Talkin' 'Bout My Reputation

With Love and Capes #4–the retail edition in stores, reviews are starting to filter in. And they're good!

..let's look at the indie publication Love and Capes. It's a fairly simple light comedy about a superhero who reveals his identity to his girlfriend. The main character is a Superman analog, and there are analogs of (at least) Batman, Wonder Woman and the Justice League around as well. Although the correspondence is decidedly loose and tilted towards humour. What makes this series so great is the characterization. While there are other more obvious gags in the book, most of the humor and fun come from the interactions between the protagonist, his girlfriend, and a few other characters. They have well-developed enough personalities already that creator Thom Zahler can play them off each other well enough to make a whole interesting book.

Love and Capes isn't trying to change the world of comics or make any other such grandiose claims. But if you like secret identity hijinks and light romantic comedy, you should really make the effort to track down this book.

Ixat_totep
Comic Book Lover's Anonymous

This is a really fun series, which could best be described as crossing Superman with a 30-minute sitcom. The art is crisp and iconic, and the dialogue flows quickly and snappily. Heroes may be one way to take superheroes onto the television screen and make them really work, but Love and Capes is absolutely the other way to do so.

Greg McElhatton
Comics Alliance

My First, Best Destiny

I'm back from the Licensing Show, and will hopefully write much more about it tomorrow. Really quick, though, it was a good show and I think good things will come from it. One of the coolest parts, though, was that the CBS/Paramount booth had a replica of the bridge and command chair. And I, um, may have gotten my picture taken in the center seat.

Best Laid Plans

Here's another rarity. Two panels from page twenty.

Panel three seems like it's making fun of Harry Potter fans. It's not, and I've detailed my own plans to make sure that I can get a copy of the book during Comic-Con. So I put it in the "Nobody can make fun of my brother but me" category.

Panel five is the Amazonia panel. According to my original plan, Amazonia wasn't going to be in issue five at all. But, much like what happened with her in issue two, she forced her way in. She's a strong-willed woman. What her appearance here does is set up the framework for the next issue."Amazonia comes to Abby's bookstore for a signing" was among my ideas for this current issue, and I liked it so much that I knew I'd need more room to do it justice.

I'm headed off for the Licensing Show tomorrow, so I'll get back to things when I return. I should be in good shape to finish things up on deadline.

They're a Leavin' On a Jet Plane

Last night I finished page nineteen, so I've got just five pages left. If I'm good, and manage to channel a little bit of the Speed Force, I might even be able to get page twenty done before I leave for New York City.

This page turned out pretty well. It's split between a Mark and Abby scene and a Crusader and Darkblade scene, and both are fairly funny. With this page, Jerry and Joanne Spencer leave the book, never to be seen again… for the rest of the issue. And one of the sub-jokes in the superhero part came about just because I needed them on ground level for the punchline. I wound up situating them on the docks outside of town, and that inspired me for the first joke. You'll have to trust me that it's funny, as it's not the scene that I posted.

As I wind down to the end of the series, I'm one page short of the 24 that I need. Usually at this point I have everything completely locked in. This time there's one scene that I need to extend. It'll work out fine, but it's different problem to have, going from too much story to not enough.

Color Your World

While I was working on page 17, I drew a panel that I thought "That's a decent image. Very iconic." I used the end of issue four as the design for the t-shirts and glasses, and this panel reminded me of that. So, I turned it into a desktop background, available for download.So, if you just need more of the Love and Capes on your computer, click and install one of these sparkly designs.
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Double Header

Tonight we've got a two-fer.

I'd put up a post about page 17, and then decided I didn't like it and took it down. It was a little too self-promotional for me. Since then, I've done page 18 as well.

In page seventeen, I "name check" Mark Verheiden. Name checking is when you drop the name of a friend in your story. I do it all the time. Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes it's blatant. Either way, it's fun, and a nice way to appreciate the people who are the wind beneath my wings, to steal a phrase from a Bette Midler song. That's something I never thought I'd do.

