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| Rant #3: Movie Magic! The game is on. We're now revving up to shoot our first feature film! With Desert Rose wrapped up (Check out the trailer), and me taking my sweet, sweet time writing the film script for One More Hit, we felt we this was a good opportunity to bang out a fanboy comedy pic. So contained below, you will find all the pertinent information: WHO: The film will be starring...Us. The Fanboy Legion... The Three Satin Gents... The Geeks of Gold! Yeah, we're a bunch of nobody hucksters with no big time Hollywood experience, but hey, it worked for Clerks... WHAT: A group of small press comic creators (new territory for us, I know) venture out into the night to blow off steam and try to come up with ideas for their new anthology book. Their evening runs the gamut as they encounter hack fortune tellers, a flaming janitor, the last descendant of Jesus, a bridge troll from a mystical land, an honest to goodness superhero, an alien looking for love in all the wrong places, Dracula and the Magus himself... ALAN F'ING MOORE! One might say the film is Citizen Kane meets Will and Grace... But that one would be an idiot. WHERE: We're shooting in and around Sin City itself, Las Vegas. But don't be expecting to see bright lights and coke-fueled nights here. We're locals. We don't mess with the casino scene... Plus, the last time we filmed on The Strip (a stretch of road where most of the casinos are located), we were hounded by guys handing out fliers for prostitutes. The hookers were fun, but we got little work accomplished. WHEN: Most of the light tests and effects tests are out of the way and we plan to begin filming sometime next week (February 6th). The shoot should hopefully last until about the middle to end of March. After that, it's three months of editing, special effects, and music score... With luck, we'll be able to stay on schedule and premier this mama-jama at this year's San Diego Comic-Con. WHY: Why? Because we gotta! Oh, and because rare are the films that are geared directly toward the comic geek... HOW: Who knows how a little start up company, with barely enough money to fund a cheese sandwich let alone a professional looking film, like us manages to pull these things off... But here we are... It's all about the ingenuity, kids! Finding ways to get it done and not need a 150 million dollar budget... I guess if we needed to purchase anything extravagent, we could just go out mugging old ladies for their bingo money... So yeah, that about covers it. Keep checking back, as I'm sure we'll be updating as things progress and with a little luck, I might be able to get a blog going that specifically covers the film. Until then, my fellow geeks... |
| Rant #1: We're the Next Big Thing!!! Tell me if you've heard this one before. A small press company that nobody ever heard of puts out a book that gains a lot of media attention. Either they've come out with a book that blows people away, they've acquired an old property and infused new life into it or they've jumped on the bandwagon of a popular craze (can anybody say "zombies"?). Needless to say that they sell a bunch of copies and decide they're the next big thing. It seems like every time a small engine starts to gain a little steam, they start thinking they're going straight to the top... Which makes them act stupid. From making outrageous claims about their future (Crossgen), to pumping out a zillion books (Dreamwave, Chaos, Crossgen again, etc.), to pumping out fifty alternate covers for EVERY SINGLE BOOK in their line (who isn't guilty?), they make REALLY bad business decisons. What happens then? They implode. They overstretch their reach (creatively and financially) in pursuit of a bigger piece of the proverbial pie. This results in them losing funds and ultimately, their company. How does this keep happening? Why can't we learn from the mistakes of those who came before us? The simple answer: we're morons. Deep down, every person who dreams of making it in comics thinks they're Eastman and Laird (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). We think we can do the same because somehow, we're not like all those other guys out there. We're smarter, with a better product and our penises are larger, too! But we're not better (well, maybe the penis thing). We're the same. You got the publishing rights to a hot property of yesteryear and everyone's taking notice? The audience will slowly taper off as they realize why they forgot the property in the first place... Certain things belong in the nostalgia box. You've put out yet another zombie book with a slight twist? The craze is gonna end, and all that's gonna be left are the truly excellent works (Walking Dead, I bow before you!). Then there's the hard one: the truly original book you came up with that got lucky when the right people noticed it. These always seem to overstay their welcome because, let's face it, when you start making money off your touching mini-series about an autistic, river-dancing, mutated ninja gerbil, you suddenly have a million other brilliant ideas about where the character can go... So where does that leave us? Hell, I don't know. We'll try and be different. We'll make the best books we can and build slow... If one of our books makes a splash, I don't expect to put out a million books while the eyes are still on us. I want to steadily put out books and KEEP the eyes on us. Maybe we can slowly branch out and bring in other books.But the key is doing it slowly and making sure the product is the best it can be... But don't be suprised when Super sells a ton of copies and we bring the book back as a continuing series, with multiple spin-offs and one-shots, all with fifteen variant chrome covers... |
Rant #2: I Blame Image! Gilbert and I were having a discussion about why it took us so long to actually knuckle down and chase the dream that is comics, and amongst the myriad of reasons, we came up with this: early Image was a bad role model. Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not putting the majority of blame upon their shoulders. I certainly don't want an apology or anything, because they were just a group of guys trying to make a new path and a few bucks for themselves (an honorable goal if any). And I'm not trying to take anything away from what they did accomplish, which was MASSIVE. These guys proved that you could make it without having to be at the big two. But as far as role models go for the aspiring creator, they were lacking. Maybe this could be better explained with a full back story... We were all into comics from the get-go. I used to draw crude little comics about a boy and his dinosaur back in the first grade. The first comics I ever read were Green Arrow: Longbow Hunters and Spider-man: Hooky (both worth buying for their reasons). I'm sure all the other guys in my pack of geek friends were the same. But your first exposure to comics and when you really get INTO comics are usually two different things. Sure, I read those when I was young and they impressed me, but that was about it until I was twelve and had lunch money I could blow at the comic store. This is also around the time where I decided that I was going to be a comic artist... Period. But something happened... Me and mine came into the comic scene right when the Image boom began. These were the biggest, most talked about guys out there, so we got pulled in by the sheer gravity. Spawn! Youngblood! Wild C.A.T.s! Cyberforce! Our young minds were being bombarded with what was hailed as the best in the industry. The books themselves were all style and no substance, and we loved it! Of course we did. We were twelve! Teenage boys will follow anything where people are dying horribly, women have big racks, or if we were lucky, big racked women kill people in horrible ways! We weren't the only ones fooled, either. The big two started doing everything they could to keep up with the Image boys, until all the signs of progress from the eighties were washed away... Basically, these guys were the heroes of the industry... So we became focused on style, our constant obsession to have our work look like the guys reigning over Wizard Magazine's Top Ten list. Style over substance... We weren't learning what we needed to learn: Storytelling, mood, consistency, and certainly not punctuality. We were learning the Image way: style over substance. So yeah, not exactly the best guys to be looking up to. You may have noticed there wasn't any mention of guys who were doing good work at the time... Well, we didn't like those guys... Because they weren't doing the big numbers or weren't being idolized in the lunch room. It's too bad, because I love those guys now... Wish I'd paid them more attention back then... It might have gotten me off to an earlier start... Well, that said, I want to say no hard feelings to those guys who put out the junk we all ate up, because it was a cycle. If we weren't eating up your books, you might have strove a little harder. Heck, after the bust happened, most of you DID strive harder... And hopefully the next generation will be even better for it... |