THRILLBENT IS LIVE!
How do you engage this brave new world of comics?!
Go to http://www.thrillbent.com/
Click on the title you want to read.
Turn the pages with your arrow keys. Just like pages. Left and right.*
Done.
...
Well, that was anticlimactic.
*******************************
Which is, of course, the point. No music. No motion comics. Just pages of art and words.
We're not trying to re-invent comics. We're trying to hack out the tools by which some other, younger ferocious person will re-invent comics.
Content Density (look, ma, I made up a term!) at this point will run to roughly a regular paper issue's worth of material a month. It will vary in the future, but right now this allows us to contract artists, colorists, etc at a rate with which they are familiar and comfortable.
The updates are always in multi-page bursts, giving you enough new material to feel like you got a chunk of story each time you swing by. You can read about Mark's thinking on the size of these updates here. Personally I'd chalk our adoption of this structure up to Warren Ellis' FREAKANGELS. In my personal design notes, this was one of the first "We do it like THAT!" notes.
No advertising yet, as we're still tweaking the page construction. Yes, I know that means there's no income from this thing. Until we figure out the best way to get the material out to the humans, Mark and I are supporting the burn rate ourselves. He sold his fantastic comic collection. I am using the residuals from the Catwoman movie.
Up to you who has committed the greater sin.
There are a couple ways to optimize your viewing experience, in both the pdf download of LUTHER (and future pdfs) and on the THRILLBENT site.
PDF: In our preferred iOS pdf reader of choice, GOODREADER, you just tap the edge of the screen and the slides lay over quite nicely. The changing panels, additional dialogue balloons, etc all work as they should. Most tablet pdf readers work the same way.
If you're viewing the pdf on your computer, on whatever pdf viewer you're using you want FULL SCREEN and SLIDESHOW settings. Again, page advances will be with the arrow keys. I'd note that you can also open the file with the Chrome browser, grab that FULLSCREEN setting (farthest left on the blue bar at the bottom of the page) and it plays pretty damn fine.
Our comics are, in a word, dumb.
LIVE COMICS ON THE SITE: Blow your browser out to Fullscreen. Getting rid of the bookmarks bar will also help -- basically, it'll automatically resize to whatever screen you've got open, but it'll look better the more screen real estate you give it. Then click the arrow keys. Done. It reads like a dream on your tablet in browser mode also, with tap page turns or swipes.
IN THE APP: That's not quite ready yet. But it's getting there.
Okay, that should answer any questions. Enjoy, and as always your feedback is critical.
* (You can also click on the edges of the images, but I prefer the arrow keys, as it's more like turning a page. I am obsessed with skeumorphism in new media.)
Showing posts with label comics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comics. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Oh, Hi. I'm the Sidekick.
In case you hadn't heard, Mark Waid is thinking of doing some digital comics.
Heh.
In a small way I've been aiding Mark as he's developed these ideas for the last three years. Any long-time reader of my blog knows I'm a systems geek. I coined the phrase 4GM, comparing new media models to asymmetrical warfare. Wrote about Netflix taking over TV back in 2007 or so. I'm fascinated by the way older content distributors and providers continually confuse the distribution system with the content -- hell, the WGA has chalked up some truly epic bungles with that mindset.
The only thing that's kept me from larger experimentation with alternate medium delivery is that, ironically, I'm running a TV show. Granted, it's one of the only independently produced TV shows in the US, but it's still distributed straight into your cable-box old-school style.
So, instead, I've been kibitzing Mark during three years of shared lunches. Mark had his own reasons for getting into digital. My interest in a new comics model came out of my work on trying to figure out new TV distribution models. Looking at other mediums, I kept hearing about how digitally distributed, serialized comics on the web wouldn't work ...
... and I kept looking at Penny Arcade and PvP and my personal favorite, Something Positive, and seeing independent humans making a living. Better than a living, in some cases.
"But John," I'd hear, "those are three, maybe four panel gag comics made for niche audiences, which only support individual creators, not companies."*
Yes, they are. They are serialized narratives combining writing and pictures which allow their creators to make a living telling stories. Which just happen to be digitally delivered.
If one man can kill a bear, any man can kill a bear, so to speak. I have to admit, Mark's got a multi-pronged business and artistic approach to this new model. I'm still humping the same idea I've been obsessed with for years -- the democratization of the creative industry.**
Now, of course, indie comics take years to build up an audience. And it's grueling work, with a high risk of failure. Sure. That's called capitalism, and it's awesome, and please show me the document guaranteeing your mass-market comic won't also flame-out no matter how much promotion it gets.
