Shadows in the Forest

Within the deep dense forest of the Western Woodlands of Mystery strange creatures dwell.  Creatures without substance or form.  Shadow Folk, the essence of evil.  They lurk wherever there is darkness and feed on lost things and wandering travelers.

The elves live near the densest part of the Woodlands and stories have cropped up of elves disappearing if they leave the forest path.  It is not just a tale to scare little children, the Shadow Folk are taking elves from the darkest parts of the forest.

It is said that the Shadow Folk arrived in Midieville soon after the battle against the trees and bears.  Some think that the they are actually the disembodied spirits of the trees themselves, wandering with only the lust of evil to guide them.  They are tricky creatures who make subtle noises just off the paths into the shadows.  The noises entice a curious elf to look for the source, and that's when the shadow folk strike.  As soon as no light is directly cast on their victims, they flood in and bathe the area with darkness, then the elf is no more.

So, be careful if you venture into the Woodlands of Mystery.  Stay on the paths, don't wander out of the sunshine, and don't investigate any curious noises.  If you do, you may never be heard from again.

~Marvin

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

Zombies in Hatman?

So, now that all 3 parts of "Revenge" have gone online, I can freely discuss some of my thoughts about this story. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I wrote "Revenge" in more than one setting. I had the idea for the Venom parody story and Man-Hat creation from the start but didn't know what to do after that, so it sat incomplete for a while. Then I thought about what if we could do something akin to zombies, but in the "family friendly" 3twins way. And I came up with the idea of the Man-Hat shooting mind control candy out into the city on Halloween night that would turn the trick-or-treating kids into zombies.

I'm actually not 100% happy with my final version of the script for this because I think the zombie aspect kind of didn't reach its full potential. Part of it might be that I'm not the biggest fan of zombie movies, so I didn't want to dwell on it much in the writing and the other part, may have just been lazy writing. Ultimately, I think that I wanted to present the Cider-Man character so much that I shoved the story into that box and didn't let it breathe.

I think maybe what would have been the best for this story as a whole, in retrospect, would have been to prolong the dark Hatman stuff and explore that in a more Hatman centric way, more truly like the Black Spider-Man story was. But I think originally my fear was that we would be called to the floor too much for copying that story. One of the things I strive for is to attain originality in our parodies, to pay more homage than just hash out the same thing. That said, I would like to have explored a darker Hatman or Hatman as the villain more and maybe concluded the whole story with the creation of the Man-Hat and left him as a character looming in the night until next year Halloween.

I know I'm being kind of hard on myself about this as the writer, but we don't have many viewers, so we don't get any criticism, and therefore, we should examine our stuff more critically, I guess. All in all, I am happy with the finished product. I feel fortunate that we were able to get in on the ground floor of Tillian Wagner as a comic book artist. Her stuff definitely has a different feel and it has really grown into it's own style, especially with the upcoming comic she's working on for us currently. It's neat to be able to see her art grow, and I hope those of you out there that do follow our stuff will enjoy it as well.

Jason

The Spectacular Cider-Man?

So, if you've watched part 2 of "Revenge of the Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man" you know that a new superhero was introduced, The Spectacular Cider-Man. This is the character I spoke of as the idea that Steve and Andy didn't think would work. He is only briefly in part 2 but part 3 will feature him much more prominently. I think Tom Cox did an excellent job with the Russian accent as well as the characterization. In case you're concerned that we're creating far too many superheroes, I ask you to save that critique until after viewing the final part of this story next week.

As you may be able to guess, the image to the right is the cover for part 3 of this story. It is a parody of Web of Spider-Man #1 and the character of Cider-Man is obviously a loose parody of Spider-Man. However, the vaguely similar costume and similar sounding name is where the correlation between the two characters ends. I assure you we are not ripping off Spider-Man in any way.

I really can't wait until next week when part 3 goes online. I hope you all enjoy Cider-Man and I really look forward to any comments on him after it goes online!

On another note, I'm currently working on an outline for the next installment of the Pumpkin Head/Hatman Halloween saga that will be titled "Son of the Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man." It is still in the early stages, but what I can tell you is that it will have something to do with the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and of course, the Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man character. How much, I can't say. Besides, this story had "something" to do with the Pumpkin Head character, even though it was brief!

Until then... Bwa ha ha ha ha ha!

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

Hatman & Indigo 44! What happened to issues 42 and 43?

Hatmaniacs,

After our long hiatus we finally have a new Hatman & Indigo issue ready for your viewing pleasure. However you may notice there are two issues missing in the story sequence. Who is Dr. Beakman? What happened to Indigo? Why didn't they finish this story? All these questions (and more) will, eventually be answered. It is best to enter into this newest issue as if issues 40 and 41 never happened.

