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

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