War Games - Part 17

This Thursday: the conclusion of the War Games story arc!  I hope you've enjoyed this change of pace these last several weeks.  I have to admit that I'm pretty happy with the the way this chapter has turned out, and I can't wait to see Chapters 3 and 4 in the next book.

Only two more strips until the end of Chapter 4!

War Games - Part 9

Hey, sorry about the tardiness of this one.  I mean, it's still Tuesday, but I like to get these posted in the mornings.  With yesterday being a holiday, I had some family over, and needless to say I didn't get much drawing done.  

This one was a blast to work on.  I don't think I've done a "splash page" quite like this yet.  Drawing combat is fun!  I hope you like the change of pace, because there's a lot more face-smashing to come!

War Games - Part 8

Kris Straub, who does a few webcomics, tweeted earlier:

"Do you know why I like webcomics?  Because anyone can say, 'I couldn't find the story we all wanted to read. So I wrote it.' "

This especially rings true for me.  Growing up as a huge fan of the X-Men, I never, ever got tired of seeing them just doing regular stuff in the school environment they lived in, like playing sports together, or even just shooting the shit.  I could read entire books just about the stuff they got up to in the Danger Room.  I wanted to live in the X-Mansion.

Moreover, I wanted to see something like the Venture Brothers, but strictly for superheroes.  There are a few superhero satires out there, for sure, but nothing that I've found has been quite what I was after.  All that, combined with having these characters in my head for years that have been absolutely screaming at me to tell their stories, Super U. came to be.

Aftermath - Part 2

It's fun, sometimes, when dialogue isn't necessary.

Back when I used to party (and when I had friends), usually I was the one who woke up around dawn on the bathroom floor.  It's just so nice and cold there, you know?

There's a trend in comics (and sometimes even webcomics) to have superheroes that are outside of the social "norm" (and I use that term as loosely as possible), and by that I mean Muslim superheroes, gay superheroes and so on.  The part that amuses me is, generally, when a gay superhero shows up in comics, she's a lesbian.  Right, because we're supposed to believe that you're featuring a lesbian superhero because you're standing up for the rights of lesbians, and not at all because you're catering to your male-dominated audience who wants to see pictures of girls kissing.  Compare the ratio of gay female characters to gay male characters.

What's more, generally when a male superhero comes out, it tends to be a character most readers could care less about.  Northstar, anybody?

I'm not claiming to be breaking any new ground here, of course.  Just an observation.  There are a few exceptions, of course.  And, to be fair, especially in the past year or two, comic writers finally seem to be getting wise to the lopsided representation of homosexual supers, and we're starting to see a lot more male couples.  I just read that, in X-Factor, Shatterstar and Rictor have gotten together.  Coincidentally, I also heard the title was cancelled this year.

I have / had a homophobic friend who's favorite character was Shatterstar.  I wonder if I should tell him? :-)

Re-Reallocation

This Thursday, on Halloween, Super U. is hitting its 100th strip.  I think that's pretty cool.  To celebrate the event, I'm offering up a strip that's a brief interlude; maybe a portent of things to come. 

As of last Friday, I deactivated my Facebook page.  I assume this means that the Super U. fan page on Facebook is also gone (I don't know, but if it's still there, somebody let me know, okay?  I told Jason the page was all his now, if it still exists).  I left the "like button" here on the site, and, of course, if you're interested in promoting the comic on Facebook yourself, you merely need to share the link; there's even a button to do that right below every post.

I've been actively promoting the comic on Facebook for almost two years, and it has really gotten me absolutely nowhere.  I've had more success half-ass promoting it with Google+ and Twitter than I ever have from Facebook.  The reason for this is pretty clear: my stuff was never able to branch out beyond people I personally know and reach a wider audience.

That's not the real reason I'm ditching Facebook, though.  The real reason is much more personal.  Without even considering the negative effects I think social media can have on the way we interact as a society, I just grew sick and tired of Facebook etiquette, especially, especially the fishing.

Person I know:  Oh, doom and gloom.  Agony.  I'm never going to recover from this awful tragedy that just happened.

