We Can Be Heroes

I just finished the lettering and colors on a short one-shot webcomic by Darrin O'Toole and Barry Keegan. It's a great little tale about homelessness and everyday heroes. Read or download a hi-res PDF here.

The best Star Wars Comic ever

This is an genuine work of love – Star Wars – adapted by the nine-year-old John White, from Dublin, between 1977 and 1983. The comic book is a genuine re-imagining as John had only his recall of cinema screenings of the recently released movie and comic to work off.

Around Christmas time 1977 a nine year old budding artist started to draw his own comic adaptation of his favourite film; just seen in the cinema, with no DVDs, books or comics to guide him . The early results were peculiar, but it was fun and some consolation for only seeing it once. Less obsessed friends would claim "We saw it 6 times!": he yearned to see it again.

Some time later, he got his hands on the British printing of the Marvel comic and treasured it. his drawing improved and with the comics, bubble-gum cards and the full-colour photos in the novel he began the process of drawing, re-evaluating and redrawing - casting the older pages in the bin.

So now reader, here's the very odd fruit of that 4 or 5 year effort. Rediscovered only last year. The shabby 1977 home-made comic becomes 2010 web-comic.

Star Wars Age 9 (John White)

2000AD is 35 years young today!

My favourite thrill power mag is 35 years old today!

2000AD, along with Scream!, were my first steps in to the grown-up comic world after I graduated from Buster and Whizzer & Chips. At the time I didn't realise how much writers and artists like Alan Moore, Pat Mills, John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Dave Gibbons, Grant Morrison, Bryan Talbot, Brian Bolland and Simon Bisley would have on me. In fact, I'd like to think my middle-aged mohican is an homage to Rogue Trooper!

I still have a pristine issue 3 (sadly missing the red alert wallet) stored away in mylar.

Very exciting news...

The first few pages of Brendan McCarthy's return to comics – 2000AD's The Zaucer of Zilk – are arriving in my dropbox for flatting. The new strip, which follows the adventures of an interdimensional magician, will mark the artist's first original story in decades.

"The Zaucer of Zilk strip is a phantasmagorical psychedelic extravaganza that features fanciful fantasy rather than hardcore techno sci-fi," McCarthy told Comic Book Resources.

The Zaucer of Zilk will debut in 2000AD Prog #1775 on March 21. I'm very excited to work with Len on this strip. Brendan is one of my comic heroes.

Alan Moore is gonna kill someone!

Here are the covers of the seven recently announced prequels to the best selling graphic novel of all time – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal 1987 Watchmen.

The new titles will be released in weekly miniseries form by DC Entertainment.

Watchmen diehards aren’t impressed. Alan Moore – who considers the original series/graphic novel to be complete and wanted nothing to do with Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie adaptation or any prequels or sequels – has described the project as ‘completely shameless’.

Gibbons, on the other hand – who advised Snyder on the movie – has given his blessing.

Good Vs. Evil in the comic colour palette

When it comes to superhero comics, colour is a big deal. The psychology of colour is an important storytelling tool. Noting its importance to the comic book medium – especially in superhero comics – ColourLovers has created an infographic that highlights the colour theory employed by Marvel and DC Comics, amongst others, over the years.

While the data used for this infographic isn't scientific or fully comprehensive, including every superhero would be more or less impossible and demand too many qualifiers to make for a snappy chart. All in all the infographic is just a simple reminder of basic color theory as it relates to superhero titles. Head over to ColourLovers for the full size infographic.

Animated Comic Gifs

Artist Kerry Callen has transformed a series of classic comic book illustrations into clever, endlessly cycling GIFs. Click here for more loopy fun.

The Grey Hulk?

In the Incredible Hulk's debut, Stan Lee chose a grey skin tone for the Hulk because he wanted a colour that did not suggest any particular ethnic group. The printers had problems with the grey tones, resulting in varying shades of grey, and even green, to appear in the issue. After seeing the first published issue, Lee changed the Hulk's skin colour to green.

The green skin colour was used in all retellings of the Hulk's origin story, and reprints of the original story were even recoloured for the next two decades, until The Incredible Hulk vol. 2, #302 (December 1984) reintroduced the grey Hulk in flashbacks. Since then, reprints of the first issue have displayed the original grey colouring, with the fictional canon specifying that the Hulk's skin had initially been grey.

A pressie from Lee

Here's a lovely little sketch sent to me by Lee Carter , a fellow Droid!

Pop over to his site and check out his portfolio.

Notes towards a practice of responsive comics

 

Here's the very talented Pablo Defendini -- developer, designer, artist, digital guy -- describing how "responsive" comics can be made using HTML and CSS that intelligently format themselves for a variety of devices, and addressing the writing and illustration challenges this gives rise to. He's not talking about "motion comics" -- he's talking about comics where the layouts and writing take into account a range of screen-sizes and aspect ratios.

Source: Boing Boing

History of Comic Colouring: Part 1

Let’s talk about old school colouring.  For 40 years color in the American comic industry used a simple, hand separated 4-colour (CMYK) system. The colors were made of three percentages of each of the three printing inks (CMY): A 25% dot, a 50% dot, and a 100% (or solid) color. The possible combinations of these tints gave colourists a palette of 64 possible colours to use  – though most used no more than half of them. Many of the darker colours were indistinguishable in print. Limiting the palette to 64 colours kept printing costs down, and were about all that would reliably reproduce on the cheap newsprint paper used for comics. Airbrushing and special colors and effects were reserved for covers, which were printed on heavier coated paper stocks.

To create a light green, for instance, a code of Y2B2 was used. This meant that 25% of Yellow (Y2) and 25% of Cyan (B2) are needed to get that colour. In order for the colour guide artists to be able to communicate with the colour separators, charts of the 64 colours with their codes were printed and distributed to the colourists.

Copies of the original art were made at 8 ½ x 11, and the colourists would write codes from the chart on the guides, which the separators used to know which colour the guide artists wanted.

The separator, which for much of comics history was Chemical Color Plate in Connecticut, would make nine acetate prints of the original art, one for each percentage of each color. The black and white artwork – originally drawn at twice the printed size, then 1½ times, and currently slightly less than that – was photographed, reduced and printed on sheets of clear acetate. Nine copies were made of each page – one for each of the three percentages of the three colours – and these were turned over to a separator often house wives paid by the page). Using the coloured artwork as a guide, areas on the acetates would be filled in with an opaque paint (Rubylith) to correspond to the colour indicated. Once the colour guides were fully “translated” and the acetates were finished, they would be photographed with appropriate screens to create a single version which included the percentage dots and the solid of one colour. These three new pieces of film, along with a fourth clean version of the art which was used to make the black, were used to make the printing plates.

But that was in the olden days – now, it’s almost all done with pixels.