book as part of Free Comic Book Day, and that means that there's a huge chance that it really is someone's first exposure to the story.

So the first thing I did was I added a recap page. This introduced the main characters and told you what happened last issue. There are lots of ways to handle these, but the upside is that they can be removed for collecting in a trade. Especially if you're doing a complicated plot-heavy story, I think these are a great idea.

But, even with that, a lot of people skip over it, or don't read it all the way. And you don't want to have people referring back to the recap page constantly while they're reading.

Which brings me to Love and Capes #13. It's the FCBD issue, and the issue immediately following the marriage of the two characters. You can read the first five pages along with my interview at Robot 6. Just read the first couple if you haven't already. I can wait.

Back? Cool. Now here are links to page 1 and page 2 with notes. I didn't stop the plot for exposition, or force anything in to the story, but they're crafted so that in those first two pages, you find out the following:

1. The characters' names. Why? Because people use names in coversation..
2. They quickly reference that they're on their honeymoon, and not just on vacation. And we know they're married, not just dating.
3. Mark brings up Abby's bookstore and her sister. Charlotte's not named yet, but we can do that whenever we meet her. For now, we know Abby's job and that she has a sister. We don't know she's got a brother and two parents who are still alive, but that's okay. They're not going to appear in this issue. So my new reader doesn't need to know they exist yet.
4. Mark uses his powers in front of Abby. First, this shows that Mark's the hero, just in case they didn't get that from the cover. We know he's invulnerable and can fly, and probably move at super-speed given how far away the sun is. Now, I have the advantage of using a Superman archetype, so I don't have to catalog all his powers. But I've shown the powers that will reference most of the jokes that will follow.
   This also shows that Abby knows Mark's secret, and I think that's hugely important. That's a plot point that's different from the genetic memory of Superman that exists. Yeah, Lois knows Clark's secret now, but ask the guy on the street and they'll remember all those put-one-over-on-Lois stories. So I've covered that.

No clunky exposition. No flashbacks. But if you haven't read an issue of Love and Capes before, you're probably caught up enough to keep on reading.

Crafting a story that does this isn't effortless. But I think it's worth the effort to make sure your book can be read by a new reader without turning off an old one.