Me:  What's wrong?  What happened?

Person I know:  ...

My imagination is far too active to be able to handle this sort of thing, especially when it's coming from someone I care about.  I fill in the blanks.  The worst part is, I think people who do this are well-aware that they're baiting others, and purposefully don't indulge them with the rest of the information simply because they enjoy others worrying about them helplessly.  They're not interested in anything but your unquestioning sympathy.  They just want your sad face emoji comment.  That's not social interaction, that's sociopathic.

One time, because of the vagueness of somebody's unthoughtful statement, I was even convinced a relative had died, and had to call all over the place at like 1:00 in the morning to get the answer, setting off a chain of events that... well, you can probably imagine.  It was not pretty.  In the end the person who had died was someone I never even met, and certainly not related.

Then of course, there's the thing every week where I get my numbers back from Facebook, and they'd be like, "This week your stuff reached 142 people!  2 of them liked it."

It goes even further beyond that, but I'm leaving it there.  I'm done talking about Facebook.  If you're interested in following the comic in some other fashion, remember I'm still posting updates on Google+ and Twitter.  I highly recommend either of those over Facebook, by the way.

Pliable

I think I can pretty much declare at this point that I'm around 85% back to my original comic style.  It's taken a long time to undo the damage that caricaturing did to my work, not to say I didn't learn a lot from it.  I was fortunate to work with other caricaturists that strongly-emphasized cartooning over exaggeration, and my cartooning skills improved quite a bit because of it.  For example, I knocked out that Spaz pic there in the third panel in no time at all.  Don't get me wrong: I love cartoons, and I think caricatures are pretty cool, too.  And like I said before, initially when I began Super U. I think I was trying to emulate the style of other webcomics.  I certainly don't knock cartooning and caricaturing.  They both take an incredible amount of practice and skill to do right.  But recently, I found a picture I did of Raine a few years ago, and I got a little upset, because I knew I couldn't draw it that well anymore.  I will get there again, and soon.

The last strip, this one and probably the next few all deal with the wrap-up / fallout after Justice's capture, Rex Ruthless' demise and Aiden's death and subsequent ressurection.  This little action-run has been fun, but it can't be punches to the face all the time.  Don't worry, I will endeavor to continue delivering the funny, even if I'm only using humor to disguise my true intentions of making you find yourself compelled to learn more about these characters.

Hey, that gives me a cool idea!  I'm going to put a poll up on the bottom of the site for you to vote for some of your characters.  Who do you want to see more of?

As always, thanks for your support, and please keep sharing Super U. with your friends!  I've made it easier to follow me on Facebook and Twitter with the new buttons there on the top, and to share things you like on your social media of choice.  Tune in for next week's blog as I think I might discuss how freaking amazing Grand Theft Auto 5 is.

It Comes to a Head

I worked on this on pretty much the entire day.  I thought I was trying to get these done quicker!  Still, I'm really happy with how it turned out.  

You can look at this strip and compare it to pretty much any strip prior, and see how much better it looks.  Why?  Because I Photoshopped it.  Sure, I put considerable effort into shadowing and line-work, and my style has gravitated even further toward my comic roots as I continue to undo the damage caricaturing did to my art-style, but aside from those things, I literally just moved a couple sliders around in Photoshop and got this amazing finished product.  It's really quite sad, but that's how the game is played.  You don't actually have to be very talented to make something look amazing in Photoshop.  Artists these days, or what passes for artists, can perform in a couple clicks what it would take a skilled traditional artist a lot of forethought and technique to accomplish.

So why did I use Photoshop on it?  Because it made the strip look better, and what's more, you can no longer include yourself in the world of professional artists if you don't know how to use Photoshop.  It's really very unfortunate.  But being that I don't enjoy painting (and I'm not particularly good at it), and having to produce artwork so quickly, it's the only logical option.

I'd love to draw this stuff by hand and just go to town with some Prismacolor markers, but that just isn't in the budget.  I mean, we're talking like 4 bucks a marker.  Sucks to that.

