Batman The Ride!

 Just going to be amazing...why? Because BATMAN!!!

 

Batman The Ride front seat POV and offride animation Six Flags Fiesta Texas new for 2015

				Batman The Ride front seat POV and offride animation Si...

Batman 75th

Greetings 3twins fans,

I believe Jason posted quite some time ago about how the 60s Batman TV show influenced young Andy and Jason to come up with Hatman & Indigo.  We would come home from school and watch re-runs of Adam West, as Batman, as he would save the day with the Boy Wonder.  This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Batman.  It's interesting to look back and see all the changes in the Batman stories, as well as the many mediums it has used.  Adam West's Batman from the 1960s was not the first televised serial, Batman has been on the small screen since the 1940s.

Along with live action television, Batman also has graced our tv sets with many animated incarnations including the Super-friends, Batman the animated series, Brave and the Bold, and the newest cartoon Beware the Batman, just to name a few.  I'm sure most of our readers are also familiar with the Silver Screen Batman films from the 90s and the more recent Dark Knight movies.

All that doesn't even touch the vast collection of comics featuring Batman. I love the darker Frank Miller Dark Knight comics, but also the lighter Batman '66 that is currently available online by Kevin Smith and Ralph Garman.  I urge you to look into an incarnation of the Bat that you are not familiar with, and soak up a bit of what the Dark Knight has to offer.

~Andy

Batman

You know you loved it when Tony Stark ended his press conference at the end of Iron Man with “I am Iron Man.” Just a simple one line wrap-up avoided confusion, potential lies, and concern over secret identities. I would like to be able to say “I am Batman.” I am not.

 

As a kid, Adam West was Bruce Wayne to me. I was born at the right (or wrong) time to accept Batman as a campy and fun superhero that took up the challenges of fighting campy super villains, getting in an impossible escape situation, managing to escape despite that fact, and proving weekly (same bat time) that good will always triumph over evil. I was at the right age to appreciate that lesson, and there will always be a part of me that wants it that way.

 

As an adult, I enjoyed the darker Dark Knight from Tim Burton’s vision to Frank Miller and beyond. That is the hero I would like to be as long as I could rise above the temptation to turn to crime. Sure it would be cool to have the arsenal of super powers others have (everyone wants to fly, right?), but isn’t it somehow much cooler to be able to hang with those elite heroes without any special abilities beyond those you have achieved through discipline alone?

 

Imagine your escape!

                                                                                                                        ~ Chuck

The Superhero Genre Has Come A Long Way

I’ve been re-watching the X-Men movies this week in anticipation of finally going to see X-Men: Day of Future Past. It’s hard to believe that 14 years have gone by since the original X-Men first hit theaters, and a lot has changed in the genre since then. Prior to X-Men, few superhero films experienced very much critical or box-office success. And especially thanks to the campiness of the Joel Schumacher Batman films, few thought that anyone would take superhero movies very seriously. And only the die-hard fans questioned 20^th Century Fox’s decision to tone-down some of the comic elements in X-Men, most notably forgoing colorful spandex suits in favor of black-leather costumes – a fact that Cyclops even jokes about just before the movie’s climax.

But I think X-Men’s attempt to appeal to a more mainstream audience ultimately succeeded and paved the way for a slew of superhero movies in the years to follow. And as the genre grew, it seems that the general public’s acceptance of all aspects of superheroes did as well. We now have two Spider-Man franchises where his blue and red suit is no issue at all. And the masses flocked to see The Avengers without batting an eye at watching a massive battle against an alien army. If only we hadn’t rolled our eyes to such things back in 2000!

But now that it’s acceptable for superheroes to exist on screen just as they do in the comics, isn’t it time that we saw Wolverine in his iconic yellow and blue (or brown and tan) costume? Oh wait – maybe that does pop up in X-Men: Day of Future Past! Don’t spoil it for me!

