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

Hatman & Indigo 48: Brawl

Voice Actor Profile: Steve Surine

Today, I'm taking a look at Steve Surine, affectionately refereed to sometimes as "The Third Twin".

Steve, like myself, began doing voices as a young child, with his adorable impressions of Gizmo, talking in silly voices, or doing various accents, mainly because his family thought it was hilarious. This naturally lead him to be involved in children s musicals at church, but due to his shyness, he was rarely given a speaking part.

But those musicals did help him break out of his "shyness shell" a bit and in High School he took a Drama Class, which helped to bust it fully.

Around the same time Steve started doing bigger parts in small drama's for the church youth group and he and I began writing a few plays together for our Creative Writing class.

Then after High School Steve, Andy and I did a few home videos where we basically just goofed off (you can see the fruits of those efforts in "Ode To Mother's Day" and the "Indiana Foster Trilogy"). Steve also had a few more prominant roles in adult Church Musicals while in college.

On 3twins.net, Steve voices: Glomo, Zapman, Regular Man, Gidju, and Bob Palindrome, just to name a few. One of my favorites to look out for in the coming months is the voice he does for a Japanese beetle named, Bishamon which will debut in Ion Bunny 5 early next year.

Well, that's all for now,
Remember to join me next time when I mirror my previous post, somewhat, with the voice actor profile of my twin, Andy.

Until then,
I'm Jason Kuder and you're reading my words!

Comics and Movies

In the next soon-to-be-released edition of KudeeCast, Jason makes a comment about how comic book movies are often frustrating because of the many ways they deviate from the original comics. I couldn't agree more.

Since its release in 2005, I have hesitated to watch the Fantastic Four film, partially because of this reason. The film's main villain is, of course, Victor von Doom, AKA: Dr. Doom - one of the most feared and powerful villains in the Marvel Universe. But rather than staying true to Doom's origin as a poor child from Latveria who grows in both knowledge, technology and mystical power to become the villain we all know today, the film depicts Doom essentially as an American billionaire (if it wasn't for the fact they say he's from Latveria, his accent and demeanor certainly wouldn't give it away) who comes to power in the same cosmic accident that creates the Fantastic Four.

Twists in the plot such as this always seem to anger the true comic fans. Whether it's something great like distorting Dr. Doom's origin, making Mary Jane Watson Peter Parker's High School crush or killing off Venom after 15 minutes of screen time, or whether it's something minor like making Tony Stark's butler Jarvis a computer or giving Wolverine a leather jumpsuit instead of his classic yellow spandex (okay, maybe those aren't minor).

While in some cases, I have to admit, the changes are not a big deal, and in fact, are (I hesitate to say) necessary for translating the story from the printed page to the silver screen, most of the time I'm still left asking, "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?" I mean, would it really be so bad to try and get the story right?

And I've barely even mentioned what is perhaps the biggest tragedy of them all - killing off the villain at the end of the film. This is fortunately one area where The Fantastic Four film didn't go wrong, but yet so many comic films do. One of the greatest joys of the comic book world is seeing the hero and the villain locked in a seemingly never ending battle. While at the end of the day we always want to see Peter Parker trump the Green Goblin, or Wolverine get the better of Sabertooth, or Batman send The Joker to Arkham Asylum for the umpteenth time - we DON'T want to see these bad guys put away forever. You have to admit, when Gobby comes back from the dead, you might be saying, "Oh no Peter, watch out," but there's at the very least a little piece inside that's excited because it means you get to see the conflict all over again.

In the movies, though, dead means dead, at least most of the time, so when we see the hero put the villain six feet under, we know they're not comming back, and we know that we're missing out on seeing another great battle between the two in a future film.

I write all this knowing it isn't going to change anything - and that as comic book movies that distort the comics continue to come out, I will still keep paying $8 a pop to see them on the big screen. But at the same time, I keep in the back of my mind the resolution that should Hatman & Indigo, or any other 3Twins story, ever make it big enough to get the green light for a film version, I will NOT let them turn Hatman's head into a Fedora, or change the animal parts of Indigo, and I will certainly not let them kill off Glomo, or The Evil Zap Man, or Super Cold Frozen Man, or any other villain that we didn't kill off in the comics!

Well, that's all, thanks for letting me rant.

-Steve

P.S. For more of Jason's take on this, be sure to watch the next installment of KudeeCast when it airs soon on 3Twins.net

What's Your Favorite Back to the Beginning Art?

