Comics soon in a theater near you
As a contrast to all the Spider-Man stories this week, Alan Kistler sends us a quick update on other movies in the pipeline:
"This is an interesting week in terms of comic book movies and the like.
Iron Man director Jon Favreau has confirmed that Jeff Bridges will be shaving his head to play the role of Obadiah Stane, who in the comics was a wealthy, sociopathic industrialist who took Tony Stark’s company and manipulated the recovering alcoholic into drinking again.
Rumors are flying that Sarah Michelle Gellar is up for the role of Harley Quinn in the upcoming Batman sequel The Dark Knight, but this has yet to be confirmed by anyone.
And "Moriarty" at Ain’tItCoolNews has posted up a review of an advanced screening of The Transformers. The review is full of spoilers concerning plot, so if you want the gist without having the story ruined for you, here are the highlights:
- The plot will involve the Allspark cube, analogous to the "Autobot Matrix of leadership" from the original cartoon series.
- The characters in the film are said to be very accurate to how they were portrayed in the Generation One cartoon series.
- Optimus Prime is said to have amazing action scenes and is showcased as an incredible warrior.
- To the satisfaction of older fans, Megatron and Starscream do indeed argue quite a bit.
- The supporting cast of John Turturro, John Voight and Josh Duhmel are said to give a solid performance.
- The special effects are supposed to be very good, though it is said that a couple of the robots look odd when speaking with robot lips.
- There is a criticism that certain characters are not shown enough or given enough to do, as screentime must be focused on explaining the origin and nature of the Transformers.
- There are supposed to be several references to the old cartoon for fans to enjoy, including lines by Optimus that were lifted from the original series.
Sounds like a great report to me. Here’s hoping the movie lives up to the hype."
Did his sewage sub actually run out of gas forcing out hero to slog? And is that a foreclosure notice on Stately Justice Manor? BRILLIANT! I'm loving this comic more and more. And I'm loving that each episode is coming out, week after week, like clock-work. Can't wait for next week.
Hey – gas costs money! It must have been 3¢ or 4¢ a gallon in 1930!
Well done Mark and Robert. Love the sub, love the prop copter. And who doesn't love a little gun-in-the-face?
Well, I don't think LJ is getting too much of a kick out of a gun in the face!
I've always imagined heroes like Batman, Daredevil and Lone Justice do get some kind of kick out of having a gun in the face while maintaining the self-confidence that they are still the ones in control of the situation. They are control freaks and adrenaline junkies. I think this is the basic motive of most "Heroes with Tragic Back Stories." Batman can't control the chaos of his childhood, the fact that Mom and Dad were randomly gunned down by some criminal. But he can put himself in seemingly chaotic and dangerous situations and then bring order to them. If heroes didn't enjoy a bit of danger and drama, they wouldn't swing around from roof-tops or flit about with Propter-Packs. There are safer (and cleaner) modes of transport than sewer-subs.
That is a thoughtful and reasonable take on heroic motivation. It might very well be a good fit for Batman. But I'm pretty sure that it is not the primary motivation for our Lone Justice. Especially considering just who is holding that gun. Tune in next week.And please – that is a storm drain – not a sewer.
To continue on the points Russ made… I feel that in today's comics (your Batman's, your Daredevil's, etc.) most heroes are merely reactive devices to their chaotic counterparts. How many times must we see Batman brooding in a chair before some warning buzzer alerts him to a crime anyway? Mark and Robert did a wonderful job thus far on LJ by NOT having the overly used caption/thought bubble explanation why "I am who I am because I need to cure my city" blahblah blah…. and instead toss us into LJs world, literally strapped to a wrecking ball crashing through a building.It's what we need more in comics today… less predictability!
Was there a difference between Storm Drains and Sewers in the 1930s? When did we start worrying about water quality, putting in treatment plants and separating our runoff rainwater from our sewage?
Okay – Bob and I are going to change the ending to LJ:C! now. In about 50 pages LJ will come down with typhoid and soon after it will devastate the city.That is, unless you can prove there were storm drains and treatment plants in the 1930s.;)
I don't want Lone Justice to come down with Typhus. I would like to see a scene with LJ carrying a gas can down to the sewer-sub and finding it crawling with rats. LJ takes out his pistol and shoots some of them, just because he's in an foul mood. I'm sure some PETA folks would object. But if you can't ethically shoot rats off your sewer-sub, when CAN you!
I see a scene where LONE JUSTICE uses a flute!
To start a completely different topic… Mark.. do you use Comicraft fonts?
I have a limited number of Comicraft fonts. Comicraft makes really excellent fonts. I'm always tempted to buy more of their fonts because they not only design every little aspect of the letter forms, but they make sure every aspect of the kerning and leading and all the extra characters are worked out to the final degree. They also clean up the vector points on each letter so that the fonts are not RAM intensive. But you won't see much use, if any, of Comicraft fonts in my projects. Because I design my own fonts. And the reason I design my own fonts is – I don't want my comics to look like all the other comics out there. Comicraft fonts are ubiquitous. And while I don't do as good a job with the kerning and leading and extra characters, I do design fonts that work well with my projects. And I'm perfectly happy doing the kerning on a word-by-word basis (look – my fonts are not that bad).Until I created my current main font (that I call ComicJoe) I was switching fonts on every project. But ComicJoe has become a favorite, while also not being overtly styled in such a way that it looks out of place on either an EZ STREET contemporary graphic novel, or a 1930s pulp adventure like LONE JUSTICE: CRASH! But I have a deep inventory of fonts that I've designed, that I have yet to use on any project. Because fonts are fun!BTW – I do not use the industry standard of Adobe Illustrator to letter my comics. I use Quark. And maybe I will do a "Watch Mark Wheatley Letter" video in the future to show how I do that. Because I find that using Quark is much faster than using Illustrator.
