Anticipation of Comic-con

This Sunday (May 3rd, 2009) Jason, Michael and I will be hosting a booth at the Indianapolis Comic Convention. This will be our fourth time at the Indy comic-con, but I still get anxious.

Promoting something that is purely digital, to the physical world, can be complicated. We usually hook up a laptop to a monitor and speakers, and broadcast comics and cartoons from the booth. Our main purpose is to encourage visitors to our booth to check out the site, and (hopefully) become returning fans.

With each visit to comic-con, our 'brand' becomes more recognizable, but I hope we can continue to stick out, and be memorable. In the past we have given away CD's containing downloads from our site, raffled off posters, and gave out magnets and cards. This year we're trying some different things... "what?" you may ask, "come and see for yourself" is all I can say ;)

Hope to see you there,

~Andy

My first script

As soon as Andy, Jason and I decided to produce Hatman & Indigo on 3Twins.net we started to crank out scripts. Actually, I should say that Andy and Jason started to crank out scripts. For some reason I hesitated to write any because I didn't feel like I had a good feel for the characters. Eventually, though, things began to click.

At the time I was working in a small art gallery and we were never very busy so I had lots of time to sit and think. I was going through some of the Hatman & Indigo scripts that Jason and Andy had already written and was thinking about possible story ideas.

If you watch our first few stories you'll notice that we often played off the idea that Hatman would accidentally wish for something by saying "I wish" as a figure of speech, only to have to beg Leppy to give him his second wish back. With this in mind I wondered what would happen if Hatman were to flippantly say, "I wish I'd never been born?"

And so this became the basis for my first Hatman & Indigo script, issues 15-17, It's NOT Such a Wonderful Life. The plot was obviously a loose parody of the Jimmy Stewart film It's a Wonderful Life - in fact, we parodied the movie's box-cover for the second part of the comic.

In my first draft of the issue, Hatman wished himself out of existence and then the rest of the story followed Indigo's adventure to find a way to get him back. Indigo quickly realized his only chance was to find another leprechaun so he could make a wish and restore his friend. Fortunately at the ideal moment, a wadded up flyer for a leprechaun convention flew by, letting Indigo know where he could find a leprechaun. He kidnapped an elderly leprechaun, forced him to grant him a wish, and soon brought our hero Hatman back safe and sound.

The story was too short, though, so I beefed it up a bit by adding the scenes about Hatman's adventure as a phantom, witnessing what life was like without him ever having been born. This provided a chance to flesh out Leppy's character a bit since he was assigned to keep an eye on Hatman. What I think is interesting about this story is that it was our first, and so far only, Hatman & Indigo story with a purely situational villain.

It also gave us the character Scotty. Originally Scotty was supposed to be an elderly, Irish Leprechaun. But Andy and Jason were doing a read-through of the script and when Andy read these lines, he ended up using a Scottish accent. The voice sounded so hilarious that we decided to make the the character a Scottish Leprechaun. From there we couldn't resist the urge to bring him back as a recurring character.

The story also was the first appearance of the Fairy Queen, Hatman's mom and dad, and one more character that we haven't seen again just yet, but I promise, we will soon!

-Steve

PART 2: Parody Covers

Previously, I briefly wrote about the process of choosing a cover to parody for a specific Hatman issue. I will go into more detail on that now.

Many times we have to really work on what covers would fit best with what stories. Granted, we could just arbitrarily pick something recognizable and go with that. However, I have tried to implement a few rules into our parody covers.

My first rule is that only characters that appear in that story can appear on the cover. For instance if its not a story featuring the Terrible Trio, you won't see Zapman on the cover. Now I say in the "story" meaning that if for instance the cover is for part 3 of a story and Leppy appeared in part 2 but isn't in part 3 its okay to have him on that cover. Because we look at each story as a whole and the parts just help break them up into manageable pieces.

My second rule is that it has to make sense somehow in relation to the source material we are parodying. Take "The Terrible Trio part 2" for example, we wanted to parody "The Avengers issue #4". It was an obvious choice to put Super Cold Frozen Man in the place of Captain America, because he has a shield (which was originally designed to feel some what like an icy version of Cap's shield). And then, because Indigo and Glomo can both fly we put them in the spots for Wasp and Iron Man, Indigo in the Wasp position because he has wings. Then looking at what was left, we decided since Hatman has a cape, he should be where Thor is and why not have him swinging a hammer as well. Finally, Zapman was put in the place of Giant Man.

My third rule is that any text that appears on the source material should be closely parodied if at all possible. Again, if we look at the above covers, you'll see "Captain America Lives Again!" and in the story previous to this, we had led our audience to believe that Hatman & Indigo had killed Super Cold Frozen Man, so we put "Super Cold Frozen Man Lives Again!" Also, a good reason this cover worked so well with this particular story was that the part 3 was the very first Ion Bunny so putting Ion Bunny in the box where Sub-Mariner is on the original was also a no brainer. Then we looked at the text for "Avengers" and decided to make ours say "Adventures" and we squeezed our Hatman & Indigo logo in after that.

I still have a lot to say about parody covers, so we'll continue this another time.

