Batman

You know you loved it when Tony Stark ended his press conference at the end of Iron Man with “I am Iron Man.” Just a simple one line wrap-up avoided confusion, potential lies, and concern over secret identities. I would like to be able to say “I am Batman.” I am not.

 

As a kid, Adam West was Bruce Wayne to me. I was born at the right (or wrong) time to accept Batman as a campy and fun superhero that took up the challenges of fighting campy super villains, getting in an impossible escape situation, managing to escape despite that fact, and proving weekly (same bat time) that good will always triumph over evil. I was at the right age to appreciate that lesson, and there will always be a part of me that wants it that way.

 

As an adult, I enjoyed the darker Dark Knight from Tim Burton’s vision to Frank Miller and beyond. That is the hero I would like to be as long as I could rise above the temptation to turn to crime. Sure it would be cool to have the arsenal of super powers others have (everyone wants to fly, right?), but isn’t it somehow much cooler to be able to hang with those elite heroes without any special abilities beyond those you have achieved through discipline alone?

 

Imagine your escape!

                                                                                                                        ~ Chuck

Superhero for a Day

In honor of my oldest son's birthday, today's post touches on the innocence of a child's imagination. It came to my attention that my four-year-old wants nothing more than to be a super hero when he grows up. He believes that Gotham City is a real place, that Clark Kent is somewhere out there disguised, and that monsters actually can creep from under his bed in the night. To think of such a innocent mentality might sound silly or childish. But that's the point, in fact, all of us at 3Twins.net have to dig deep down to find that creative mindset.

You may be able to recall a time in your life, even if it's many years ago, where everything was worry free, full of milk and cookies. And the worst thing you had to face was a skinned knee. The days when playing outside until the sun hit the hills, and you heard your named called name across the neighborhood ringing in dinner time. Believe it or not, video games were a luxury rather than a pastime. For some of us, video games were not even a possibility yet!

In today's day and age, playing outside until dusk isn't even a reality anymore because of the long list of parental worries. Working that nine to five grind can also make it exhausting to take the kiddos outside, to the park or for a bike ride. It is important though, to take the time to embrace that inner hero inside your heart. Kids are only kids for so long, after all. Whether you are a parent now, plan to be soon, or not even considering it at the moment; it is important to remember to dust off your super cape and put it back on for old time's sake. Be a super hero for the day, or be one forever, the choice is yours and yours alone!

If you could be a superhero for a day, who would you be?

Photo courtesy of Rodgers Photography of Grand Junction, CO

SUPERHEROES

Who doesn't love them?  I think that even if you weren't into super heroes before,  you are now! The Marvel universe has grown in the movie industry the last few years and these movies have reintroduced these amazing characters to generations young and old! Those that have read the comic books have a deeper connection (like Jason), those that have seen the movies (like me) enjoy the new adventure and the way the others light up as they pop off the page. I love the fact that my whole family enjoys it all!

~Michelle Kuder

Issue 40 Preview

Last night the final installment of Hatman & Indigo issue #39, Shocking Science Fiction Stories, went online. This means that next week we're ready to begin a new saga in the world of Hatman & Indigo titled Superheroes, written by yours truly.

I wrote the first draft of this script a couple of years ago and it was one of the first three-part stories we ever wrote. I remember back then that seemed like quite a saga. Now there are six three-part stories and a four-part story on 3twins.net! But just as our story-telling over time has grown, so has this story and by the time it is completely unveiled it will be our first five-part issue. The first part of the story was drawn by guest artist Kendall Stump.

I don't want to give too much of the story away, but I can share a little for our valued blog readers. The story begins with Hatman, Indigo and the Damsel family planning a party for Blonde. But the plans are quickly interrupted when Hatman gets an invitation to a super hero convention and decides to take Indigo along for the ride. There's something odd about the convention and it's up to our heroes to figure out just what.

"So who's behind the mayhem?" you might ask. While I can't say exactly who, but I will tell you that it's a brand new villain. You'll just have to stay tuned to find out just who that new villain is and what his or her motives for provoking Hatman & Indigo just might be.

By the end of this saga we promise more mystery, more action, more characters and more battles than ever before. And we hope you'll get a lot of good laughs in there too. So don't miss next week's launch of our newest story!

-Steve

Writing: the heart and soul of 3Twins

Well Andy may have forgotten his turn at blogging, but I certainly did not forget mine!

I had a conversation last week with Jason about writing, specifically writing for Hatman & Indigo. One thing is for sure, Jason, Andy and I love to write, maybe more than anything else. And I think you'll notice if you watch some of our earlier comics and compare them to some of our recent comics that our writing really has improved.

I feel like quite often one of us will write a new Hatman & Indigo script that really raises the bar (like Jason's script for The Hatman Clause, or my script Superheroes, which you'll see come to life in a few weeks). Many times these "raise the bar" scripts end up sitting on the shelf for a while to the point that by the time they are actually released, the comic itself is just sort of average, even though the writing of the script inspired us to get better.

In other words, even our best stuff can be improved upon.

So with that in mind, this Saturday Jason, Andy and I are getting together for a 3Twins writing conference where we'll brainstorm ideas, rework some upcoming scripts, and even write some new material.

This is where you as a fan can help us out. If there are any particular Hatman & Indigo stories that stand out to you as funnier, more action packed, or just all around better than the rest, let us know. Or if there are certain stories that just didn't do anything for you, tell us. Or if you have any comments that you think could help us write even better stories, please, say something. We'll take all of your feedback into consideration when we come together Saturday, and maybe your input will have a big impact on our upcoming stories!

Now, in other news, last week I blogged about how it can be discouraging to create comics for 3Twins, believe they're really great, but struggle to get people to come to the site. Well, here's an opportunity for you to help us correct that. There are several websites dedicated to promoting webcomics. For example thewebcomiclist.com, topwebcomics.com, webcomicz.com and comicon.com. With some of these sites, just by searching for the Hatman & Indigo page, you can increase our popularity and potentially drive up our ranking on the site. And in the case of topwebcomics, you can even vote for Hatman & Indigo to move us up the list of top comics.

So we are shamelessly asking you to click here and vote for Hatman & Indigo. In fact, you can go back every 12 hours or so and vote again. And with your help, we can move Hatman & Indigo up the list and hopefully bring in more viewers! And while you're at it, check out some of the other great webcomics on the list and help them find new viewers as well!

-Steve

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