Maybe I shouldn't belittle my efforts.  It's probably a bad idea.  I don't want other people to know how easy it is to make things look amazing in Photoshop, because the world needs more artists; the real kind.

When not drawing or house-cleaning (and sometimes during house-cleaning), I've been watching a lot of programs lately involving people travelling to all corners of the Earth, doing astonishing things and seeing amazing places.  And up until recently, I had become once again heavily embroiled in Skyrim.

I realized I was trying to live vicariously through these people (and these characters).

There's still so, so much beauty left in the world, and I want very badly to experience it firsthand, but to do so requires money and freedom from obligations, both of which I have in short supply.

I still haven't given up hope that I'll soon be relocating, where I can live a life that more closely resembles my ideal one.  But I think about Kyoto and British Columbia and the Himalayas and the Alps and New Zealand, and I get very sad, because I know I'll never see them.

God, but I get mopey, don't I?  Sorry.  Occasionally I remember that this is a blog page, and I just start dumping out all the stuff that's been weighing heavily on my brain.

No more of that.  Gotta keep it professional.  Stiff upper lip, and all that.

Please help spread the Super U. love and share stuff with your friends, especially the geeky ones.

The Walters Files: Trash

Trash was another one I made up way, way back in the day, probably around 7th grade.  Now, it seems he's a Hulk spin-off, but that's not essentially true.  I never read Hulk comics, and truth be told I knew very little about the Hulk.  He's green not because of the Hulk, but because I gave him a face like a Ninja Turtle (hence him not having a nose, and sometimes I draw his mouth in an almost rounded beak-like fashion).  I think when I created Trash I was reading WildC.A.T.S., which was a pretty shitty comic in retrospect,  but I ingested anything and everything Jim Lee had a hand in, so I guess it's fair to say I wanted my own "Maul" character.  Just about every super-group has the big muscle guy, and more often than not he's the dumbest one on the team (though Maul and Beast are exceptions).  I decided to make Trash so dumb, he basically had the brain of a child, as if the process that changed him into Trash inadvertently destroyed his mind.  Not a very original concept, I know.  Really, nothing about Trash is all that original, but that doesn't mean he's any less fun to draw and write for.

I'd sometimes draw him with two arms, and sometimes four.  I couldn't decide which look for him I liked better, so I gave him the ability to grow extra arms.

Trash does have a fairly scripted origin that I won't be changing much for Super U., but I can't tell you much about it, because that would ruin the surprise.

Chapter 3 Begins... Now!

Clickify to Enlargicate

It's been a long time... but Chapter 3 is here!  

Thanks to all of you for your patience, especially to those of you who watched and shared the movies and stayed tuned during the hiatus.

After you read the comic, remember to vote for Super U. in the Top Web Comics 100.  That button to the left over there.  It's at number #896 right now, and there's only 12 days left to vote on it!  I don't, like, win anything, but it would be pretty good exposure and nice to have as bragging rights.

While you're at it, you can Like the comic on Facebook, too.  The button right above the last button.

And since we're on the topic of things you should do, you should also browse my wares in the Super U. Store or check out my book.  If there's any merchandise you want to see that I don't offer, tell me what you're interested in seeing and I can probably make it for you.  Also, I believe starting tomorrow, all the prices in the Super U. Store have will drop again.

So, yesterday was my daughter's first day of kindergarten... her first day of school of any kind, really.  I'm already tired of talking about it, but it seemed to go pretty well (on her end, anyway).  It was a strange sensation, yesterday, being home alone with my dog and cat and nobody else.  I've been the one home with her in the daytime for the majority of the last 5 1/2 years, and for the last several months I've been a "stay-at-home dad."  I took the opportunity to finish the comic, so I wouldn't have to be up all night finishing it like I've done in the past.  Today... I don't know.  I suppose I should clean things?  I do have to go grocery shopping.  It will be strange doing so and not misplacing my daughter every five minutes.