Enjoy!

-Andy

Pumpkin Man Sub-Saga Recap: Part 2

The Return of The Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man was the second installment in our Pumpkin Man Sub-Saga (which from here out I will refer to simply as "Return". This story featured the return of not only the Pumpkin Man, but a throw away joke character from Issue 3, The Badger. The Badger was intended to be an obvious parody of Wolverine and we loved him so much that we decided to bring him back as a reoccurring character. Since we had previously established that our heroes should keep a good distance from Regular Man, this story gave us a good opportunity to feature The Badger and take a look into his origin.

Anyone who saw The Hatman Clause Part 3 will notice that the voice and characterization of The Badger has changed since this comic. In that story we chose to ignore it, but I will state now that the official cannon explanation is that soon after the events of "Return" The Badger reclaimed his former life and over time his previous personality returned as well. The forgetful Badger, while heroic, had been a broken man, afraid of the unknown and chose his words carefully. As his memory returned, so did his confidence, and the wavering higher pitched voice full of fear was replaced with his natural bass tone. (That being said, the truth is, we just got a different voice actor and he decided to take the character in a different place. We were intrigued with this new take on the character and changed him slightly to reflect this.)

Back to the recap of "Return." The story opens sometime after the events of the first Pumpkin story. Regular Man and Farmer Bill (quickly joined by The Badger) barricade the door of Farmer Bill's barn because it houses the infamous pumpkin. Keeping him locked away from the farmer should ensure that the pumpkin will not regain his full power. Farmer Bill grows forgetful and confused, so the Badger and Regular Man encourage him to go inside while they finish up. A newscast explains that the Terrible Trio are engaged in some sort of crime, so Regular Man and The Badger decide to take care of it. Before they can, the barn bursts open knocking Regular Man unconscious. The Badger, weak minded at this point in his life, is drawn in by the power of the pumpkin. The effects wear off soon and The Badger leaves to get help. Farmer Bill hearing the commotion finds his son lying on the lawn and through suggestion of the Pumpkin, thinks the pumpkin power will give him the strength to save his son. He approaches the barn and becomes the fully formed Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man once again.

The Badger flees to Hatman & Indigo's to warn them of their returned villain but his forgetfulness strikes and he can't remember why he came. Indigo wishes that the Badger's memory problems would be over and we are treated to a flashback of The Badger's origin at the hands of some aliens. After the flashback, Pumpkin Man breaks in and kidnaps Indigo.

Happy to be excluded from a kidnapping this time, Blonde joins Hatman and The Badger to help defeat Pumpkin Man and free Indigo. Because the Pumpkin has telepathic power of suggestion over narrators, he can control Hatman and Indigo (who both filled in for the Narrator while on vacation in the previous Pumpkin story). We also learn that the Pumpkin not only has the power to levitate things but can control the growth of pumpkin vines as he captures all the heroes one by one, mummifying them with vines, with the exception of Regular Man whom he decides to ship away in a wooden crate. Blonde is left to face the orange menace alone, which she does heroically, by spraying him with a heavy dose of the farmer's pest poison. This causes him to melt into a pile of goo as the vines recede and our heroes are freed. Hatman frees Regular Man as the group discovers that the toxin did not defeat the pumpkin, but mutate him. He now no longer needs Farmer Bill as a host body (he's formed a body of vines and his gooey head resembles it's former shape) and Regular Man's power doesn't defeat him. The Badger does however destroy him with the help of Indigo creating the "field goal" our homage to the "fastball special" featured in X-Men comics when Colossus throws Wolverine. Hatman wishes the defeated goo to be trapped in an inescapable box and all is well.

As with the first installment, while I re-watched this story, I thought that it was a step up from the first. Steve's art had noticeably improved (with the exception of his take on Blonde for part 1) and the storytelling was tighter. The addition of a few more panels and some extra Narrator duologue would have helped, but all in all, it is entertaining. As with many of our stories, this could be a lot funnier. The funny is more in concept than in blatant jokes, and this is something we struggle with constantly, trying to find a good level of both action and comedy.

What will happen next? Well, you only have to wait a few more hours! Issue 44, part one of the third installment (confusing, I know) in the Pumpkin sub-saga will post at Midnight Eastern Time tonight!

Jason

Pumpkin Man Sub-Saga Recap: Part 1

Yesterday I touched on the history of our Pumpkin Man Halloween Special sub-saga. Before the new issue posts tomorrow, I'd like to recap the previous installments in this saga.

