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.

War Games - Part 3

If you're new to Super U., you may be wondering why suddenly I'm using photos as background instead of drawing it out.  You may be thinking I'm lazy.  In fact, you'd be right, but moreover, I use photos as background during the "Dangerous Room" sequences, when the students are participating in holographic simulations in Combat Education class.

Teams have been chosen.  Roles are being assigned.  On Thursday, you'll get a glimpse of Team Frost and Team Ex doing the same... and then the fur is gonna fly.

War Games - Part 2

Aiden hasn't been an outright lech in a while, so I thought it was about time he got back to that.  Still, it's good to see him back to his old self again.  Or, at least, the self he most recently created for himself.

I was up until the wee hours of the morning the other night mapping out the rest of the chapter, which in turn caused me to get incredibly tired last night and have to finish the strip this morning, so sorry it's a little tardy.  But thankfully I did, because as it turns out I'm going to need every available strip to finish this story arc.   I hope you're in for lots of action and excitement instead of the usual (which I guess could be classified as wannabe superheroes behaving badly).

Apocrita Man

I've come to realize there's a certain freedom to be found in creating a webcomic that very few people read; I can get away with stuff like this.

I'm taking the week off next week.  My family and I are going up to the Smokeys (yay for tax returns!).  If I can't live as a recluse in the forests and mountains, I can at least pretend to be one for a while.

Thanks for reading, and please remember to share the comic with your unsuspecting friends on NetFace, Twooter, TheGoogle+, and most recently, Pinterest (whatever the hell that is).  I'd link to those, but there are buttons right below this post that will do just that.

Unbeknownst

The Technosyde story is nearing completion, as is, actually, the chapter.  I think there's only 9 strips left.  Like I said before, the hiatus between this chapter and the next is gonna be a really short one, but I wanted to go over what's gonna happen during that time (more for my benefit than anyone else's).

-Revisiting the merchandise.  Nobody's buying it.  It's time to lower some prices, axe some merch and create some new merch.  I may even need to look into different merchandisers entirely.  I'm still looking for feedback from you guys as to what kind of merch you'd like to see.  You don't need to buy anything, just tell me what you would buy, theoretically.

-New marketing campaign.  My current one gets me a lot of visits to the page, but that's as far as it goes; it hasn't seemed to attract a returning audience.  Maybe it's just because my comic sucks?  I have no idea.

-Looking into a new website entirely.  I think one of the major things my comic suffers from is site navigation.  As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a way to make it any easier using Blogspot.  I know for a fact I can do it better through WordPress or the like, but the last time I tried that it was pretty unsuccessful.  It wasn't drawing an audience, and my regular readers were still coming here.  I plan on keeping this site going for some time, and playing with this whole Google + relationship, but behind-the-scenes I may start building a better site, and then one day I'll switch it up on you out of the blue.

Trepidation

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.  I won't be doing a strip for Thursday.  I'm still planning to do a Walter's File for Saturday, though.

I was lucky to have been able to finish this one as it is.  My daughter is home from school for the whole week.  Fortunately she was reasonably accommodating yesterday to her Dad sitting at the computer for the entire day, but I won't be pushing my luck on that one.

Now that Aiden knows of his curse, he's become as fearful of dying as any mortal.  After all, what good is it being immortal if you have to start from scratch each time you die?  It seems the brazen, misplaced-confidence Aiden has gone the way of the dodo...

Serendipitous

While this is hilarious to me, there's a chance you won't get it, in which event I would direct you to this:

That strip, of course, can also be found in the book that I happen to be selling.

Also for your purchasing pleasure is various merchandise.  Give 'em a look-see.  Don't see anything you like?  Tell me what you want to see, and I'll make it for you.  Hats, different shirts, coffee mugs... it can probably be done.

Shanna (AKA ShitKicker) is one of my favorite characters, and has been around nearly since I started drawing comics.  In the initial incarnation of my comic from long ago, I'd always intended for Shanna to eventually hook up with the character that would eventually evolve to become Aiden.  Maybe that will still happen... who knows?  Right now I'm enjoying playing with the Aiden / Raine love / hate relationship, and Shanna seems to have found a lot of common ground with Scumbag; they both love punk rock, they're both outcasts / rebels, they both resort to violence, etc...

Also, in case you were wondering why Daemon isn't all shadowed-up in the second panel, it's because he's actually dead, and it's hard to use powers when you're dead.

Trying New Things

I made the thumbnail very small on this one, so hopefully nothing is spoiled.  I made myself laugh a lot drawing this one.  Read the comic before the blog, too.

Kudos to Jason for the Hello Kitty underwear idea.  I knew Aiden was either going to be wearing ridiculous underwear or be buck-naked with someone's shoulder or something blocking the view of the naughty bits, but Jason suggested Hello Kitty underwear during our Google Hangout yesterday and I knew it had to be done.

