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.

Just wanted to drop a note that I’m continuing to work hard on the refresh of the old strips. As I mentioned this is somewhat necessary for me not only in regards to the artwork but in making sure things that are coming up in the story make sense with respect to what has gone on before. I had made some mistakes early on simply because I didn’t have enough of the story prepared.

So if you’re bored and looking for some time to kill (or just interested) shoot back to the start and check out what’s been done so far. While some of the early artwork had character, it was pretty bad. Ugo was this floating dude with antennae, then he had big dark green horns… John was fat, then thin, then fat, etc.

The first two strips were redone earlier and don’t have the current style, but they are in line to be done (but they look better than the originals).

In addition, I’ve improved some of the strips where the artwork was just bad, or I didn’t have enough time or I didn’t draw something right. I think the best example of this is the one I just uploaded:

http://www.maroonedcomic.com/more-to-the-mission/

Here’s the two for comparison:

The original had no backgrounds and the “construction” panel was very basic. I’ve fixed a lot of continuity stuff, as mentioned, plus fixed a couple of punchlines that were just pretty bad. I’m about half finished with the project, I hope to have the whole archive settled within a month.