War Games - Finale

Never underestimate insane cartoons.  Or moderately sociopathic immortal time-traversing klepto siblings.

And that's it!  One more strip to go to wrap things up, then the (probably) last Walters File!  

I'm going to be out of town for a couple days, and I'm anticipating that the final strip will be a little late getting posted.  I'll do my best to have it ready for your viewing pleasure at some point on Tuesday.

Plans this weekend involve a further progression toward my quiet exodus from society.  Here's hoping things pan out.

War Games - Part 1

War Games, part one of... a lot!  I've been chomping at the bit to start this scene.  

Team Justice is arguably the strongest, and has an extra team member due to, um, unforeseen adjustments.  As a result, the other Combat Education teams are eager to take them down a peg.

Team Dick-Punch, well... they are not the strongest, especially since they lost Raine.

Mr. Walters' loathing for SuperDude is well-known... is he taking it out on SuperDude's daughter?

Walters undoubtedly got the memo that Aiden was to be given "special attention"... is this some twisted act of defiance in the face of his employers?

Yeah, it probably is.

Either way, Team Ex and Team Frost are about to show what they're truly capable of...

Eavesdropping

These will start being funny again.  I promise.  Of course, we still have to deal with the awkward relationship forming between Raine and Aiden, where she begins to have feelings for him at the same time he dies and forgets his feelings for her completely.  Surely there's comedy to be found in that.

But, I don't know, maybe you guys like the narrative stuff?  There was a lot to get through these last few weeks.  Next week, I'm going to go into something I like to do every chapter, and that's walk you through a typical day at Super U., class by class, as it were.

If narrative is your thing, go check out the Saturday Super Stories.  Jason just recently updated, and the new story happens to feature Mr. Walters, the Dark Avenger.

Lastly, I wanted to give you a quick heads up that I won't be posting anything the last week of this month.  I'm gonna go disappear for a while.

The Straw

I sketched this one out a couple days ago, but I never came up with an idea for the third panel.  Even after I'd completed the final versions of the first two panels, I still didn't know what to do for the third.  The best I could come up with was a Mr. Walters rage-face.

Yeah, well, they can't all be winners.  Shut up!  Get off my back.

Anyway, the point of this strip is to lead into the next two, which are the last two of Chapter 3.  We rarely see the siblings together, as Time Lass is usually off doing something by herself, and by "doing something" I mean pathologically stealing things throughout all of human history.

But now it seems SuperDude has gathered the three together... but for what?  Come back on Tuesday and see!

Nullification

Happy Holidays, and New Year and stuff!  My Christmas was pretty good.  Being broke and unemployed, I couldn't really afford to get anyone anything, so I don't really deserve the stuff that I got.  

Incidentally, did you know Super U. has merchandise for sale?

We kept it low-key again this year.  I was invited once again by my brother-in-law's sister's family, and while I appreciate the offer immensely, there's just something not right about spending Christmas with your sister's husband's sister's husband's family.  I mean, I'm not even the fifth wheel there, I'm the flat doughnut in the trunk.

I also don't go overboard with presents for my kid and keep things as simple as possible (so her expectations remain low).  Two years ago we attended the aforementioned Christmas party, and my kid was showered with gifts.  You know, that point where the kids stop appreciating what they're being given and just toss things over their shoulder to tear into the next gift?  I almost avoided that this year.  Almost.  We got together with my sister after Christmas to have a mini-celebration and exchange gifts, and she had waiting for my kid there all the stuff those people had bought her.  Part of me thought, man, how nice of them to get her presents... they hardly know her, and we didn't even show up!  But the other part of me thought, great.  She's going to start expecting this every year, and sure enough she managed to hit that point when she stopped even paying attention to the gifts she was opening.

Anyway, I'll stop before I go on a tangent about how much the holidays bum me out.  I'm sure most of you feel the same this time of year.

So!  Only three strips to go before the end of this chapter!  After that, I'll take a bit of time to write up some ideas for the next Chapter, and I'll be re-visiting the Super U. merchandise.  Expect some after-Christmas price drops!  There's also a few minor changes I want to see to concerning the site.  The Walters Files have gotten so extensive now, I want to separate the students from the faculty, and give them their own sections.  And, like I said before, this may be a good time to look into getting a new site entirely.

Last but not least, be sure to catch up on the Saturday Super Stories, written by my friend Jason, for they offer insight into the origins of the Super U-niverse.

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.