I was considering taking this opportunity to get a new job, but I'm not sure.  I would only have something like 5 hours to work, and that's if the job was close (and the only things close are chain restaurants and frickin' WalMart, none of those job being in any way desirable).  But there is a library in town; maybe I'll see if they need some help.

I'll be busy with the comic again, but I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm still open to do any commission work, if you guys are interested.  Contact me, and we can discuss details.  You can even pay via the Donate button here on the site.  Also, if you buy a book, send it to me and I'll sketch on the first page for you and then send it back to you.

Super U. Strip #76: Archrival - Part 4

Here's the last three movies!  They've been a ton of fun to make, and they gave me the time needed to put together ideas for Chapter 3 while still putting out some content.  I had hopes I could drum up a small YouTube audience with these, but no such luck.  For the most part, not even some of my regular readers seem to watch them (but some of you do, of course, and I thank you profusely).  So, while they've been fun, I don't think I'll be doing them anymore.  That, and I've about exhausted my iTunes music library making them.

Next Tuesday, Chapter 3 begins!  The very first strip will be done in Illustrator as usual, but after that point they will all be done (hopefully) in Manga Studio.  That means they will have a different look, one that will more closely-resemble my hand drawn artwork, and with any luck that will be a good thing.  The reason for the art-style switch should become apparent on Thursday, because, as I've done several times before, I'm incorporating the style-shift to accompany the story.  Beyond that, I can say no more... you'll just have to wait and see.

Seriously though, you guys, I need help.  If you don't want to buy merchandise or whatever, I'm totally cool with that.  I'm not keen on soliciting my friends, anyway.  But it's free to share the comic with your friends.  And all of you goomba friends of mine who don't read the comic?  You guys are mean and unsupportive.

I figured out a way to put these directly from YouTube onto the site here at Blogspot again.  Before I would just click "Share to Blogspot," but they removed that option on YouTube (so much for this whole "one-Google thing...).  But I realized if I put the address for the movie directly into the... well, the point is, here they are, more or less how I want them to be.

So, without further ado, I give you the Archrival: Part 4,5 and 6!

Super U. Strip #71: Roommates

Super U. Strip #44: Random Encounter

Archrival: Part 4

I did warn you about the change of atmosphere.

Only two strips left until the dramatic conclusion of Chapter 2.  And when I say dramatic, what I mean is you will hate me for the ending I have planned.

Also, *gasp!* An establishing shot?  Varying panel sizes? This comic is getting all professional and stuff.

Not much to report other than that, though.  I've been stuck in the house for a while because my car's got a flat and we're broke. It's nuts out here in Touristopolis for the long weekend, anyway. 

We tried to take the kid out to have some fun this last Sunday at one of those bounce-house places, only to discover upon our arrival that the place was closed.  That went over as well as you might imagine.  Looking into it, I saw that there is a possibility the place is closed while one of their employees is being investigated for something to do with child pornography, so it's probably just as well she couldn't go.

It turned out all right in the end, though.  We took her to a place she could ride on a Ferris Wheel for the first time, and she decided she wanted me to take her on the go-carts, which was pretty bad-ass because A.) my five-year-old daughter loves driving fast in a go-carts B.) I got to drive a go-cart.

But that's all I've got for now.  Thanks for coming to the site, and please share the comic with your friends using one of those handy-dandy social media butttons there.

Roommates

This is how much of a geek I am: I have a list of who is a roommate with whom.  "Whom," right? Or just "who?"  I don't remember.  It's almost 3:00 AM and I just finished this, and I'm definitely not thinking straight.  There was probably going to be some dialogue in this one, but I forgot what it was.  Something to the effect of Bobby Rocket vowing to hunt them all down and kill them one-by-one, I think.

There's a lot characters in this one I haven't used in a while... and some not much at all, really.  Bobby was a last-minute edition to the list of students; I needed somebody to balance out the Combat Education teams.  He's heavily-based off of an old role-playing character of mine who was sort of like a 50's greaser meets a pyromaniac.  

I have too many damn characters.

I had to go with something a little "light-hearted" for this week, because starting next week, shit gets real.  Pretty much.