-Jason

Parody Covers

Many of our comics have parody covers (to understand what this is, just compare the images to the left and right). In fact, we actually have more parody covers than original covers. The pattern usually is that issue one of a multi-issue story is an original cover and the subsequent issues have parody covers. We have broken this pattern a couple of times, (technically only once on the one part Christmas Carol issue, but the following issues "Omniscient" weren't parody covers, however, the part 2 cover could arguably be a parody of the part 1 cover, and at this point your probably saying "who cares") but we try to have that be the pattern.

Anyhow, a lot of thought is put into the parody covers that we do. I spend a lot of time searching cover databases (coverbrowser is a great one) looking for covers to possibly parody. We are usually working about six months to a year ahead, so I am constantly jumping around the different stories and issues thinking of what would best portray the comic issue at the time. Some comics lend themselves to a specific cover naturally. Like "Back to the Beginning", as I mentioned in a previous post, the part 2 cover is going to be a parody of the "Back To The Future part 1" box cover (refer to that post for the reference image). However, some comics don't so easily lend themselves to a parody cover, so we have to put a little thought into it.

Our first few parody covers were specifically parodying "first" issues. Like Action Comics #1 (shown on the above left), which is the first appearance of Superman, Incredible Hulk #1 (you can guess who that featured) and so on. We still have a few "first" issues in mind for future covers, but we have expanded to include other interesting covers as well as ones you might recognize right off the bat and some that may be a little more obscure.

I will continue more on this topic later.

-Jason

Hatman & Indigo's Excellent Adventure!?

The first few pages of Hatman & Indigo: Back to the Beginning (part 1) went live on our site today. But, as Jason mentioned in an earlier blog it went through quite a large change from concept to final script.

As you can probably tell by the title, this story parodies Back to the Future. But originally I wrote it to be more of a parody of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

It opened with The Narrator giving us a tour of Hatman’s house, as Indigo wakes up. Indigo then sees Hatman & Indigo (from the immediate future) has a conversation with them, and they leave. The story unfolds similarly to what happens in part 1 of Back to the Beginning, so I won’t reveal much more. However it ended with the same scene it opened with only from the future Hatman & Indigo’s perspective of seeing Indigo that same morning (just like Bill and Ted). You can read more about how the script evolved into what it is today, by reading Jason’s earlier posts.

Enjoy!

~Andy

50 for the 50th - Some Tips

Back in 2005 when we first began the process of creating The Adventures of Hatman & Indigo as a comic, I don't think I would have guessed that four years later we'd have 35 issues on-line. But here we are with our 36th issue well on the way.

In a few months we should be ready to publish our 50th Hatman & Indigo comic, and to commemorate this milestone we're going to feature 50 covers for the issue - that's more than all of the covers and variant covers we have on the site right now combined! So understandably, we're looking for a little help from our fans. As mentioned in the last post, we would like people to submit covers to us, and if we like them, we'll use them as part of the 50 covers (read the last post for more details). But for anyone who's never drawn a comic cover before, I'm sure there are a lot of questions about where to start and what it takes to make a good cover.

From the fall of 2006 through the end of 2008, I was the primary Hatman & Indigo artist. If you include Ion Bunny, I've actually drawn 24 comics for 3Twins.net, plus 11 original covers, 9 parody covers, and one variant cover. I'll be the first to admit that the work being done by our new artists is leaps and bounds beyond what I did for 3Twins, but if you look at my earlier work and compare it to my later stuff I think you'll agree that I've come a long away. So I think I can offer some tips for our would-be cover artists.

1) Make it dramatic: Covers are intended to be eye-catching and draw the reader in, so you don't want to put your characters in hum-drum poses. Spice it up a bit with a nice action shot.

2) Fill the frame: In some of my earlier covers I made the mistake of drawing the characters too small and filling a lot of the space with background images. Again, you want the cover to be catchy, so let your characters dominate the page, but...

3) Keep it simple: You don't want there to be too much going on or the drawing will become too cluttered. Pick a focal point and make sure everything else in the drawing is used to enhance that point. If it doesn't add to the piece, take it away!

4) Experiment: If you don't know where to start, just draw the first thing that comes to mind, no matter how weird it seems. My favorite original cover was the cover I did for issue #29 Origin: Remastered. The image is of Hatman wearing a Superman-esque costume, flying over the city. The idea came to me and initially I didn't want to draw it because Hatman can't fly! But I went with it and it worked. The lesson - just draw. It might end up great, it might be terrible, but you'll never really know until you try.

-Steve

Issue 50 cover contest

Depending on exactly how our release schedule works out, our 50th issue of Hatman & Indigo is scheduled to come out this winter (probably somewhere between November and January).

We would like to have 50 unique covers for this, these would be randomly generated at a 2% chance each. Several of our artists from issues past, present and future are working on some, but I'd like to present the option for you, the fans, to submit something as well.

Depending on how many covers we get from our artists will depend on how many of your entries we can display. You will be notified if you get in and we will be looking for things that stand out.