But although the webcomics gave us the first plausible premise (and now you should be reading John Robb's work on open-source warfare), Mark wanted to go even further. What were the artistic merits of moving to digital as a delivery system?
Gutting the cost of entry allowed for more artistic experimentation and variety, of course. But he's been doing this for 25+ years, and he's a shitload more ambitious than I am. That's when he found Balak, and we began to trade this graphic back and forth obsessively:
about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART
This work began to nail down some of the rules of digital comics. Mark was the one who actually quantified most of these over the course of endless emails -- I'm just good at pithy summaries.
1.) Like paper comics, the reader should control the pace of the information in digital comics.
2.) Using layers, the creator can pull focus and create additional dimensions of storytelling, including time and subjective perception.
Motion Comics, those filthy bastards, fell into the trap of mistaking medium for content. The digital screen is made for TV and movies. Therefore, comics on a digital screen should look like TV and movies. Add animation and voices!
Hence, monstrous hybrid.
If, instead, you just treat the screen as an odd-shaped page which can be instantly updated and is conveniently in almost every home and office on earth, you get a much more accurate idea of how to proceed.
Of course, none of this is revolutionary -- I'm just tracking how we hacked away at it, amateurishly and arduously, over three years. Along the way, the Kindle started hitting critical mass, and we tore that model apart. Despite there being some comic successes on the Kindle -- manga in particular transferred well -- formatting issues prevented comic artists from taking full potential of that distribution channel. Of course, now that the new Kindle Fire is moving them over to an HTML-based publishing model, things should get much easier. Pablo Defindini has done outstanding work demonstrating how comics might use responsive design on the new readers.
But the Kindle lesson, in the rise of the Kindle-only million-seller author, was a valuable one: you don't have to be famous to make a living telling stories. You just have to be famous enough, with a devoted enough following.
Then the iPad hit. Comixology did a great job of getting out front on the tablet comics market. But they were forced to figure out a way to convert pages laid out for a larger space down to that seven-odd inch screen. That led to "guided panel view" which was pretty spiffy. However, in TV and movies, we call that "pan and scan", and no one's fond of it. Because it's not how the writer and artist meant for you to experience the story.
This tied in to another discussion we were having, summarized by Mark in an email:
3.) "We live in a wide-screen world. Use it."
Most long-form story-telling comics on the web were essentially back-door physical world comics. The Blind Ferret guys (very smart humans), Warren Ellis' Freak Angels, all of them were laid out for easy reproduction in a classically formatted portrait alignment hard-copy publication. They used the screen to distribute, but they did not use the canvas of the screen. (This is all a pretentious way of complaining about scrolling down when reading each page of Freak Angels).
And sure, you want to be able to publish that hard-copy some day. But again, that weird-sized widescreen potential comics page is in almost every house and office in the Western World. There's no inherent advantage to portrait view. Shouldn't the more widely distributed canvas have the artistic advantage?
So we experimented with resolutions and orientations. Friends of mine, Geoff Thorne and Todd Harris, developed some sample art, 8 pages of a comic with chuffah dialogue, to lock down landscape presentation, art resolution, a bunch of the artist-y numbers. Web designer Gary Henderson developed our first story software models, trying to incorporate additional materials such as scripts and layouts into the primary presentation. At the same time Mark chatted with artist Jeremy Rock, who was experimenting with how to create image flow on landscape pages which then seamlessly joined into readable portrait pages for the hard-copy phase of the comic's life. While I screwed around with e-readers and grind-it-out bullshit, Mark had Jeremy re-draw one of his BOOM! stories, "Luther", experimenting with the ideas of information flow (the staggered captions, etc.) We then plugged it into the reader, and bob's your uncle, a creatively satisfying longform story made for the screen. Not the first, not the best, but a reproducible model, done as a layered pdf. (None of this was rocket science, but it was ... fiddly.)
About this time, Joe Quesada at Marvel decided to drive the company much more aggressively into digital comics, and Mark began working with those lads. Mark changed the way he developed and wrote comics to take advantage of the new style. Momentum shifted, and now you have the the great -- and I mean goddam GREAT -- Infinite Comics experiment at Marvel.
Meanwhile, I was screwing with distribution, trying to live up to one of my pet theories about media:
4.) Information should be dumb.
