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!

Voice Actor Profile: Tom Cox

Tom Cox is likely our most seasoned actor at 3twins.net. So, naturally I thought I'd start my new blog series devoted to the Voice Actors, with our "granite voiced" Narrator.

Tom has been involved in the Theatrical Arts since the young age of 12 when he joined the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre, although he told them he was 13 because that was the youngest they would allow.

Tom "hammed" it up at the Civic for several years until he went off to College at Olivet, where he joined the theater there.

After School, Tom took a short hiatus from the Kalamazoo area and moved to Florida for about a year and a half to do Dinner Theater. Until the late 1980's when he joined his father's side at the microphone back in Kalamazoo doing voice work for radio spots.

In the early to mid 1990's Tom took a bit of a break from acting to focus his live more on his sons, that is until around the time our paths crossed for the first time while both attending Lake Center Bible Church, where he put back on his dinner theater "hat" and entertained and ministered in the various productions there.

Although Tom had been a great proponent of 3twins from its inception, he didn't begin working with us from the start. But when we needed a "Joker-esque" actor to play the part of "The Evil Narrator" in Hatman & Indigo #24: Omniscient, Tom stepped up to the challenge and has been a regular since, later taking on the role of the Hat-Mo-GPS Unit in Issue 27 and ultimately taking his place as the life and breath of the Hatman Universe itself, the Narrator in Origin Remastered.

Tom can also currently be heard in the Christain Webtoon, "The Wartleys".

Join me next time when I give you a little peek into the acting history of yours truly.

-Jason

Superheroes

Fans,

Now that Hatman & Indigo plan on attending the Superhero convention. What do you think will happen?

The story is left open for your interpretation (until the sequential issues are released).

Will Hatman join the Galactic Superhero Force?

Will this be a trap by The Terrible Trio?

Will we meet new heroes or maybe even villains?

Share your thoughts... I always love hearing where our viewers think we are going with a story.

Thanks for your input,

Andy

Hatman & Indigo in HD!

Last week we released our first High Definition issue of Hatman & Indigo. We will continue to have standard definition versions available, for quicker load times, but from now on we will always offer HD versions of each comic.

Having the HD version of the comic not only allows the images to be cleaner on high resolution monitors and TVs, it also affords us the ability to easily convert the HD flash into BluRay and DVD options in the future.

We at 3twins.net, LLC are continuing to expand our horizons, and always looking to the next best thing we can offer to you, our fans. Not only will we continue to offer HD versions of Hatman & Indigo on 3twins.net, we are also looking into other mediums to broadcast our Heroic and Incredible friends.

Keep sending your feedback, we are always willing to rise to any challenge.

~Andy

Comic layouts

One of my many, many tasks at 3twins is doing the comic layouts. I am not the only one who does this, but part of being the "big cheese" is making sure things get done, and if everyone else is too busy to do something, then I take that "thing" on myself.

Now, I'm not complaining, I actually like doing this, although, it is quite creatively taxing. You see, we write Hatman & Indigo in a script format because we have actors who come in and read the lines. However, since it is a comic book it needs to be layed out as such after the actors have read their lines. I know this is different than say, Marvel Comics, does it. But they don't have actors record audio for the characters, do they?

Anyhow, I take the script and break it down into pages and panels with little descriptions of how I see the panels in my head. Sometimes the artists actually follow those, other times they use them as a guideline. I call this part the "Text Layout".

We have a nifty little program called "Comic Life" its only $30 for the delux version and I highly recommend it for anyone even remotely interested in creating their own comics (there is a version for Mac as well as Windows). It is an incredibly helpful tool for drafting what I call the "Panel Layout".

For the Panel Layout, I put the script with the completed Text Layout on one monitor and Comic Life on another monitor. (I also highly recommend multiple monitors for anyone who would like to work in any type of media, it makes life so much easier, but if you don't like that sort of thing, it's your call. :) ) I read through the "Text Layout" and either choose from the many template layouts that come with "Comic Life", or tweak my own to fit the script. Sometimes, I realize that something won't really work the way I had layed it out in the script, so I tweak it a little bit. After I get the Panel Layout finished, I send it onto the artist who does the really magical part, the art.

I have a lot of these to do, right now, so instead of working on them, I blogged about it. I guess, my stalling is pretty much done and I'd better get to it, huh?

-Jason

What's Your Thoughts?

The last several pages of "Hatman & Indigo: Back to the Beginning" went on line today. This issue ends with a cliffhanger. I don't want to spoil it for you, but I thought it may be nice to see what you, our viewers, think is going to happen next. Go ahead and watch the entire issue (it doesn't take that long), and then post your ideas on where you think the story is going.
We already have the rest of the story finished, so don't think your going to sway the issue. It would be nice to see how predictable (or not) our stories are.

Thanks for your feedback,

~Andy

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

The May 3rd Comicon

Yesterday (May 3rd 2009) Andy, Michael (both pictured left) and myself attended the Ash Comics show. As usual we had our comics and cartoons playing on a monitor for the attendants to watch.

This time, however, we were able to bring one of our new artists, Michael Lude, who has done some awesome work for us already (check out Hatman Clause pt 3 and Back to the Beginning for some of his art).

We all had a great time and we are getting ready for the next Ash Comics show, where Michael will be doing caricatures of the attendants!

-Jason

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

"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