A sneak peek at Christmas

I am currently in the process of writing "A Hattington Christmas Story" which is going to be a parody/tribute of the beloved holiday classic, "A Christmas Story". I've had the idea for this rattling around in my brain for a couple of years and now I'm finally writing it out. I've blogged before a bit of how we try to make our parodies fresh as well as really portray the original material in a good light. This is no easy task and we really do put quite a lot of thought as well as some research into these types of stories, maybe more so than the mainstream "parody" movies do (i.e. Superhero Movie). I'll share with you a little bit of my process so far.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had several long discussions with Steve, Michael, Andy and my wife, Michelle (she does the voice for Blonde) about exactly how I should tackle this particular project. As you will remember with "Hatman Clause" I took more of the base concept from the source material and wrote something entirely new and different. Well, with this I want it to be more close to the source material, and yet still tell an original story. Which as you might guess is going to be like a tightrope act in order for it to work.

So, in these various discussions I picked the brains of my fellow 3twins-ians and asked, "what scenes from the movie should we portray?" and "what should we try to shy away from or more or less alter in a way?". I'm not going to give you a whole lot of spoilers for the answers we came up with, because, where's the fun in that. However, I will give a few teasers as to what I've come up with:

A Christmas Story was set in the 1940's and was about a man recalling a particularly memorable Christmas from his past. Well, the approach I'm taking with my 3twins tribute version is: Setting it in the 1980's and it will be Hatman recalling a particularly memorable Christmas from his past. So, the story will have the same "feel" and we can still reference '80's things like the movie referenced '40's things.

The next question was, "Do we have our regular cast of characters play parts in this?" Or "Should we try to extrapilate a past for Henry Hattington out of what we already know and therefore, certain characters (i.e. Leppy, Indigo, Blonde...) who appear in nearly every single issue will be absent from this story?" And the answer we agreed on is the latter, many of our regular cast will not be in "A Hattington Christmas Story". However, I am working in new characters that will somewhat "fill the shoes" of the absent cast members as well as a surprise here and there for a few cameo's from people we have met in the Hatman universe.

As you can guess, this will be a bit of a departure from our normal adventurous style, however, I really hope that when it goes online, it will feel like a warm tribute to the classic Christmas movie that is number one for many people.

-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

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