By dumb I mean "as platform independent as possible." Your comic should work well in a pdf reader on a tablet or laptop or desktop computer, on a website, in an app. Your workflow should allow you to easily slot your comic into as many different platforms as seamlessly as possible. As cool as that Infinite Comic Nova comic is, there's nothing in there you can't do with a bone-dumb pdf- reader. It's all about execution. A reconception of how you can tell stories graphically now that you can experiment with layers and time.
Also, there should be different ways to make a living at this -- you shouldn't have to be waiting around, gambling on prestige print collection, before you can make a living telling your story. That's the stuff we're still working at now, and will be the subject of future posts and some of Mark's future announcements.
So that's the rough version of how we got here. Mark's the one driving this, with the able Lori Matsumoto handling the technical stuff, while I'll continue to fiddle over here in the corner. We'll be referencing a lot of very smart humans who've been working on (and succeeding at) this for much longer than we've been playing at it. Some of this is going to work, some of it is going to fail miserably, but we'll show you all the spinning gears as we go.
Mark's been gracious enough to include one of my new webcomics on his site when it launches. Mine will be nowhere near as artistically mature as his work. It'll be a comic, written and formatted for widescreen, serialized for online delivery, but not as aggressive in playing with narrative flow. Frankly, I don't have the chops for what Mark's doing. But it'll be fun as hell. I hope we manage to work out enough of the kinks to help you make your comic someday, tell your story.
*New rule -- if your own model is based on selling books to an audience which numbers less than one-tench of Wil Wheaton's Twitter followers, you do not get to call anybody else "niche."
** I was a stand-up comic, the ultimate freelancer, hopping from club to club, booking my own gigs. That experience burned freelancer instinct into my DNA: how many gigs in how many weeks to make my nut? To pay the mortgage, to put a little away? I love metrics. What can be measured can be managed, etc. etc.
Heh.
In a small way I've been aiding Mark as he's developed these ideas for the last three years. Any long-time reader of my blog knows I'm a systems geek. I coined the phrase 4GM, comparing new media models to asymmetrical warfare. Wrote about Netflix taking over TV back in 2007 or so. I'm fascinated by the way older content distributors and providers continually confuse the distribution system with the content -- hell, the WGA has chalked up some truly epic bungles with that mindset.
The only thing that's kept me from larger experimentation with alternate medium delivery is that, ironically, I'm running a TV show. Granted, it's one of the only independently produced TV shows in the US, but it's still distributed straight into your cable-box old-school style.
So, instead, I've been kibitzing Mark during three years of shared lunches. Mark had his own reasons for getting into digital. My interest in a new comics model came out of my work on trying to figure out new TV distribution models. Looking at other mediums, I kept hearing about how digitally distributed, serialized comics on the web wouldn't work ...
... and I kept looking at Penny Arcade and PvP and my personal favorite, Something Positive, and seeing independent humans making a living. Better than a living, in some cases.
"But John," I'd hear, "those are three, maybe four panel gag comics made for niche audiences, which only support individual creators, not companies."*
Yes, they are. They are serialized narratives combining writing and pictures which allow their creators to make a living telling stories. Which just happen to be digitally delivered.
If one man can kill a bear, any man can kill a bear, so to speak. I have to admit, Mark's got a multi-pronged business and artistic approach to this new model. I'm still humping the same idea I've been obsessed with for years -- the democratization of the creative industry.**
Now, of course, indie comics take years to build up an audience. And it's grueling work, with a high risk of failure. Sure. That's called capitalism, and it's awesome, and please show me the document guaranteeing your mass-market comic won't also flame-out no matter how much promotion it gets.
But although the webcomics gave us the first plausible premise (and now you should be reading John Robb's work on open-source warfare), Mark wanted to go even further. What were the artistic merits of moving to digital as a delivery system?
Gutting the cost of entry allowed for more artistic experimentation and variety, of course. But he's been doing this for 25+ years, and he's a shitload more ambitious than I am. That's when he found Balak, and we began to trade this graphic back and forth obsessively:
about DIGITAL COMICS by ~Balak01 on deviantART
This work began to nail down some of the rules of digital comics. Mark was the one who actually quantified most of these over the course of endless emails -- I'm just good at pithy summaries.
1.) Like paper comics, the reader should control the pace of the information in digital comics.
2.) Using layers, the creator can pull focus and create additional dimensions of storytelling, including time and subjective perception.
Motion Comics, those filthy bastards, fell into the trap of mistaking medium for content. The digital screen is made for TV and movies. Therefore, comics on a digital screen should look like TV and movies. Add animation and voices!
