A couple weeks back, I reviewed the latest installment of Hatter M graphic novels. Today, I received the following message in my email box and, given the informative nature of the response, I thought I'd share the whole thing verbaitum...
Hi Sean, (Critical Illuminator)
Many thanks for the insightful and enthusiastic review of Hatter M: Mad With Wonder. The members of the Hatter M Institute for Paranormal Travel, my co-writer Liz Cavalier, artist Sami Makkonen and I would also like to thank you for your recent review of Hatter M: Mad With Wonder. From your review we gathered that there were some concerns about the dramatic trajectory of Hatter’s search. Let me emphasize that we hold to the academic and aesthetic view of criticism and believe you are working on behalf of readers and fans to interpret, analyze and shed light on Hatter’s quest. This is an invaluable service and we deeply appreciate your assistance as Graphic Guides and Mythos Interpreters.
In turn, we also depend on your criticism to measure our own efforts. When questions are raised or clarification sought we immediately roundtable the review and work to address the issues. After an intense examination and debate our unanimous consensus is to distribute the following overview for the planned 5 Volume graphic novel series as both answer and update for reviewers who would care to join us in shedding extra light on Royal Bodyguard Hatter Madigan’s realm jumping adventures.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!
Anyone who has read the Looking Glass Wars or even the introduction to the first comic book knows that Hatter is eventually successful in finding Alyss and bringing her home.
NO mystery there.
But at the heart of Hatter’s search there is a mystery. As Volume 2 unfolds readers should start to realize that the mystery of this planned 5 Volume parallel series is the path that Hatter follows both consciously and unconsciously. Before he can master the final challenge of finding the Princess he must first, like all of us, realize there is something he must learn from his ordeal. Operating from the metaphysical rule stating: Everything Happens for a Reason we have begun to track and eventually reveal this mystery.
WHERE IS THE RESOLUTION?!
There is a carefully plotted method to our madness and we wish to assure our readers nothing is extraneous to the ultimate storyline. Clues are being laid down and characters established with our collective eye on the finish. This information may or may not have resolution in volume 3 or 4, but Volume 5 will complete the revelatory map.
When readers encounter Hatter in Volume 2: Mad With Wonder it is 1864 and he has been searching our world for five years. Volume 2 provides the reader with a historically accurate timeline of 1864-1865 for the American Civil War as well as the revisionist revelation of Wonderland’s involvement in the final days and battles of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause. BUT NOT UNTIL the forthcoming Volume 3: The Nature of Wonder will readers discover the conclusion of this hidden historical episode. Warning! This information is not available in any government issued textbook. You will only find it here.
WHY THE FLASHBACKS?
Interwoven with this external timeframe are Hatter’s flashbacks to his formative years as a Cadet at the Wonderland Millinery under the tutelage of an older brother. Dalton Madigan is an iconic influence on Hatter as well as being his only family. Dalton raised Hatter and taught him to fight while guiding him through his Millinery training. As the flashbacks reveal, Dalton is never far from Hatter’s thoughts. In moments of self-doubt he conjures Dalton, fearing he cannot complete this quest alone. Without slipping any spoilers let us emphasize…no detail is extraneous.
THANKS!
In closing, I would like to emphasize that as a writer and creator I depend on your enthusiastically imparted knowledge to ensure that readers are provided with the necessary critical magnifying glass to fully enjoy and comprehend my work. That said, I am always available for questions, theoretical debates, interviews and tours of the Hatter M Institute.
Madly yours,
Frank Beddor
Cosmic Monkey Comics posted a video tour of their store. I've never been there, but it looks like they've got a really nice set-up; one that I daresay many other shops could take some notes from...
I stumbled across these two pages, documenting some of my time at Transylvania Polygnostic University, and thought I'd share... If you're not able to discern as much from the contents of the first letter, this was during the time when Girl Genius was only a printed pamphlet comic and hadn't been migrated to an online one. Sadly, the TPU website is no longer online; I never heard exactly what happened but I suspect it had something to do with the increased funding that had been given to the Department of Death-Ray Physics.
An almost random, un-retouched panel scanned from the Zot #31... Notice anything... "off"? Or seemingly out of place? How about I zoom in on a tighter cropping for you... There are three white circles in the black areas that don't appear to belong there. See them? One in the lower left corner, one in the upper right corner, and one on the left side up towards the top. Those weren't put there by artist Scott McCloud.
Those are actually accidents that occurred during the printing process.
Traditionally, printing involved making a mirror version of the image you wanted to produce, carving it in relief so that all the areas that were to be printed were raised, covering it with ink, and then pressing that down onto a piece of paper. Basically, the same process as a rubber stamp. For professional printing, they generally used metal plates, though, as rubber didn't have a tendency to hold up very well on large print runs that you might find in, say, comic books.
