Zapman Remasterd Line Art DONE!!!

Greetings 3twins fans,

Today I won't be talking about the game, but rather an old project that has seen a new step toward completion.  Zapman Remastered, all three parts, are completed in the pencil/ink stage!

S. LaDon Ware has been working on in-game art for our upcoming Of Mages & Pages game for the Nintendo Wii U, but prior to that, he was working on the Zapman Remastered line art in his spare time.  Just yesterday I received the last of those pages!  While I would love to devote the next couple weeks to coloring, recording and editing this story so we could release it on our site, we are just all too busy with the game.  However, I will also mention that work has continued on a "lost" story of Hatman, and our goal is that as soon as our game publishes next fall we will resume publishing comics on our site at a regular rate.  It is good that we will have about 7-10 issues backlogged by that time, so we can continue to work on more games and comics at the same time!

Next week, I should have something really big to show you all for the game, but for now, marvel at the beautiful handiwork of S. LaDon Ware!  I've chosen to share with you a panel from the first page of Zapman Remastered part 3. 

Why are Hatman and Indigo weaving through traffic in the Hatmobile?  Will they reach their destination in time?  Tune in this fall, same HAT time same HAT website!

-Jason

3twins.net Update!

Andy and I are both taking classes now, which has it's ups and downs. Some of the ups are that soon we will be officially learning how to do what we've been trying to do all along with 3twins.net. That is designing a good website! As some of you know, what we have online so far is entirely self-taught and created with less expensive products. Well, Andy and I are both planning on purchasing Adobe CS 5.5 Design Premium which should help give us the added tools to bring you a new and better 3twins.net. How long with this take before we have these programs and know how to use them? I'm honestly not sure. We both have been talking about it for a while now, and for the time being we are planning on it as soon as we get the funds.

This brings us to the downs of both of us taking classes, it eats up a great deal of our time. I've explained this briefly in blog posts before, but it is just one of those sacrifices we need to make, so that in the long run, 3twins.net can be better off. This means that the roll out of content is more than likely going to remain at the slower pace we've experienced for the past couple of years. We hope to bring at least two full stories this year, which will equate to six issues of Hatman & Indigo. This year, the plan is to bring you Remastered versions of the origin stories of Zapman, and Super Cold Frozen Man. We will also be reformatting old comics from their current .swf format to blip.tv files in an added hope to gain some revenue.

Andy and I are also still working on ideas for possibly releasing new Midieville shorts as well as reformatting all of our old Midieville cartoons to the blip.tv format. Production on Star Fetched episode 2 has been on hold for a while as we decided to possibly change that show to an all-audio format, and we are now considering possibly keeping it as a cartoon, but the work necessary for pulling off Star Fetched is incredibly time consuming. We have some really great stories written for Star Fetched and can't wait to bring them to you, but we ask that you remain patient. Maybe in the meantime I can release a few pages from our earliest Star Fetched scripts to increase your interest! I'll save that for another blog post, though.

As for the immediate future, I have a two week break from school starting this coming Tuesday (12-20-2011) and as I previously mentioned, I plan on working hard on finishing up Zapman Remastered Part 1. I will tease you with more updated images as they are finished.

Until then,
Enjoy the Holiday, Hatmaniacs!
-Jason

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!

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