Hence, monstrous hybrid.
If, instead, you just treat the screen as an odd-shaped page which can be instantly updated and is conveniently in almost every home and office on earth, you get a much more accurate idea of how to proceed.
Of course, none of this is revolutionary -- I'm just tracking how we hacked away at it, amateurishly and arduously, over three years. Along the way, the Kindle started hitting critical mass, and we tore that model apart. Despite there being some comic successes on the Kindle -- manga in particular transferred well -- formatting issues prevented comic artists from taking full potential of that distribution channel. Of course, now that the new Kindle Fire is moving them over to an HTML-based publishing model, things should get much easier. Pablo Defindini has done outstanding work demonstrating how comics might use responsive design on the new readers.
But the Kindle lesson, in the rise of the Kindle-only million-seller author, was a valuable one: you don't have to be famous to make a living telling stories. You just have to be famous enough, with a devoted enough following.
Then the iPad hit. Comixology did a great job of getting out front on the tablet comics market. But they were forced to figure out a way to convert pages laid out for a larger space down to that seven-odd inch screen. That led to "guided panel view" which was pretty spiffy. However, in TV and movies, we call that "pan and scan", and no one's fond of it. Because it's not how the writer and artist meant for you to experience the story.
This tied in to another discussion we were having, summarized by Mark in an email:
3.) "We live in a wide-screen world. Use it."
Most long-form story-telling comics on the web were essentially back-door physical world comics. The Blind Ferret guys (very smart humans), Warren Ellis' Freak Angels, all of them were laid out for easy reproduction in a classically formatted portrait alignment hard-copy publication. They used the screen to distribute, but they did not use the canvas of the screen. (This is all a pretentious way of complaining about scrolling down when reading each page of Freak Angels).
And sure, you want to be able to publish that hard-copy some day. But again, that weird-sized widescreen potential comics page is in almost every house and office in the Western World. There's no inherent advantage to portrait view. Shouldn't the more widely distributed canvas have the artistic advantage?
So we experimented with resolutions and orientations. Friends of mine, Geoff Thorne and Todd Harris, developed some sample art, 8 pages of a comic with chuffah dialogue, to lock down landscape presentation, art resolution, a bunch of the artist-y numbers. Web designer Gary Henderson developed our first story software models, trying to incorporate additional materials such as scripts and layouts into the primary presentation. At the same time Mark chatted with artist Jeremy Rock, who was experimenting with how to create image flow on landscape pages which then seamlessly joined into readable portrait pages for the hard-copy phase of the comic's life. While I screwed around with e-readers and grind-it-out bullshit, Mark had Jeremy re-draw one of his BOOM! stories, "Luther", experimenting with the ideas of information flow (the staggered captions, etc.) We then plugged it into the reader, and bob's your uncle, a creatively satisfying longform story made for the screen. Not the first, not the best, but a reproducible model, done as a layered pdf. (None of this was rocket science, but it was ... fiddly.)
About this time, Joe Quesada at Marvel decided to drive the company much more aggressively into digital comics, and Mark began working with those lads. Mark changed the way he developed and wrote comics to take advantage of the new style. Momentum shifted, and now you have the the great -- and I mean goddam GREAT -- Infinite Comics experiment at Marvel.
Meanwhile, I was screwing with distribution, trying to live up to one of my pet theories about media:
4.) Information should be dumb.
By dumb I mean "as platform independent as possible." Your comic should work well in a pdf reader on a tablet or laptop or desktop computer, on a website, in an app. Your workflow should allow you to easily slot your comic into as many different platforms as seamlessly as possible. As cool as that Infinite Comic Nova comic is, there's nothing in there you can't do with a bone-dumb pdf- reader. It's all about execution. A reconception of how you can tell stories graphically now that you can experiment with layers and time.
Also, there should be different ways to make a living at this -- you shouldn't have to be waiting around, gambling on prestige print collection, before you can make a living telling your story. That's the stuff we're still working at now, and will be the subject of future posts and some of Mark's future announcements.
So that's the rough version of how we got here. Mark's the one driving this, with the able Lori Matsumoto handling the technical stuff, while I'll continue to fiddle over here in the corner. We'll be referencing a lot of very smart humans who've been working on (and succeeding at) this for much longer than we've been playing at it. Some of this is going to work, some of it is going to fail miserably, but we'll show you all the spinning gears as we go.