The Walters Files: Mr. Walters / The Dark Avenger

It is all kinds of fun writing for Mr. Walters.  Like I always say, I'm not a big fan of DC, but I love Batman as much as any fan of superheroes does.  I love that Batman is human, and yet is capable of defeating anybody ever, and usually does, solely because of his rigorous training, wit and level of dedication.  Mr. Walters is no different.  My version is reminiscent of Bruce Wayne from Batman Beyond, but his attitude is more closely that of Frank Miller's Batman (both the older, well-written Frank Miller Batmans and the terrible, terrible more recent versions Miller blasphemously concocted after he became a sad parody of himself and lost his credibility as a writer).

This is slightly off-topic, but fans of comics, often during an argument in a comic shop, love to ask, "Who would win in a fight between ___ and ___.  Whenever Batman is involved in this question, the answer is always pretty much Batman.  My theory is that Wolverine could beat Batman, but only if Wolvie got the jump on him, and Batman wasn't expecting to be jumped by Wolverine that day.  Or ever.  If Batman had more than five minutes to prepare... sorry Wolvie.

Anyway, in the Super U-niverse, some of the characters are amalgamations of heroes and villains from DC and Marvel.  Jason came up with the idea that Walters would also be the Punisher of the Super U-niverse, which works perfectly, and the military aspect of his background helps to justify that lack of information about his past.

My goal for Super U. is to constantly keep moving away from the parody aspect and focus more on the original stories and characters, but I'm not sure if I can see a Super U-niverse that doesn't involve Walters in some way.

Super U. Strip #72: Reunion

Super U. Strip #60: Interrogation

Super U. Strip #56: Staff Infection

Super U. Strip #57: Eulogy

Super U. Strip #53: The Exchange

Super U. Strip #47: Divine Blessing

Reunion

Well, look at that, I finished the strip and it's not even 3:00 AM!

I think I've mentioned before that a lot of things in Super U. are based off of role-playing game I ran for some friends.  In that game, it came to pass that each instructor took on one student to personally mentor and more or less "pass their mantle" onto.  It's something I'd like to reflect in the comic, and you're seeing the first step here.  It might not come as much of a surprise that Mr. Walters, A.K.A. The Dark Avenger, would select Raine to be his protege, being the tragic back-story vigilante that she is.

There's only 6 more strips to go until the end of Chapter 2, and shit is about to go crazy at Super U.

Interrogation

Click to Enlarge

For a recently unemployed person, I was pretty busy yesterday.  As you probably noticed, the site got a new re-design.  Unless you're new to the site, which is a big possibility.  In that case, hello!  Welcome, and thank you for visiting my webcomic.  I hope there are things that you like here.  Please visit The Archive to get acquainted with the students and faculty of Super U.  Hit us up on Facebook.  The Super U-Tube channel.  Whatevs.

Also, Super U. is now being advertised through Project Wonderful, who, if you don't know, is an advertising group that does a lot of their work in the field of webcomics.  Which means I had to make a lot of ads.  Here, I'll show some of them to you.

Here are couple of the "Safe For Work" Ads.

And also a couple of the, ha, "Not Safe For Work" Ads.

I put a relatively small amount of money into advertising for starters, but I didn't expect to find that, after less than 24 hours, 6% of that money would have already been spent.  I'm advertising, for now, on some relatively low-traffic sites.  But I cannot complain about that.  As of the time of this writing, the ads have already been viewed 2,281 times, and they brought 10 new people to the site.  Pretty cool.

Also, I made the comic.  With all the work I'd been doing on polishing up the site and putting together the campaign, I nearly didn't get the actual strip done.  Despite the fact I never wrote any dialogue for it, I'm happy with it anyway, and I think it works.

But that brings me the biggest change of all: Starting next week, Super U. strips are going bi-weekly, to be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays!
With this change may very well come a change in the format of the strips.  I have a lot of experimenting to do to see what works for me.

I'd appreciate some feedback on all the, you know, stuff.  And again, if you're new to the site, thanks for coming.  And also if you're old to the site.  You guys are awesome.

Eulogy

I'd blog today, but the shorty wants to get on the computer.  That's how it goes, folks.  As a parent, whatever it is that you want to do, you must share or outright relinquish it instead to your offspring.  It doesn't matter if they are, say, watching TV, if you begin using the computer, your offspring will immediately want to use the computer.  Furthermore, if you then go and do something involving the television, the likelihood that the offspring will then alter her or his desires to involve said television is quite probable.  

I pulled the strip out of my ass this week, but you know, I like how it turned out.

Staff Infection

Doing a little better this week.  Got out this weekend to Bok Tower, which is about an hour from my apartment.  And my wife ran across this incredible thing that we are planning to make a whole weekend out of during their "Hatsume Fair," which I gather is some sort of spring festival.  We had no idea such a place existed in Florida, let alone only a few hours from here.  Knowing there are things like this outside of Tourist Hell, Florida is helping me to come to terms with the reality that I may be living here for the next third of a century or so.   It's nice to have something to look forward to.