Wow. I actually put together books in InDesign. I find the intense tools for fonts make it pretty easy to work with. I personally despise quark. Do you use … Fontographer… to "create" (input letterforms) fonts? I'd like to try doing some title or display fonts that way. For standard copy inside a book, I have a few "rights free" fonts I've used, which seem to get the job done thus far. Very interesting, for sure Mark!
It is really all about the time it takes to do the job. I know Quark. I've been using Quark for 15 years. I've seen InDesign and it has a lot to offer, not the least of which is the work flow with Photoshop and Illustrator. But I would have to learn a new program and for at least a while my speed would drop. And I can't afford that. So I stick with Quark. And really – no complaints except for color-matching. And I expect my rather extensive lettering libraries for Quark would not port over to InDesign. And that would be a big loss. All my balloon shapes and tails that I've built over the years. I build my fonts in Fontographer. Even though Fontographer is in dire need of an update (so I wouldn't have to set my computer memory to almost nothing so the program will run). But I only get into Fontrographer sessions about once a year when I get on a font design binge. So I can live with it.Y'know – I must have 4000 fonts on disk that I've collected over the years. And I've never found a good way to keep track of them all except my memory.The bottom line is – lettering is a major storytelling factor, right up there with the art and the writing in comics. Lettering can make or break a comic. And too often it is treated as a budget-cutting afterthought.
All amazing information Mark. I could pick your brain about lettering for hours! Being a graphic designer by day… I've learned the ins and outs of solid page layout, and how to properly treat type. The one area I would probly want more instruction is the basics of ballooning… Do you pros make the bubbles in illustrator and then type in quark over the bubbles, and set from there? Normally in InDesign, I keep illustrator open with the page I'm working in on a locked layer, draw out my bubble by hand, sew the tail to the bubble with the pathfinder, and copy and paste it right into indesign. From there, I'll generally re-use what I can, when I can… but as you said, it does come down to speed. Whatever produces the best results in the least amount of time, right? As far as font management, I recommend FontExplorer X by Linotype. It allows you to organize sets however you need to, and activate whole chucks at a time without having to restart photoshop, illustrator or indesign. I keep all my "comic" fonts in one set, and simply turn em on when I need them. Sadly, I'm still a newbie, and have…10-12 comic fonts total.
The "standard" approach for lettering (mainly due to how much work Comicraft does in the industry) is to work entirely in Illustrator. There is a very good book from Comicraft and published by their imprint, Active Images, on their process.Insight Studios does it a bit different. We do 98% of the lettering in Quark, and 2% in Photoshop. I won't try to do a step-by-step here, but the highlights are:I have libraries of balloon shapes, caption shapes, balloon tails and lettering styles. Every time I need an unique balloon shape or tail shape I keep a clean copy and add it to the appropriate library for future use. At this point my libraries are fairly extensive and I rarely need to create a new shape. BTW – you might have noticed that I prefer an "organic" approach to my balloon shapes. I am proud to say that none of my balloon shapes is perfect! I like to keep that human feel in the work rather than make it look like a machine is spitting out perfect circles, ovals and rectangles. The balloons and tails are blank item boxes, and I am able to set the border style and item color as I wish. I start lettering by dropping balloon shapes all over a page of rough pencil art (I letter at this early stage to allow adjustments in the art if there is not enough room for the lettering). Then I copy and paste lettering into pre-styled lettering blocks (while I use my balloon shapes and tails on nearly every project – I will set caption and balloon type styles for each new project – this includes the font, point size, leading, any distortion and the paragraph style including drop caps if needed). The lettering blocks get dropped into place over the balloon shapes and the balloons and lettering are fine-tuned to fit to each other and the comic art while also leading the reader's eye across the page in the correct order. I don't add the balloon tails until I have final color art in place. And I use the MERGE ITEM command in Quark to combine the tails and balloons. At this point I will also pull levels of the art in front of lettering balloons and captions as needed to place lettering elements at the correct subjective depth in the art. And I accomplish that by duplicating the art item box and then creating a custom shape that trims away everything not needed.I know this is too short an explanation to really get it across unless you are already familiar with basic production techniques. So I will definitely aim to create a new how-to lettering video soon.
BTW – I checked out FontExplorer X by Linotype on your suggestion. And apparently only the MAC version is available. The PC version has been removed from the site. So I'll have to remember to look again in the future. Because it does sound like a useful utility.
Well, I got exactly what you meant Mark, and I greatly appreciate you sharing with the class. :)
Nice little mention of LONE JUSTICE today on Make It So Marketing's Comics And Pop Culture Blog.