Mark Verheiden, of course, is the absurdly-talented writer and producer of such things as the good seasons of Smallville and the best frakkin' show on television, Battlestar Galactica. And, like everyone else on the planet, he's got a blog. Check it out, it's good stuff.

Then, I did page 18, which I considered the "easy page" of the book. It was actually one of the discarded endings to issue two, where Mark would fly Abby up to watch the fireworks on New Year's Eve. I liked the scene, but it didn't work for the story. Here, it worked nicely.

The fireworks ar all from photos, and there was no perspective to really worry about. I thought it'd be easy. The operative word being thought.

Turns out when you write seven panels of two characters flying, it starts to get boring visually. So I kept moving the characters around, and in to new and different, and much more challenging to draw, positions. I'm pretty happy with the end result, but it certainly wasn't the gimme that I thought it might be.

With this, I have six pages left to draw. Hopefully I can get at least one more drawn before I leave for the Licensing Show on Monday, which will put me in good shape to wrap things up by the end of the month. That's my plan at least.

Video Killed the Comic Book Star

I've mentioned before that I'm going to be doing the Licensing Show in New York. And hey, if you're going to be in the City So Nice They Named It Twice shoot me an e-mail and I can probably get you into the show sans admission costs.

Anyway, I've had to put together a video trailer of Love and Capes for the show that will be displayed at our booth. Just for fun, I've added a music track. If I were to ever broadcast this, I'd definitely get rights-clearances on the song. For now, it's a guide track.

Still, I think it came out okay. Hopefully, some people at the Licensing Show will think so, too.

Eight to go...!

Love and Capes #5 is now old enough to drive. I hit page sixteen last night.

Here Mark's Dad, Jerry, and Abby share a quiet moment. I've been beating up on Abby in this issue, and needed to give her a good moment. It's especially important as she's not going to have a great rest of the book either.

And, blissfully, this page was a lot easier since I was able to reuse the stadium from the previous page and they went inside the stadium for most of the sequence.

Eight to go…

Glass Houses

I'm always looking for more cool things to do with Love and Capes. That's part of why I'm going to the Licensing Show in New York next week, attempting to arrange Love and Capes underoos and video games and who knows what else. One of the things that I've managed to prototype, thanks to Toon Tumblers, are these slick as can be Love and Capes glasses!

There's a tweak or two that needs to be made on them, but nothing too major. I'm working on figuring out a way to make a production run of these, and hopefully you'll be able to order your own Love and Capes Toon Tumblers.

Would anyone be interested in that?

And The Crowd Goes Wild

My computer is back home and running quite smoothly. Big thanks to the Apple Store for getting it done on Sunday so that I would have it to start my week.

In fact, I got it back in time to finish page fifteen, which is the hardest page I've drawn so far. My stupid writer decided to set a scene at a baseball game. This means drawing crowds and rows of seats, and so on. For this page, I actually designed a series of heads and bodies of people to use in sitting crowd scenes. I'm sure I'll have to draw another crowd of people sitting in rows sometime in the run of the book, so I've got them on file. I also had to design logos for the Deco City Architects and the Chronopolis Dragons, as well as a logo for the stadium itself.

Well, for that, I took another logo I designed for RAP Promotions, the promoting arm of friend Roger Price, purveyor of my favorite convention on the whole darn planet, Mid-Ohio-Con, and used that as the corporate sponsor of the park. Hey, it's no more awkward than "Quicken Loans Arena."

This page also features two rather unique jokes. The first is one of the few times I borrowed something so obviously from my own life. My experiences shape the book, obviously, but there's never been a point where Abby acted exactly like some girl I dated. But, Joanne Spencer is loosely templated on my mother, who's a Steelers fan, so you might be able to guess what happens.

The second joke required a lot of clever staging (at least, I thought it was clever) and a little bit of trust, too. I could have spoon-fed the reader the joke, but I'm hoping that they'll make the connection. And it was a hard connection to draw.

All right, I'll be heading to NYC for the Licensing Show next week, so I have a lot to do and not a lot of time. Back to my now much-cleaner studio and to work…!