There's still one strip before the end of Chapter 2 that I have no idea what I'm going to do with.  Maybe that one will be less real.

Random Encounter

I've got nothing "profound" to blog about today, so on with the funny!  Oh, wait.  One thing.  This whole Black Friday starting on Thanksgiving thing?  It sickens me.  I feel terrible for the poor bastards that have to cut their holiday short, the most important holiday in many respects, just to go and work through the entire evening, being screamed at by belligerent, nuts-o shoppers.  I'll be doing my shopping the same place I've done it the last few years now.  Amazon.

I hope you're digging this story arc.  There's a few more weeks of it.

 

Tactical Withdrawl

Prepare to be bombarded by my Wall of Text spell.  Lots to talk about this week.  To spare you, I'm going to put the comic up here, and not all the way down there.

Next week is the end of Chapter One, and the last strip before the hiatus.  Remember during that time to keep your eyes peeled for links to the YouTube animatics on Facebook, and you could even be awesome and subscribe to the Super U. YouTube channel.
I'm not sure quite yet how long the hiatus will be... hopefully not too long.  It depends on how long it will take me to get the comic established on those other sites I was talking about last week.  But things will be slowing down for me at my real job pretty soon, and I'm sure the hankering to make new material will soon consume me.

So my PS3 bricked again.  I wasn't too mad about it, though.  The thing had been refurbished once before, and it was a six-year-old model and it saw a lot of use.  Besides, it only had 37 GB of memory, and long ago I hit the point if I wanted to play anything new, I had to make sacrifices I never wanted to make to play it, uninstalling games and deleting saves and the like.  So I picked up a new one.  I had wanted to get the bundle with Uncharted 3, but they didn't have any, so instead I got the one with Modern Warfare 3.

I've never played any Call of Duty game.  I'm not particularly fond of First-Person-Shooters, and I was always concerned that the learning curve would be too great for me to jump in at this point.
I was right.  I played Campaign mode for over an hour, and I found the game to be too over-the-top, like the video game equivalent of a Michael Bay film.  Beyond that, though, I found it to be thoroughly confusing.  I spent the whole time shooting my allies in the head because I couldn't discern them from the enemy, or just trying to find the enemy at all while simultaneously being shot in the face.  I appreciate their attempt at realism, I really do.  No glowing icons over enemies' heads, a few hits and you're down, no heads-up display with red dots to show who to shoot, sort of thing.  But not having those things made the game impossible for me to play.  I can only imagine how pathetic I would be at an online multiplayer mode, when I'm up against a squad of pimply thirteen-year-old boys swearing into their headsets who have logged thousands of hours into the game already.

I'm not sure if video games need to be this realistic.  They're supposed to be a leisure activity, aren't they?  An escape?  I don't know if I want to be prepped to be a soldier in WW3.
On a related note, my wife and I have been having this discussion, and I wanted to throw it your way.  I think that an exciting time for video games is coming soon.  We've achieved the point now where video games have achieved cinematic-like realism.  Just like in the art world, that will mean that soon video games will transition into the "abstract period."  What if Pablo Picasso was a game developer?  I think, soon, people will no longer be able to claim that video games aren't an art form, because the stuff we're going to be seeing will be like Picasso paintings that you can play.  Actually, it's happening right now.  Check out games like El Shaddai or Closure.

This weekend I saw Dark Knight Rises.  I won't spoil anything for you, don't worry.  It's safe to say I looked forward to this movie more than most any other movie before.  After seeing it, and digesting it, I can honestly say I'm not sure if I liked it. 
For starters, I knew it wouldn't be as good as Dark Knight.  How could it be?  So I went into it with the mindset that it would be awesome, but not that awesome.
I found the pacing of the movie to really detract from the experience.  There were too many points that slowed the movie to a crawl.
The acting was great, and Tom Hardy was gripping as Bane.  At least I think he was... I could only make out about half his dialogue.
But what really let me down about Dark Knight Rises is that I don't feel like I watched a Batman film.  I bought a ticket for a Batman film, but instead I feel like I sat through a three-hour commentary on the 99% / 1% issue that happened to (thankfully) have Batman in it.  Dark Knight tackled some moderately heavy social issues, but I don't feel like they consumed the movie in the way Rises did.
I'm maybe being too critical on it.  I'll let you know after I buy it on Blu Ray and watch it a bunch more.
Lastly it has to be said that with the tragedy now associated with this movie, it made a couple of the scenes hard to watch.  Perhaps that in itself cast a gloom over my experience that I tried to shake off but couldn't.