The rules are as follows:

1. The cover must have something to do with Hatman comics

2. No, profanity or vulgarities will be accepted (just remember that we try to keep our website acceptable for families, so aim for a G or PG rating, however, mild cartoon violence akin to what has already appeared in Hatman will be considered)

3. No parody covers will be accepted (we want these to be original)

4. Entries are due by 11:59pm eastern time October 31st 2009 (you may email entries to board@3twins.net or if you wish to use snail mail, please email us for mailing information. Snail mail entries must be postmarked by no later than October 31st 2009)

5. Providing rules 1-4 are followed, feel free to express yourself and be creative, we will not divulge the plot of issue 50 (which, if we did would blow your mind) so any and/or all of our characters are free game. (All Hatman & Indigo character's likenesses and logos are trademarks and copyrights of 3twins.net, LLC, and may only be used for the purpose of this contest.)

6. All submissions become the property of 3twins.net, LLC, however the artist will be credited.

Shortly after the issue is released we will provide a gallery page displaying the 50 different covers.

Any questions can be posted as comments to this blog or if you would rather you can email board@3twins.net.

"PART 2" Hatman goes Back To The Beginning!

This coming week will be the release of the first few pages of "Hatman & Indigo: Back To The Beginning". Which as I stated earlier is a loose parody on "Back To The Future", but what I had not mentioned was that it was a very long and arduous process arriving at the final script. Originally Andy had written a script titled "Time Portal" where Hatman and Indigo follow the Terrible Trio back in time to stop them from preventing his (Hatman's) creation. It was somewhat a loose parody of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (Andy can elaborate on it a little more). As we try to do with all of our scripts, we went into editing it for content and humor and I thought that it ended kind of too smoothly, so I added onto the end of it some more stuff and made it more like "Back To The Future" and suggested the title be changed to "Back to the Beginning" instead of "Time Portal". Andy and Steve liked that but thought it needed a bit more, so they each added some stuff to the story and then we went back to editing it and we all kept feeling that something was missing so we went into another round of edits and additions. The last draft of this story ended up being a parody of all three of the "Back To The Future" movies and even though it was a very exciting group of adventures, they didn't seem to really feel like one story. So, we shelved the thing for a few months and would just bring it up in discussions every once in a while. What we realized was that because we all loved "Back To The Future" so much when we were kids that we wanted to make sure we did it justice in our parody. So, I sat down and took some notes on what things we all agreed needed to happen in the story and then created an outline which I shared with Andy and Steve and after we were all in agreement, I began to write. I kid you not, one Sunday I sat at my computer and from scratch re-wrote "Back To The Beginning" in one long setting. It was as if my muse was with me that day and the words just flowed from my fingertips and aside from a few minor spelling and grammar edits we are going with the draft I wrote in that day. Even though I'm getting the writing credit on the cover, its really a 3Twins story that we all had a hand in. I hope you enjoy it over the next several weeks as it unfolds.

-Jason

Hatman goes Back To The Beginning!

I've been hard at work with one of our all star artists, Michael Lude, on the next exciting Hatman story, "Back To The Beginning". I don't want to give too much away; but, as you may be able to glean from the title, our characters travel back in time to revisit the events of the Origin of Hatman. This is a loose parody of "Back To The Future" (check out bttf.com its a really cool site devoted to everything "Back To The Future") and like my previous parody story, Hatman Clause, it is more a parody of the concept than a plot for plot parody. So, you'll notice some references to "Back To The Future", but it is also going to be a fresh story with its own twists and turns. A riveting story coupled with Michael's stellar art (you can view his most recent feats on Hatman Clause part 3) this is gearing up to be the best Hatman story yet! This will also be the debut of our first story to span 4 issues! We've got some great parody covers planned for parts 2-4 as well, including a fairly large group of variant covers for part 2 which will be direct parodies of the first "Back To The Future" movie box/poster (see image attached to this post) featuring pretty much all of the cast each on their own in the "Marty" pose. (To get an idea of what I mean by "variant" covers, visit Hatman Clause part 2 and once the comic loads refresh it several times to see the cover change, hint there are 3 versions of that cover). As we start to post parts of this story on 3twins.net I will continue to give updates.

-Jason

Midieville & Star Fetched Update

Even though Star Fetched and Midieville have taken a hiatus, that doesn't mean they're gone for good...

Midieville is getting completely revamped. We will have fresh new landscapes, and a new look to the characters. As you may have guessed this is a long process. We want to bring Midieville up to the level of Star Fetched, graphically. Because of these changes, we will also be retelling the recent story, from a slightly different perspective.

As for Star Fetched: episode 2 is under production. We ran into some snags with the production of episode 1, and are trying to avoid those with the second installment. Things to look forward to: More information about the green alien and the space battle from the first scene of episode 1. Also now that our "heroes" are stuck on an asteroid, what's life on the Pascal going to be like for our five crewmen?

I will post production updates on a regular basis.

~Andy

3Twins: Behind the Scenes

Hello and welcome to the new blog for 3Twins.net. This will be a place where the 3Twins (Andy, Jason and Steve) can post our thoughts about what we do to give our viewers an inside look at how we create our material.

We hope you enjoy!