A short strip this week.  I had some ideas where I would introduce Dean Clobber, Disciplinary Head, in the third panel, and I wanted to give him a ridiculous "It's Clobberin' Time!"-esque catchphrase, but I drew a blank.  But, nevertheless, I like how it came out.

I think once I hit the end of Chapter One on the "official site" I'm going to ditch Interrupted Reality.  It looked promising at first, but it has yet to bear fruit.  I still plan on, after the end of Chapter Two here in another 23 strips or so, taking another hiatus to YouTube-ify the Chapter, with the goal of 2 movies a week, I think.  Maybe I'll spread them out to trick myself into thinking the sites are getting more attention than they truly are.

Anyhoo, please help to spread the Super U. love.  "Like" and / or "+1" this page with those little buttons over there, and "Like" and "Share" the links on your preferred social media sites.  Doing so will result in your gaining my utmost admiration.

The Exchange

Sorry, brief bitching-session upcoming.  I'm going to post the comic first, before I invite you to the pity party.

It was tough scrounging up the motivation to finish the strip this week.  Anyone reading this has probably been supporting me from the beginning, and I appreciate that to no end.

The problem is... well, let me give you an example.  Every Wednesday, Facebook sends me an activity report.  On a given week, an average of  5 to 8 people total either Like or Share the links (both for the strip and the Saturday Super Stories combined).  In all likelihood, those people mostly consist of my close family and a couple friends.  Now, this week, for example, the links reached a combined total of 70 people, which is actually somewhat low in comparison to previous weeks.  But let's use that as an average.  So, on any given week, 62 to 65 people see the link and say, "meh, this does not have pictures of cats," and they ignore it.

I don't have anyone to blame anyone for this but myself.  The problem must be that either my comic sucks, or I'm doing something wrong to promote it.  Though promotion is something I really need to invest further in (as in, spend money), I'm going to have to lean toward the first option, because most of my "best friends" don't even read it.

I'm just going to stop there, because everything I try to follow that up with becomes even more negative,

Anyway.  I'd like to follow up on that with something more uplifting, but I got nothin'.  Hope you enjoy the strip this week.  Got some good stuff lined up.

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!

Closure

Here's strip #39, the last strip of the first chapter.  Today Super U. celebrates its 40-week anniversary.  I want to take the time again to thank all of you who are still reading the comic, and for your efforts in helping me to spread the word about this silly little thing I do every week.

Growing up I started a lot of projects like this.  But this is the first time, really, that I've completed one.  And that feels pretty good.  Sure, back in Junior High I made a few Raine and friends comic books, but they were all like 8 pages long.  At least if I compiled Super U. so far into a book, I could get a good 13 pages out of it.  So... that's an improvement.

Next week I'll send out the first two animatics.  Don't forget, if you've got a YouTube or Google account you can subscribe to the Super U. YouTube channel (you can join this site too hint hint), and same as always, please help me share those links on your social networking sites of choice.

Depending on how fast I get the ball rolling, maybe I'll be able to put up more than just two every week.  They don't take me too long to make, at the moment; the length of the hiatus depends more on how quickly I can get established on those other sites and to explore a new format and yadda yadda yadda... we've been over this.

Decided to go with Playstation Plus, which is a membership you pay for that gives you a lot of rewards for doing so.  Back in the day I didn't think it was all that worth it at the time, but now there's a lot of good "free" games that are worth entirely more than the subscription fee.

Like Gotham City Impostors.  I'm actually enjoying it, despite the fact that it's a multiplayer game and all you do, really, is shoot each other a lot.  The aspect of having crude "Bat-gadgets" really changes to the dynamic.  But the part that I especially appreciate is that, unlike, say, Call of Duty, a lot of the stress of trying to stay alive is gone.  Why?  Because everybody is dying all the time.  Even the people who are a lot better than you.  Half the time, when you get killed, and your screen shows you the person who did it, and their character is gloating, they get shot in the back mid-sentence.  "Ha ha ha!  You're a waste of bullets, you - - GAAAH!"  It's hilarious.  Also, I have yet to kill a single teammate so far.  Maybe the friendly-fire damage is toned down, or it doesn't exist, I'm not sure, but that's my kind of shooter: when you're not so confused that you're embarrassing yourself by killing your buddies all the time.

So... stay tuned for Chapter 2, and in the meantime enjoy some musical comic strips.

Thanks again,
Matt

This "Dangerous Room" story arc was fun, but man, it took like 20 weeks to get through!  I can't wait to get back to the stupid!