The first appearance of the infamous Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man was in Issue 9 (the cover says 5, because it was the 5th story and we were numbering them by story, not issues back then). This is one of the first stories Steve Surine drew for us. He actually worked on this story the same time he drew Ion Bunny issue 1. In writing this story, Andy decided to try something a little different, start with a flash back, and giving the other characters a chance to play "narrator." I personally love doing the voices of Farmer Bill (my impression of late character actor, Pat Buttram) and The Pumpkin (a generic gravely cockney voice) and this gave me a good chance to use them both a lot. I actually had the idea to use these two voices because of the character of King Stanely I voiced in our "Ode To Mother's Day" video we had made several years prior.

The story took place soon after the formation of the Terrible Trio and featured them prominently. After fighting over who should lead their bad guy gang, Super Cold Frozen Man used his ray gun on a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch in hopes to create a new villain to help him prove he should be in charge. This pumpkin grew into a giant jack-o-lantern as it lodged itself on the head of Farmer Bill (a previously unseen character in the Hatman Universe). The Pumpkin Head was imbued with telepathic and telekinetic powers but was symbiotically linked to the farmer, if the farmer could get him off his head, he would reduce to a normal pumpkin and be innocuous. After reading Super Cold Frozen Man's mind, the Pumpkin Head flew off to kidnap Blonde by levitating a normal pumpkin and riding it. He also telepathically convinced the Narrator that he should go on vacation. By the end of the story, Hatman, Indigo and Blonde were all tied up and the Pumpkin revealed that Super Cold Frozen Man was his "father." As the Terrible Trio gloated at their success, Farmer Bill's son, Billy Boy, walked in the barn (where our heroes were being kept). Startled, Super Cold Frozen Man shot Billy with the ray gun. The power of the ray gun aged Billy to a full grown man, gave him a green costume and the power of "regular." As Regular Man, Billy could negate Hatman's powers as well as those of anything that had indirectly come about as a result of Hatman. Thus Regular Man saved the Day by powering down the villains and rescuing his father and the heroes.

After re-watching it in preparation for this recap, I noticed that we really have come a long way. There should be a lot more told by the narrator(s) and the art, while good for Steve's first Hatman book, doesn't always tell the story properly. More panels could have helped greatly. The sound effects and editing (my job) felt forced and "acty" and the ending was abrupt.

Jason

Revenge of the Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man

So, in two short days Hatman will be back on 3twins.net! If you've followed our posts with any regularity, you are probably aware that the soon to post issue has been in the works for quite some time!

The image I'm posting (top right) is a sneak peak at the first page of this exciting Halloween special.

This issue was drawn by Scott Matteson, the same artist who drew Issue 32: Amazing Aquatic Kid. The colorist is Tilian Wagner who picked up the second and third installments of this story.

I really want to discuss how this story came about, but I can't go into too many details yet. However, I can discuss the title and our thought process for the Halloween specials.

Way back in 2004 when Andy and I were drafting ideas for what we thought then would be a Hatman & Indigo cartoon, we started thinking about possible characters and character names. Andy had thought of Super Cold Frozen Man thinking the long name thing was funny, we continued that with Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man. We really didn't have any idea what he would be beyond that. That is until Steve drew the first concept drawing (bottom right) and we had an idea that maybe the pumpkin was separate from the man. Andy wrote the script for the first story and we loved the character so much we decided that every year we would feature a continuation. A kid-friendly horror story, if you will. Back then, we came up with several titles for the "Pumpkin Man" sub-saga. To make this easier to read, I will now refer to "Pumpkin Man" as BGPHM. Some of the titles we came up with were: Return of The BGPHM, Revenge of The BGPHM, Son of The BGPHM and so on (that last one is a teaser for the next installment after Revenge).

The idea of the various titles is an homage to classic sequels like Son of the Fly, and the original Pink Panther series. Hopefully the stories will be entertaining enough that the long titles will remain funny and not become stale.

Tomorrow, I will blog a recap of the first 2 Halloween specials. But if you'd like to watch them here are the links to the part 1's: The Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man & Return of the Big Giant Pumpkin Headed Man

Jason

More news on some new stuff

I've been a fan of online TV and movie reviews for a while now, so I'm finally going to start doing a couple. To be a little different than the masses I've decided to focus not only on the content but also the boxes and special features as well. I personally own all of the available seasons of The Simpsons, Frasier, and Futurama, so I might start with doing episode by episode reviews of those in addition to some of my favorite movies. I'm going to attempt to be a kinder critic than most out there, talking about stuff I like, instead of stuff I don't.

I know these blogs keep saying "on the horizon" but I do have good news that the horizon is approaching fast! October first you can expect part one of our Halloween special (two years in the making!)

I can't wait for that one to come out! I was the script writer on it and I think it's one of my best scripts so far. Afterward, I'll be sure to do a post on how I came about it.

Jason

P.S. Chicaco Comicon was a bust this year due to illness, so sorry I don't have anything to report there.