Until next time,

-Steve

The Beginning of My Love For Comics

If you’ve spent much time at all on 3twins.net then you know that our love of comics is evident in much of the work that we do. I personally grew up loving comic book characters, especially Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, but my experience with them was entirely through movies and cartoons. Even though I loved the stories, I never actually read the comics.

At least that was the case up until the summer of 1997. I was shopping with my brother and sisters, happened to see a four-pack of Spider-Man comics, and bought them on a whim. This was my very first comic book purchase! That four pack was known as the Revelations series, which was the conclusion to the Spider-Man Clone Saga – a story-arc that dominated the franchise from 1994-1996.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the Clone Saga is considered one of the lowest points in the history of the Spider-Man franchise. It was full of messy storytelling and plot-lines that angered hard-core fans and confused new readers by phasing out Peter Parker and establishing Ben Reilly as the new Spider-Man. Writer Bud Budiansky was tasked with bringing Peter Parker back and ending the saga, but it was no easy task because of all of the loose ends and other problems that had been created. Budiansky ended up soliciting ideas from the entire Marvel staff and Revelations was the final product of his efforts. The final comic in the series saw the death of Ben Reilly and end of the clone saga, the first appearance of Norman Osborne and the Green Goblin in 20 years, the disappearance of Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s baby, and Parker reestablished as Spider-Man.

I spent the rest of the weekend completely lost in those four issues. My love of Spider-man was officially solidified and my love of comics was born. I never did become a comic book collector, but to this day I still enjoy reading them and getting swept up in the images. And if you peruse some of the drawings I’ve done for 3Twins, especially in Hatman & Indigo, you might even see how the Revelations story-arc influenced my own artwork.

Until next time,

~Steve

Let The Short Halloween Begin!

Our latest Hatman audio comic, Hatman #49: The Short Halloween is on our Blip page and will soon be added to 3twins.net! Though The Short Halloween is one of our shortest comics ever, though, it is still a fun little ride. With a runtime of 1:49 who can't take almost 2 minutes to find out what's scaring Hatman this Halloween? Hint, the panel to the right has something to do with it!

This comic has been the absolute fastest production we have pulled off to date! With only a little more than 3 weeks from initial concept to published product I really have to applaud the 3twins team who worked on this! While this issue only featured a couple of our characters there was a total of 5 people included in its production! S. LaDon Ware had the hardest task of taking the simple premise I came up with and creating a comic with no script or layouts!

Originally my idea was to have the comic only be one page, but S. LaDon couldn't help but add to the tension of Hatman's short adventure. It is amazing that we were able to get the very busy Tom Cox in to record Narrator lines off the cuff. I had barely received the uncolored pages when Tom arrived. So, even though Andy credited me as the writer, S. LaDon Ware and Tom Cox also had a large part in making the final product what it is!

The coloring this time was very challenging for most of the panels. Figuring out how to show Hatman in the dark was a stroke of brilliance by S. LaDon Ware who helped guide me as I colored the pages to fit his vision. All in all I think this quick concept turned out to be an amazing little addition to the Hatman Universe.

The light hearted core of what makes up Hatman & Indigo Comics was truly captured and I think it is a fitting tone for the end of this volume of the over arching story. As I've mentioned before, issue #50 will bring about some lasting changes to the Hatman Universe, without giving anything away, that will include adding greater depth and expanding the world as a whole. In light of that, this tiny Halloween special will be a nice contrast to what follows!

Keep it real Hatmaniacs!

-Jason

The Short Halloween cover

Here is the finished cover for Hatman: The Short Halloween! This coloring is based off of the Trade Paperback version of Batman: The Long Halloween. There is also a full color version of the original cover and I will be making a full color version of this cover as well, but due to the short amount of time I have to color the whole comic, this one will be the official cover and the full color one will most likely appear later on as a variant cover. We have a lot of work to get done in the week and a half before Halloween, but I'm confident it will be completed by then!

-Jason

NEW Halloween Hatman Coming Soon!