The Left is trying to use the tragedy in Aurora to say guns are bad.  The Right is trying to use it to say everyone should have guns, that way this won't happen again.
Wait... let me state that latter part again.  They think, if we have lots more guns, there will be lots less violence.  No really, that's what they think.

Being the hardcore moderate that I am, I have to say they're both wrong.  First off, if we give up our guns, then guess what?  The bad guys?  They won't give up their guns.  And then what do we do? 
We have guns because our founding fathers were so determined to not become a monarchy that they let everyone be allowed to have guns, so if that ever happened, we could all rise up and shoot our corrupt leaders and start over.  Guns are bad, but unfortunately, they're a necessary bad, and they will continue to be so until humanity can rise up beyond our idiotic primal natures.
If we all have guns, well, I hope you already know what would happen. 

The problem, in my eyes, is that this asshole got all these bullets and an assault rifle, a goddamn assault rifle, by legal means.  It is high time we question what sort of weaponry is available to civillians, and we stop being complete fools and doing things like selling crates of bullets on the internet.
In my opinion, no one, NO ONE, should be allowed to have anything beyond a single handgun and a handful of bullets. 
You might make the argument that hunters should be able to have rifles and things.  To that I say hunters are cousin-humping mouth-breathers, and fuck them anyways.

Sigh.  And now there's this Chick-Fil-A thing.  Look, Chick-Fil-A is a Christian company.  Nobody's going to make you eat there.  If they want to be ignorant and claim that gay people don't have the right to marry like everyone else, and that God would actually even care about that sort of thing, then they're cousin-humping mouth-breathers, too.  Can we stop making a big deal out of this? 

The bottom line?  People don't agree with each other all the time.  Get over it, and work to find the middle ground.  Stop letting your personal convictions blind you to the potential of a future where Stuff Gets Done and Progress Is Made.

He's Got the Kung Fu

So, the game-plan is falling into place. 

Super U., until further notice, will continue to be posted here on Blogspot, as will Jason's Saturday Super Stories. 
Animatics of each strip will be posted on YouTube on the Super U. Channel, and hopefully you'll think they're cool enough to subscribe to it.
I'm going to submit Super U. to Comic Genesis and Drunk Duck as well, two webcomic hosting sites. 
One of the longer-term goals is to get the strip up on KeenSpot, which is probably the primo place to get it published, but they're not currently accepting submissions, and honestly, they're still out of my league.  But they operate Comic Genesis, and so the hope is that if it does well there, maybe they'll consider Super U. for KeenSpot in the future.

A dedicated website is still in the plans, but I'm going to start with the above first and see how things go.  Other long-term plans include posting a new strip three times a week.  In the near future, I'd like to make actual, physical books of each chapter available for purchase, and from there, who knows?  Guest spots? Commissions?  Prints?  T-shirts?

I'll keep posting links on Facebook and Google+ to this site, and occasionally to some of the others, as I think most of you reading this now will probably prefer Blogspot.  Posting on the webcomic sites will be my attempt to have Super U. reach a broader audience outside of the Facebook circle.

There's only two more strips until the "hiatus," but don't forget during that time, while I'm establishing Super U. on these other sites, I'll keep posting animatics to Youtube and be linking them to Facebook and stuff.  The first "chapter" ends then, anyway, so it's as good a time as any to take a step back and re-familiarize ourselves with what has transpired so far.

Again, much love to my readers!  Your support is what is going to keep this train chug-a-lugging.

Share/Like/Join, and thanks.
-Matt

Haikeeba!