Mark's been gracious enough to include one of my new webcomics on his site when it launches. Mine will be nowhere near as artistically mature as his work. It'll be a comic, written and formatted for widescreen, serialized for online delivery, but not as aggressive in playing with narrative flow. Frankly, I don't have the chops for what Mark's doing. But it'll be fun as hell. I hope we manage to work out enough of the kinks to help you make your comic someday, tell your story.
*New rule -- if your own model is based on selling books to an audience which numbers less than one-tench of Wil Wheaton's Twitter followers, you do not get to call anybody else "niche."
** I was a stand-up comic, the ultimate freelancer, hopping from club to club, booking my own gigs. That experience burned freelancer instinct into my DNA: how many gigs in how many weeks to make my nut? To pay the mortgage, to put a little away? I love metrics. What can be measured can be managed, etc. etc.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Released Today 2/03/10
By M A N @roquesdoodle
Warning: Content heavy post ahead.
If you're near a comic shop and are looking for some entertaining reading, I have two books being released today. First is 28 Days Later #6, the first issue of a new story arc. This is an original ongoing series about the film's character Selena and her quest to return to London through a wholly infected Great Britain. If you dig the movie, you should like the comic. Oh, and the first story arc will be collected into a gorgeous hardcover edition very soon.
The second book I have coming out today is DINGO #3. This is the 4 issue comic adaptation of my novel of the same name, so if you've read the online book, you know what's in store. For those that haven't read the novel yet (and why haven't you? it's free for cryin' out loud), the story, at it's most basic level, is about a man trying to find a stolen family heirloom. There's family dysfunction, a crazy ex-wife, tastes of magic and the supernatural, and a dog. A honkin' big-ass dog. Below the jump (if I got my HTML right, that is) you'll find a five-page preview for issue #1 that should give you a good idea of the story's flavor.
And speaking of flavorful stories, friend and amazing composer Cameron Dean put together a wonderful little trailer for my book Hexed which I thought would be fun to share with all of you (hi-res version here). Enjoy.
Monday, January 25, 2010
A Reintroduction
by M A N @roquesdoodle
Since I've been re-posting Guitar Fridays and plan to post more on writer-related topics, I thought a reintroduction was in order (also, John has been drilling it into my head that I need to get over my discomfort and just submit to shamelessly promoting myself on this site). My name is Michael Alan Nelson and I've been a professional comics writer for almost five years now.
For those of you who have been reading KFM since the beginning, you may remember John talking about my online novel titled DINGO. I've written a few things since then, the most popular titles being Zombie Tales (of which John is also a contributor), Cthulhu Tales, Fall of Cthulhu (the longest running ever BOOM! Studios series), and Hexed (the first comic ever available for phones with the Google Android OS). Currently, I'm writing the ongoing series 28 Days Later as well as adapting DINGO as a comic (issue #2 of 4 just came out last week).
While John keeps you updated on Leverage goodness, popular geek culture, and the finer points of professional writing, I'll be posting about the writing process from the shallow-end of the pool.
Up next: challenges of adapting a full-length novel into a four issue comic mini-series.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Waid Wednesdays #19: Covers, A Basic Primer
“Artist, please draw more attention to the severed head.”
Probably my favorite part of the editorial job--not co-plotting with writers, not copyediting scripts, not having the interns Google me all day--is working out covers. Part of that is because I’m a particularly visually minded editor, but mostly it’s because I still believe the cover is a key sales tool and sets the readers’ expectations for what’s actually inside the book in a way that nothing else can.
There was a time when the cover’s job was more important than it is today--back when all comics were basically an inexpensive impulse purchase from newsstands and from spinner racks, before fans began pre-ordering their comic books months in advance. Yes, most shops have new comics shelved so you can see the entire cover at once, which is a step up from newsstand displays that, at best, showed only the top third, but that doesn’t make cover art three times as important as it was--in the 21st century, most buyers have already committed to buying the newest issue of AVENGERS (or whatever) before they even walk into the store, regardless of what’s on the cover.
(And if you’ve ever wondered why so many modern covers are pin-up shots of characters rather than story-oriented illustrations, the answer’s generally twofold: pin-ups can be stockpiled in advance, and they can be repurposed for t-shirts and other merchandise at far less a cost than original material.)
That said--and feel free to call me Mr. Old-School--I still believe the cover’s primary job is to catch and hold the reader’s eye on the off-chance someone might actually be on the fence about picking it up. The cover’s not there to be a showcase for the artist, not to be lush or ornate just to show off, but to catch and hold attention amidst a sea of Wolverine comics.