So, when I told you about the next Hatman story being the revamped Zapman origin story; I didn't think we were doing a Halloween story this year. But, things have worked out that we will be able to squeeze in a one part Hatman Halloween story to hit blip.tv and 3twins.net by October 31st this year! I don't want to give anything away, but I have been reading Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale recently and let's just say they proved a bit of inspiration for our next Hatman Spooktacular! The parody cover for this story will be an homage to Batman:The Long Halloween (image right). As usual with our parody stories, the story will only be loosely based on the concept behind the original and this time the word loosely may even be too severe a word for how loose!

This issue will also mark our 49th Hatman comic and that last brand new story for a while as we backtrack and tighten up the Zapman and Super Cold Frozen Man origin stories, finally finish the Beakman/Superheroes story, and re-record the audio for all of our old issues and convert all back issues to our blip account.

As I've blogged about in the past, issue 50 is going to bring about some changes to the world of Hatman and we want to hit the ground running with the huge story arc we have planned for after that. In order to keep the high paced production that story arc will require, we need our blip account to make enough money so we can hire more help! So, you can do your part by simply watching our stuff on our blip.tv page!

Later, Hatmaniacs!
-Jason

My thoughts behind "Revenge: part 1"

So, before I start out, I would like to make sure that anyone reading this has watched our newest audio comic, Hatman & Indigo 44: The Revenge of The Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man. So, if you haven't please click the link pasted over the title of the issue and come back here afterward.

Okay, I'm now going to assume that anyone reading this has watched it, if not SPOILER ALERT!!!

Several ideas went into what eventually became "Revenge: part 1." We had discussed the idea of having an evil Hatman doppelganger show up and possibly call him "ManHat." I personally wasn't opposed to this idea, but I did think that if we were to have a villain named ManHat, he should be in the same vein as Batman's The Man Bat and Spider-Man's Man-Spider, essentially more hat than man. Being the non-artist that I am, I drew up the image attached to this post (top right) to help explain my idea of what I thought he should look like.

We couldn't agree where to put him or what his origin would be, but we all liked the idea. Andy was the one who came up with the idea that Pumpkin Man's revenge could be a new villain, instead of just another story where Pumpkin Man came back. We all thought that was pretty original. It wasn't until I was watching an episode of Spectacular Spider-Man with my daughter that I got the idea for the story. The episode was one where Spider-Man got the venom symbiote (I'm sure we're all familiar with that, it was shoved into the Spider-Man 3 movie). I thought to myself, "Since the symbiote took on the powers and characteristics of Spider-Man and amplified them, what would that look like if it happened to Hatman?" Hatman's primary ability is that he can pull anything he wants out of his hat/head, so I thought that maybe it would be that he would have arms that came out of his hat and did this, instead of him having to reach in with his own arms. Also, to set him apart visually, I thought it would be neat if he were a darker gray and had an orange tie, cape and hat ribbon/mouth. To see if this would look good, I took an image of Hatman that Steve had drawn for Hatman: issue 28 and recolored it (pictured to the right).

Then I thought that we could alter the evil doppelganger idea into this "Venom" parody idea and show Hatman get mean. Granted it goes by fairly fast in the comic, but I had another idea that I'd been itching to use for years and I knew it would work out, even though Andy and Steve didn't have much confidence in it. But for that, you'll have to wait 2 weeks until Revenge Part 2 goes online (Andy says he's confident he can get it online October 16th)!

Most of the time when we write Hatman scripts we will write the entire story all in one setting, but sometimes, we will start one part and then either not be sure exactly what to have happen, or be so creatively drained that we have to take a break. The former was the case with this story. I wrote part 1 of "Revenge" and didn't exactly know what I was going to do, I had an idea, but it wasn't enough to build a full story on. So, Part 1 actually sat on its own for about 6 months.

Next week we change gears for a little bit because 10/6 is Mad Hatter day, so we will be featuring the Mad Hatter!

Jason