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 10

I had a blast working on this one.  I should have my characters beat the crap out of each other more often.

Super U. posts every Tuesday and Thursday.  You can follow me on Twitter@Super_Uwebcomic, and of course please feel free to share links via Facebook or whatever privacy-destroying social network you're into.  Please consider browsing my wares.  After this chapter concludes in a little over a month, I'll be compiling Chapters 3 and 4 into a new book for sale, and I'll likely be putting up a bunch of new merch as well.  As always, I'd love some suggestions on ideas for new merch, and I love to hear your comments.

Thanks for reading!

War Games - Part 7

Rejected Alternate Magical Power Activation Words: Shipoopi, Shimmy Shimmy Koko Bop

If you aren't generally familiar with comics, maybe the third panel of this strip is lost on you.  Of course, if you don't follow comics, there's a reasonable chance you don't read Super U., either.

I was chomping at the bit for the day I got to draw Breakdown take his coat off.  And as a bonus, you get to see Kahuna's powers for the first time!

It looks as if Team Justice's air offensive is going to fail.  Guess that leaves Aiden's success dependent upon Team Dick-Punch's ground offensive!

Yeah, he's pretty much screwed.

Breakin' Two

Poor Breakdown.  He takes a lot of crap, almost as much as Aiden.  But... I don't think he'll be taking it anymore after this.

He looks silly in that tiny desk, though.

The Super University, you may have figured out, is just a repurposed "X-Mansion," or, rather, a repurposed Raven Institute as suggested by Jason.  But I can't help to sometimes draw things the way I remember them from my highschool, like those desks, for example.  While they were fine for us, they'd be considerably less so for a large person like Breakdown.  

I haven't drawn Trash sitting at a desk yet.  It would be physically impossible.  He probably just sits on the crushed remnants of a desk in every class.

Repercussions

I'm totally happy with the way I ripped off Jack Kirby's "Kirby dots" in that first panel.  Also, Dean Clobber's nose in that third panel.  Man, what a great nose I drew.

Looks like Aiden's mom and SuperDude sent out that memo.  This can only spell mo' problems for our protagonist.  Really though, his troubles are only just beginning...

*cues foreboding music*

Break It Down

This situation is not going to end well.

Can you believe Chapter 4 is already halfway through?  I gotta sit down and script out the rest of it so I can make sure there's room for all the cool things I still want to do!  There's lots more in store for the rest of Chapter 4!™  

But first, Aiden just has to get through the rest of the school day!

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.

Spiritorum Awayos

It occurred to me I have characters I haven't used since Chapter 1, Conjuressa, the magic teacher, being one of them.  Even then, at the time, she was just a sight gag.  I'll have to do a Walters File for her pretty soon.  Of course, if you're interested in her background, or any teacher's for that matter, you can always head over to the SSS and look up their name in the tag cloud.  And if there's ever a character you'd like to see all the strips he or she is present in here at Super U., just click on their label below any post they're in (or go to their Walters File and find their label there).

I doubt I need to prove how much of a geek I am, but here's another example: not only have I created fictional elective classes for my fictional students, but I put some thought into which students would take Comprehension of the Arcane Arts, which students would take Archery and Marksmanship and which students didn't give a crap about either one of those classes and elected to take nothing at all during their 7th period.

At least once per chapter, I like to take you through a typical day at Super U., class by class.  The last several strips have reflected the students' classes, in order.  That said, the next class should be World History with The Commander, but I'm gonna have to skip that one this time around because I've been chomping at the bit to get to 9th period, which is Combat Education with Mr. Walters.  

Now that Birdo and E.P.I.C. are dead, and Bobby Rocket's in jail, Mr. Walters is going to have to make further adjustments to the Combat Education teams.  SPOILER: It still won't go well for Aiden.

There's another reason I need to skip it, too.  See, this strip here is #98, which means I've almost hit my 100th strip.  And there's something special I want to do.

The Walters Files: Breakdown

Breakdown as he is now comes from a combination of characters.  I'll let you guess who (Jason, you don't get to guess), but, at least for now, I'm keeping him mysterious.  In the RPG I ran that spawned many of the characters that I use in the comic, there were two NPC's I combined to make the current incarnation of Breakdown.  One of them was the parody character, and the other was an interesting minor character inspired by DMX's character from the end of Belly.  The final result is a strange mix of things, but I think he works well.  In the game, Breakdown ended up being a major anti-hero / villain.  We'll just have to see how things play out this time around.

Super U. Strip#68: Incommodious

Incommodious

So, there's a story behind this particular strip.  In high school, this exact thing was said to me and my fellow gym class students, in this exact situation, by our gym teacher who dressed exactly like this and, to make it even creepier, he looked exactly like Ric Flair.  Even now it makes me laugh from time to time, and I thought I had better make a comic out of it.  I couldn't think of a third panel for it, but then again I don't really think it needs one.

There are only 10 strips left until the end of Chapter 2.  When it's done I'm going to be You-Tubifying the whole chapter and at the same time teaching myself how to draw in Manga Studio.  I'm hoping Chapter 3 will look the best yet, and I'll be able to get my digital art even closer to my hand-drawn stuff.

I've been hearing good things about Manga Studio, and I saw an example today from the artist at Penny Arcade that he did using the program, and it looked just as good as his Photoshop stuff; I gained some reassurance that I'm not going to have to master Photoshop just to compete in the world of webcomics, after all.

The Quest

Heh, I almost totally forgot to post this today!

FYI, there's a chance there won't be a strip next week, or it will be late.  My mom's going to be in town and she's staying with us on the night I normally devote to finishing up my strip.  I'll keep you posted.

I really like the way this one turned out.  The hand-drawn stuff doesn't look as good as I hoped it would, partly due to my ancient scanner, but whatever.  It's still fun.  Hope you enjoy!

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!

A History of all Nations but Mostly America

Thanks for coming to check out the strip.


As always, please help me to get this thing off the ground by joining the site, "liking" the Facebook links and sharing the links with all of your unsuspecting friends, so that this superhero satire of mine can become something bigger (+1 and share on Google+, too).  If Super U. starts to take off, I'll get a real website, and I'd aim to do a bi-weekly or even tri-weekly sort of thing.  The more support I have, the more effort I'll feel pressured into putting into each of the strips.


The dream is to be able to do this all the time.  Maybe even for money.

Click Now, or Forever Hold Your Peace.