Speaking of Google Hangouts, did you know that I've been doing them quite often while I draw the comic?  Well, I have.  If you want to watch any of the previous Hangouts, you can see them on my Google+ page.  Come chat with me while I'm drawing.  I'm lonely.

Poor Aiden's always on a desperate journey to discover himself.  This is something most of us can relate to, but not, I think, on the level of a guy who's lost his memory countless times over the course of hundreds of years and been forced to reinvent himself over and over.  This time around (at least, for now), Aiden's decided he should really be pursuing the superhero angle.  SPOILER: It probably won't work out too well for him.

This is clarification more for myself than anything, but I wanted to shed some light on Aiden's immortal curse.  When Aiden dies, he loses the details of his life, but he retains general knowledge of history and the world.  Each time, he starts at square one concerning personal traits as well, so any amount of training he's pursued or talents he's honed go right out the window.  So, he can still make cultural references, but he can (and does) forget about that last fifteen years he spent mastering the lute.

This is what makes Daemon integral to Aiden's life.  He's been there since Aiden's first resurrection, to point him in (usually) the right direction.  Of course, this has gotten pretty tedious for Daemon, so he does his best to have fun with the whole thing.  Time Lass, their sister Meghan, has taken a more hands-off approach, but we'll see more about that soon...

Of course, it's all rather more complicated than that, but you'll just have to stay tuned if you want the whole story.

Super U. Strip #64: Effigy

Super U. Strip #62: Locution

Super U. Strip #55: Avicide

Super U. Strip #47: Divine Blessing

Super U. Strip #45: Fairy Fetish

The Walters Files: Shanna "ShitKicker"

Shanna was another character I cooked up in junior high.  I think, at the time, she was probably influenced by the whole Jubilee / Boom Boom / Freefall character archtype, but, at least in my head, she has come into her own.  I always had these ideas in mind that when some super-badass villain would take out all the heroes, Shanna, who had been hiding somewhere the whole fight, would emerge and take the dude out using some ironically simple method that nobody else had thought of.  She's easy to underestimate, right up until the point she's kicking your gonads up into your throat.

Effigy

After spending a week on Twitter, I can honestly say I have no idea why it's so popular.  I see what about it makes it more useful and effective than Facebook, but how does one look at their Twitter feed for more than a few moments without one's eyes glazing over?  It all devolves into a bunch of links preceded by @'s and #'s for me.  I guess it's fun if you want to be bombarded by the random musings of celebrities instead of being bombarded by descriptions of what your family members ate for dinner and pictures of cats.  

Honestly, I think it has only increased my desire to abandon smart phones, the majority of my internet activity and computers altogether.  Has anyone seen the stuff on Google Glass?  Am I the only one who's terrified by it?  Haven't people seen Wall-E?  Doesn't anyone see that, in conjunction with fatty-mobiles, we're very nearly already there?!

That said, thanks for using your computer or smartphone to come to my website on the internet, which features a comic strip created digitally on my computer!

I cheated on the third panel of today's strip, and by cheating I mean Photoshop.  Photoshop is a tool non-artists use to convince people they're artistic.  It was extremely easy to make that panel look like that.  It didn't even take me very long, and I hardly know what I'm doing.

It did turn out pretty cool, though.  I'm a very conflicted person.

Locution

Click to Enlarge

After all the crazy stuff going on in Super U. lately, I remembered suddenly that, oh yeah, these are students going to superhero college!  Maybe it's time they get back in class.

Welcome, by the way, to the first Thursday edition of Super U.!  Remember, the comic is now posted twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we still have Saturday Super Stories, too.

Advertising still seems to be going really well.  Like, yesterday we had 84 page views.  We didn't even post anything yesterday!  The ads have already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, which is rad.  So, sorry to keep repeating myself here, but for all newcomers to the site, please check out The Archives over yonder to help you get caught up.

Also you can Bookface and the Google and even the U-tubez.  Help me spread some Super U. love!  Thanks!

-Matt

Avicide

I'm still trying to find the middle-ground between artwork that most resembles my own "style," a more simplified "cartoon-style version" of it that works well and can be drawn quickly in Illustrator, and what continues to be enjoyable to work on by the time I've gotten to panel three and it's 2:00 in the morning.  I'm not quite there yet, but I think I'm getting closer.

Time to insert the comic, methinks.

(It was tricky inserting humor into this one.)

I think I'm failing in my attempt to keep this blog professional, because I need to dump on you again.  This is the best place I can do it; I'm not about to do it on Facebook, and there are scant few people I can talk to about this sort of thing, yet things need to be said so I can get said things off my chest.  You are in no way compelled to read any of it.  In fact, I'll make it tiny, so you're even less inclined to.