In the 1980s, other materials were found to be used that were more flexible than the old metal printing plates but still durable enough to remain viable for larger print runs. The process was called flexographic printing, or flexography. The major benefit of this was that, due to the type of materials used, printers could use less viscous (i.e. thinner) inks than they could with metal plates. The thinner inks dried MUCH faster than before, thus making comic book production much quicker and cheaper. That was one of the reasons for the rise in the number of self-published comics during that time-period -- it was simply more affordable than it had been.
The down side to using thinner ink, though, was that it was more likely to allow air bubbles to get trapped within it. The problem with having air bubbles in your ink is that, when the ink is pressed onto the paper, you don't get any ink coverage in the spots where air bubbles have formed. Which means that the large black areas that are supposed to have lots of ink coverage get little white circles in them like you can see in the example above. The problem tended to be more prevalent in indie comics, but I recall seeing at least a few Marvel issues that had similar problems around the same time.
Of course, printing technology has changed radically in the past 20 years or so, and you don't see much of this any more. But it is a curious artifact of a specific period of time in comic history and, as I noticed it while riffling through some older comics, I thought I'd elaborate for anyone else who might come across the problem and wonder where the heck those circles came from.
This has been your comic book production blog post of the day.
Because I've gotten so many questions about my book (either that or I can't think of anything else to blog about) I thought I'd provide a status update on the book I'm working on: Comic Book Fanthropology.
The research and writing is going along fairly smoothly. A tad slower than I'd ideally like, but I'm going to cut myself a little slack as it's my first book. I've been pleasantly surprised, though, that every time I get to a point where I'm not really sure where to go next, I can set it aside for a day or so and I'm able to come up with a good transition or example or whatever it is that's needed right there. At least, I've done well on that so far; we'll see if I can keep at it successfully. At the rate I've been going, I figure I'll be done with all the writing and most of the editing by the end of the month.
Interior artwork has been going surprisingly well too. I've found more pieces than I'd hoped that are both contextual and metatextual; not only do they refer back to the text I'm writing, but most of them are also commenting on it in some fashion as well. PLUS, I've had good success in getting black and white line art for everything, so it should reproduce better than greyscale scans of full color pages. When I run into a writer's block, I've been able to switch over to digitally touching up the line work to make sure it's the cleanest I can get; so I think the interior illustrations are going to look really sharp in the end. (And, hopefully, they'll mostly be from things you haven't seen before.)
I've haven't really tackled the fan profiles yet. To those of you who've offered assistance on that front, I'll be contacting you as soon as I have a better idea of exactly how I'm going to format those pieces. I have been drawing illustrations for the various profiles that I know will be scattered throughout the book, and those have been going relatively well. (My attempt to capture Tom Fagan's likeness is to the right.) I'm not 100% happy with one of the images so far, but I've still got plenty of time to keep playing with it.
I do have a cover artist: Colin Panetta, the creator of Dead Man Holiday. I think we've got a pretty good handle on what the cover will look like, but Colin's putting the finishing touches on his next issue of DMH before he puts pen to paper for this. We're currently shooting for the tail end of October for having this ready. I'm eager to see his initial sketches.
All of which means that, if I'm able to keep everything together and move according to plan, I'll be able to really start promoting the book around the middle of November, and have it for sale by Thanksgiving. (That'd be November 26 for those of you outside the U.S.)
This is the first comic book I actually purchased with my own money. I recall seeing it on a spinner rack in a local drug store while Mom was picking up whatever it was that she picked up that day. I had been interested in comics for at least a few years at that point, but I had only recently started getting an allowance. I definitely remember being attracted to the cover, possibly because of the obvious Clark/Superman duality being expressly shown. (I know I liked the cover to Superman #268 for that reason.) I thus made the decision to make my first "major" purchase.
The story was entertaining enough, if a bit far-fetched -- even in the context of a Superman comic. I do recall liking it, though, because it did have all the "classic" Superman elements I was aware of. The villain appeared to be from Krypton (Superman's home planet) but was in fact an alien from a world Superboy had saved years ago (continuity). It featured Clark and Lois as Planet reporters (key characters and traits) but occurred in Smallville (Clark's boyhood home). There was a brief discussion of the original S-logo Clark had toyed with (alluding to the historical elements of Superman's history in the real world) and the mandatory Clark-pretending-to-be-scared-so-Lois-won't-discover-his-dual-identity routine. Plus some out of this world logic (Superman throwing the villain's sword all the way around THE ENTIRE PLANET and catching it as it came back) and a decent fight sequence. And, oh yeah, the whole thing was drawn by Curt "Best Superman Artist Ever" Swan.
Apparently, from what I can tell right here and now, that story or the alien race depicted in it, has NEVER been referenced before or since that issue. So, c'mon! Who's with me in writing to new DC head honcho Diane Nelson to help back the Zoltams, Gnmod, or the Xaka sword? Let's get everybody on board this and make it a real grass-roots movement to honor the great legacy of DC stories! Who's with me? C'mon!
