Friday Fandom
I can’t wait for Toy Story 3. This past week my family re-watched Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 2, which are such wonderful stories. It seems as though Pixar is the only company who can really get a sequel right. In some ways Toy Story 2 is a better movie than the original. There are so many great moments in the film, and the concept of Woody’s Roundup Gang is just genius. How fun must it have been to design all those old time toys and merchandise?
Jessie’s song always gets my wife to cry. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the “Our Town” song in Cars. Speaking of which, I can’t wait for Cars 2 either. I know some people weren’t as fond of Cars as other Pixar movies, but it’s one of my favorites.
It was seeing Toy Story that originally got my creative juices flowing again after not even thinking about art for years. I even decided at one point I would train myself as an animator. If only I could write like the guys at Pixar, my comic would be a lot better.
The Great Marooned Refresh
I hinted at this awhile ago, but in the last week or so I have been working on refreshing the complete Marooned archive. I’ve talked about the new style of the strip, which is here to stay. Well, the archive has problems. Not only does the style change every so often, but the early artwork was really awful (at least to me). You have to understand I was very new to drawing the characters and hadn’t really had it figured out yet.
Aside from art issues, there are character design and story issues. For example, you might remember Ugo as a floating dude with antennae. That had to go. Captain John alternated between kind of fat and too thin. Colors were inconsistent. Story wise, there were a couple of mistakes in continuity since I had began to solidify the Marooned universe (such as calling the NFF the “agency”), and frankly a couple of really bad jokes (like the second “pickle” joke). So I’m fixing those types of things.
Example of Refresh
On the above you can see that I had forgotten to include the ship Asimov was working on, so that is included, plus Ugo is fixed to be his normal self, and the colors are fixed to the new palette.
I realize many of you may not really care, but I’m trying to grow the strip and I want new readers to have a consistent experience. If you are interested, I essentially started twice. I redid the first two strips before I got to my final style, so those will have to be redone a third time, but they are much better than the originals. From #3 on I have gotten about 11 or so strips redone, so the archive is almost a third completed. I’ll be working on another one today.
At some point in the coming months I will catch up to where the strips are “correct” in my mind and then the whole archive will be consistent from both an art and story point of view. So check out the early strips if you are interested.
Limited Edition Print News
The limited edition print order has gone in and I should be getting a proof back next week. I chose the “what else” comic for this (and did a refresh on it first) for the subject. It will be printed on acid-free rag paper using high quality archival inks, a giclee print - so it will be nice.
There will only be 9 available (#1 goes to me). I will hand number and sign each one. I’ve adjusted the price down, it will be less than $20 although I am not sure how much less, I have to figure out my cost first. Once I get the proof, I will probably post the final information.
Story News
Monday John finally will bit into that Nusnor… I wonder what will happen? In any event, that will effectively end this current story arc. We’ll be moving into some other interesting areas… like who are the Geborga and what is Ugo’s relationship with them? And we’re going to see Ril again pretty soon too.
Doll?
Lastly, I think I’m going to try and work out a Ugo prototype doll this weekend. If I get it done I will post pictures.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:51 am
*gasp* gotta download those old drawings!
September 12th, 2008 at 7:55 am
I’d actually be interested to know if people really are interested in those. I could put them on a separate archive somewhere. I will say one thing though, when I do finally get to publishing my first book, I’ll be including a section of “how Marooned came to be” type stuff which would include older versions. Plus, I have some interesting stuff at home from when I was developing the strip - when I was using a nib instead of Micron/Faber Castell markers, and the characters looked pretty different (except for Asimov). That stuff will be in there too. I’ll post a before/after panel to this story in a minute.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:00 am
put it in a convenient zip bag archive, and up somewhere below a “the past” button.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Hmm…maybe. I’ll tell you this though, at least some of that stuff, along with a lot of other development strips and art will be published in my first book.