A person I know once declared, "If you don't like where you live, leave."  I understand the sentiment behind that statement, but frankly it makes me furious.  At the risk of being a hypocrite and putting some of my "bizness" on the internet, I have to say that statement does not apply to me.  I do not like living in Florida.  I don't like being in tourist / vacation / retirement hell, where it is sweltering most days of the year and you feel like you need a cold shower after every time you spend more than five minutes outdoors.  Where it seems your only employment options are in the "hospitality industry."  Where there is no culture.  None, unless you consider driving a poorly tricked-out (read:. loud muffler and mismatched oversized spoiler) Honda Civic and blaring reggaeton "culture."

And yet I cannot leave.  I'm trapped here.  We came here out of necessity, because we had to save ourselves from financial ruin and we knew there were jobs for us down here.  Yet now that we have gotten ourselves on our feet, more or less, I'm faced with the fact that my wife isn't inclined to pick up and move and find another job.  I can't really blame her.  Her bringing in the stable income (which is also significantly more than mine), I'm not in the position to make financially responsible, life-changing choices that affect my whole family.

What's more, I somehow have managed to be an extremely unqualified person to be hired for, well, just about anything.  The odds that I'll find a job somewhere great somewhere else in the world, and essentially reversing my role in the family with my wife's, are pretty much zero.  I'm still confused how this happened; I guess I'd always assumed growing up that being smart and a talented artist would see me through.

Possibly some of that is that I have a need to be creative at a job, and cannot be happy in a job otherwise, and yet I have incredibly high and specific standards that don't allow me to be content at most jobs that would otherwise be available to me.  Having a pretty low self-esteem, I really have no clue where those standards came from.  I suppose it could be fear, too, that I'll waste away designing logos or web pages or digitally-painting grass for a year, and being stuck behind a computer day in and day out.

I can't consider going to school to improve my situation.  My wife and I still have her school-debt to deal with, and I'm not about to add to that shit.  Plus, and possibly this is just the realist (read: pessimist) in me, the likelihood that I'll build up tons of debt and get some degree and then find myself right back to exactly where I am now is pretty high.  Most of my peers have degrees in art, even master's degrees, and have way more impressive resumes than my own... and they're stuck in down in the trenches with me.

Up until recently, I had been entertaining the idea of relocating my family to Portland, Oregon.  Strong art and music scene, good place to raise a child (because, fuck, I do not want to raise my daughter in the piss-hole state), pretty chill in comparison to other large cities, moderate weather...
But I just don't think it's going to happen.  My wife's current job will ultimately become something substantial, and I'll be both happy for her and slip a little further down the spiral at the same time.

I'm told, "that's what they make anti-depressants for."  I understand, now, why people take them.  They spend their entire lives being told they can do and be whatever they want, and then they become a responsible adult with a family and realize that they're no longer able make choices for themselves, but for their children.  That all of their friends are gone.  That they're in a situation they are powerless to responsibly change, and all of their dreams are just dreams, and all they can do for the rest of their lives is cope.

Wow, sorry.  That was a bit more venting than I intended.

Divine Blessing

Here it is: The Gripping Conclusion.

There had been a blog today, but I've been in a battle with the internets all day just to upload an image to anywhere, and now I'm out of time.

Hope you enjoy!

 

Fairy Fetish

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.  We did ours yesterday, since I'll be working on the actual holiday.  Turned out great.  That is, after dropping the pumpkin pie all over the inside of the oven and having to rush back out to the store and buy all the stuff again (after having just been to the store). 

Decided to keep a low profile this holiday season.  Not going with the fam anywhere for Christmas, and trying to just buy stuff for the nieces and nephews and my kid (and maybe my wife, if she's good).  Admittedly, I seem to get overwhelmed with stress and depression every holiday season these days, but this time there's another reason for the scaling back, and that is I need to have the money to be able fly home at the drop of a hat if my grandpa's illness takes a turn for the worse. 
Normally I don't try to burden this blog with personal problems, but I thought I had better give you a heads up, in case there suddenly ceases to be Super U. for a week or two or whatever.

I'm kind of bummed about this Kevin Clash / Elmo / gay pedophile thing.  I hope it isn't true, but it probably is.  And so close to the death of Martin Robinson (who did Telly and Snuffy, among others)... things aren't looking so hot for Sesame Street.  I just hope the ultra-conservative don't get to use this as the push they need to get federal funding for PBS axed.
My kid still isn't in school, and I'm not much of a teacher.  So I attribute most of her knowledge to educational programming that is actually entertaining enough kids want to watch it... something that, generally, only PBS can do well.

If you've got a PS3, and you're not on PSplus yet, you're missing out.  It took a bit, but now it's amazing how completely worth it the price is.  There are so many good games for free available now, you'll get your money's worth three times over.

I'm soliciting for Playstation Network cards this holiday season. 

By the way, there's only like two or three more strips like this before I move on.  I haven't gotten much feedback from ya'll about how much you've enjoyed / despised the hand-drawn stuff or the storyline.  So hook it up with the feedback, son.