The cover’s secondary job is to, with its frozen-moment single illustration, convey an idea. Extra points if the image makes me laugh out loud (like Nate Watson’s, shown above, even before I asked him to make the severed head bigger to help underscore the balance of comedy and horror of SCREAM QUEEN, about a serial killer who stalks a high school while dressed as its mascot).
When I commission a cover, I first ask for a couple of sketches--not because I feel the need to suggest a million “improvements,” but because I don’t want an artist to waste his time on anything that’s too close to a piece we’ve already done or that’s already in the works. Clever ideas outrank pin-ups, at least for me. A composition that tells me that the artist has a sense of design and isn’t just doodling kewl art onto the paper is critical. And (again, pointing to Nate Watson’s sketch here) the cover has to capture the feel of the series for new readers. Once the sketch has been approved, the artist turns it into a finished piece, remembering at all times (because I am a tyrant about them) my essential rules:
1. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HATE ILLUSTRATIONS THAT OBSCURE THE LOGO (a.k.a. the title of the magazine). You can get away with that more easily if, like Superman’s or Playboy’s, your logo is already instantly recognizable to a mass audience. “Cthulhu Tales” is not that logo. (A great logo is in and of itself a thing of beauty. And like most works of art, I can’t produce one myself but I know a good one when I see it. One of the all-time best logo designers is the multiple-award-winning letterer Todd Klein (Sandman, Swamp Thing), who regularly runs in-depth studies on what makes logo designs work or not work. I implore you to go visit his site to read the analysis of someone exponentially more qualified than I am to explain the do’s and don’ts.
2. LOGOS SHOULD BE IN ONE SINGLE COLOR THAT’S COMPLEMENTARY TO THE COLOR OF THE MAIN ILLUSTRATION. Sub-rule: Any drop-shadow behind the logo, conversely, should be in a contrasting color. That would seem to be common sense, but you’d be aghast at how often it’s ignored.
3. LEAVE ROOM NOT ONLY FOR THE LOGO BUT FOR THE "TRADE DRESS," a.k.a. the company insignia, the issue number and month, and (God help us all) that dreaded barcode that began destroying American magazine covers before you were born and that I dream every day to someday see banished--but which, for now, remains a necessary, stinking, zebra-striped evil and I’m off-topic, aren’t I? Sorry. It’s just that, to this day, I still remember the very first comic I ever bought that had a barcode on it--Daredevil 130--and I’m still traumatized to this day. I thought it was gaudy and distracting back then, and my opinion hasn’t changed in the intervening 33 (!) years. I’d love to see barcodes banished, but in an understandable but still vomitous victory of commerce over art, most comics distributors insist that they be on the front cover or else they won’t handle your book. The advantage it gives them in computer inventory-management overrules the fact that it’s a nauseating blight. If you’re a big enough publisher, you can sneak a back-cover UPC every great once in a while, but since no advertiser is keen on having it interfere with back cover ads they’ve paid for, it’s generally not an option. Onward....
4. FLOP IT. Even if you think a cover sketch is a home run, and especially if you don’t, always turn it over and hold it up to the light so you can see what it looks like in mirror-image. A surprising number of times, it makes the mediocre good and the good better.
5. GIVE ME SOMETHING I CAN SEE FROM ACROSS THE ROOM. Bold colors. And/or white space. And/or stark illustrations. Simple is always, always better.
In the comments, if you please: your favorite comic or magazine covers.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
HEXED: The Paul Pope Cover
by M A N
I really don't like to pimp my own work here at KFM, but this is just too cool not to share. My 4 issue mini-series HEXED is going to be collected into a hardcover edition with the above image on the cover. An image by Paul Pope. Yes, THAT Paul Pope (click image to embiggen).
I've been doing my little geeky dance all morning over this.
If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, Myspace Comics has been posting the full issues on their site as well as making them available for download. For free. That way you can check it out first to see if it's something you want to buy (which it is). If your LCS doesn't carry it, head to the BOOM! website where you can order it online (along with other great comics written by John and Mark, including Mark's new series Irredeemable). You can catch the HEXED issues here:
Issue #1
Issue #2
Issue #3
Issue #4 (hits shelves on April 15th)
Also, I'll be in Seattle this weekend for the Emerald City Comicon. If you're there and want to stop by and say hi, you can find me at the BOOM! booth, #406.
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