The Back to the Beginning series consists of over 270 panels of art and over eleven covers. I have decided with each completed series of Hatman and Indigo Issues I will pick one panel and one cover that is my absolute favorite art within the running series. From these issues I pick Super Cold Frozen Man and Glomo seen in Back to the Beginning Part 2 page two panel one for its conveying two of our favorite super villains menacing acts and mischievous demeanor, And The cover from part 3 Hatman & Indigo's Excellent Adventure because it 's just Awesome!

Glomo and Zap Man

You might already know that I, Steve, am the voice of two-thirds of the Terrible Trio: Glomo and Zap Man. Lately I've noticed that the voices of these characters have evolved a bit and are starting to sound a bit more like each other, so I've been exploring past Hatman & Indigo issues to try and resolve the problem.

When we created Glomo the original idea was that he have a very proper British accent. And if you check out the original concepts of our villains on 3Twins Raw, you'll also see that he was originally going to have zebra stripes instead of cow spots. As you can imagine, his character was going to be quite a bit different. After seeing Chris Secondi's final draft of the character, I felt more of a raspy southern accent would fit Glomo better, and the rest is history.

The Evil Zap Man's voice had an interesting path as well. Again, if you check out the original concept drawings, Zap Man was going to be a giant, humanoid lightning bolt - basically a six foot zapling. We envisioned an electrified, throaty sounding voice for him. In fact, one of our ideas was for Jason and I to both record his lines in a similar voice and then lay the tracks over each other for an interesting, echoed effect.

Yet again, though, the final draft of the character was much different and a different voice was in order. I went with a higher pitched, evil sounding voice and made sure that every word Zap Man said was spoken totally over the top.

I thinking through the origin of these voices, I've reminded myself of just why I made them sound as they originally did. So next time you hear Zap Man and Glomo, expect much greater things!

2006 Remastered?

Last Summer we brought you a remastered version of "Hatman & Indigo: Origin parts 1 and 2". Where we brushed off the old script, edited it some, re-wrote it a bit and created a whole new layout to hopefully tell the story better. This in no way was a slam against Chris Secondi, the original artist. But more that we had grown in our skills as writers and we wanted to really portray the Origin of our heroes in a more complete way. Origin Remastered was well received and we all feel tells the story we originally tried to tell.

We recently decided that most of our early stories could really use the "Remastered" treatment. Again, this is in no way a slam to the original artists we just feel we can now do a better job telling the origins of our major villains.

One main reason why we have decided to do this is because that many people when they first come to 3Twins.net jump to the very first comic, which is understandable. However, it doesn't portray our current skill level. So, the goal is going to be, that once we have remastered all of our original stories we will put them on the comic page, in place of the originals. "But isn't that rewriting history?" you may ask. Well, we've thought of that as well, and on the start page of the new version we will have a link to the original version.

But one more problem arouse, if we are going to replace the original 2006 comics with new "Remastered' ones then our numbering will be off because Origin Remastered was issues 29 and 30 and that will make the amazing issue 50 that we're currently working on be only issue 48. So, We decided that both the Zapman and Super Cold Frozen Man stories could use a major revamp to the point of making them 3 issues long each! This will fix our numbering and help develop the origins of those characters even more.

-Jason

Story Creations

A lot of thought goes into writing a story for 3twins.net. Whether it’s an issue of Hatman & Indigo or an episode of one of our cartoons, it all has to start with an idea. Often times, we will come up with the silliest ideas, and try to form a story around that. Sometimes, the end result has little or nothing to do with the initial idea.

Take “Meet the Damsels” for example. We had discussed Blonde having a family, and we thought it would be funny if all the members of her family were named for their hair color. This concept led us to create Brunette, and Bruno as a funny paring, as well as the other family members.

This was back when we were using classic story concepts as a jumping point for our creativity (like "Freaky Friday" influenced "Heroic and Incredible"). I wanted to loosely parody Sherlock Holmes and write a mystery where Hatman & Indigo finally meet Blonde’s family, and then the dad (Grey) comes up missing. This was going to lead to the discovery of Bald, the black sheep of the family. We dropped the mystery idea and went with a more zany approach, that the family just didn’t like Bald. You can see how the story unfolded in last year’s issues of “Meet the Damsels”, or read more about the concept to story process in Jason’s earlier blog. ~Andy