Archive for April, 2006
19 items.
I just wanted to send a shout-out to the people who have been helping me to promote the book today. As you can imagine, it’s been nerve-wracking trying to guess what the resonse will be. These stand up guys have really done a great job helping to spread the word.
First, thanks to Tim from Ctrl+Alt+Del. The number of hits he’s been sending my way are STAGGERING. I think Tim linked to me once a long time ago after I did a guest strip for him. I thought those numbers were impressive. Let’s just say he’s doing pretty well these days. You never really have a concept of how popular your contemporaries are until you’re linked by them.
At any rate, if you’re new to the site, welcome. I think you’ll find a lot of great stuff here if you’re into movies. Be sure to play around with the archive search function. Type in whatever you can think of. You’ll be surprised with some of the results it returns.
Oh, and if you have some extra money to throw around, don’t forget to pre-order a book!
I also want give thanks to Joe Dunn for a very nice write-up over at Joe Loves Crappy Movies. It means a lot.
Also Web Comics in Print gave us a plug as well as the consistently Bigger Than Cheeses – which has been on quite the roll lately, I must say!
Anyway, thanks to you all!
Some other news: I’ve installed a couple of book-related graphics between the comic and the blog. One of them is a reminder for you to take advantage of our street team offer. The other is a gauge that roughly shows you how far we need to go on the pre-order front before we have the funds needed to send the whole thing off to the printer.
Today was a good day. We’re a little less than one-tenth of the way to our goal. That’s very respectable – but I’d like to make sure we keep going strong! So if you’re thinking about pre-ordering, don’t wait! We need your support! Be sure to tell all your friends as well. Spread the news around the internet. Tell people about the book in the forum communities you visit or on your LiveJournal friends pages.
On average, there about 6,000 of you who check the site daily. If every one of you told a friend about Theater Hopper and what we’re doing with the book, that’s excellent word of mouth! You CAN make a difference!
Thanks again to everyone for their support! Launching this initiative has really shown me how tight the community is and how many great friends I’ve made doing this. I consider myself exceptionally lucky.
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Today’s comic was extremely cathartic to draw.
I dunno. For the last few days I’ve been hustling really hard to bring awareness to the book – and I would say so far things are going well. But sometimes you need a break from it, am I right? Today I just wanted to get away from that for a little while and pour myself into the comic. It felt good to get a little bit of that stress and worry of my back by parlaying it into cartoon violence.
I know the perspective is a little wonky on this one. I was trying to do this kind of top-down angle on Jared to give his uppercut more dynamic force. It didn’t really work out, but I think you get the gist of what’s going on. I mean, he’s pucnched the head of a Benbot clean off it’s shoulders! Isn’t that worth something?
I’ve never done a full splash like this before. I’ve played with panel number and size in the past, but never taken a full-step back and utlized the whole canvas. What a freeing feeling! I most certainly have to add this to my arsenal of tricks for the next storyline.
I wanted to show a lot more robot carnage in today’s comic, but there just wasn’t enough room to show Jared dismantaling all of these dopplegangers in a tiny self-storage unit. I decided one powerful image would have to do the trick.
I’m planning on wrapping things up tomorrow. May is on the horizon and a lot of tentpole pictures are coming up that I want to talk about. Specifically, all this Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes baby crap. Did you hear their daughter was born last night? Hey, what else is going on in Cruise’s life right now? Isn’t Mission Impossible: III supposed to open on May 5? What an AMAZING coincidence!
NOT.
You know in some underground bunker somewhere Cruise is mega-pissed that Katie couldn’t hold the baby in an extra week or two so they could get maximum press coverage.
Maybe when this whole Ben Affleck thing is over, I might turn my sights onto Cruise. Considering the extent of his excentricities, I could have a lot of fun with that.
More news later. Some thanks I want to send out. But for now… rest.
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I got some feedback from you guys that today’s comic would look really sharp as a desktop wallpaper and they were right!
Click on the thumbnail to grab a version for yourself. This version is saved at 1280 x 1024. I figured you could probably resize it for your purposes after that.
Dig in and thanks for the kind words on today’s comic. People really seemed to like it!
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There’s going to be a delay getting the comic up today. We’re having some problem with our hosting provider right now. Basically, I can’t upload anything to the site and I don’t know why. I get an error message through Dreamweaver saying that it can’t synch up with the server clock. Then I get an FTP error saying the file I’m trying to upload either doesn’t exist or there is a permissions problem. If any of you guys have an idea why this might be, drop me a line.
Of course, I learn that the server is all screwed up yesterday when I tried to upload a change to the book order page. I was getting the same errors, and like an idiot, thought, "We’ll, I’ll delete the file from the server and try uploading it again!" No go. Now there’s no book order page. Super.
Hopefully, we’ll have this problem fixed soon and you can get the conclusion to the Benbot storyline.
While I have your attention, I want to say thanks to a few people who have helped get the word out on the book. First, thanks to Scott over at VG Cats for including a blurb in his blog. Also thanks to Zach from Joe and Monkey for putting one of our banners up on his site. I really appreciate it, buddy! And last, but not least, thanks to Fenris over at Aikida for also mentioning the book.
I’ll have more to say about the book with today’s comic update, but I wanted to make sure these guys were recognized for helping me get this off the ground! Thanks, guys!
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Apologies for the tardiness of today’s comic. We were having some server issues that prevented me from uploading it. Something about the disk quota being exceeded. I had to delete a few non-essentials off the server to allow me upload access again. I’m working with my web master to see that we don’t bump our heads against the ceiling like that in the future.
Now that we have that out of the way, I want to remind everyone to pre-order a copy of "Theater Hopper: Year One" before the day is out!
Today is Friday and I know that means payday for a lot of you. I understand that everyone has bills to pay, but if you could set aside a little something-something for us and this book, I would be eternally grateful. Orders took a little bit of a dip on Wednesday and Thursday, so let’s end the week strong!
As always, don’t forget to take advantage of our excellent street team offer! Pre-order a copy of the book for yourself and get five of your friends to do the same and I’ll send you a $20 gift certificate to Fandango.com! It’s like getting your copy of the book for free!
So today is the last day of the Benbots storyline. I hope you guys liked it. I had a lot of fun putting it together. Man, especially Wednesday’s comic. What a blast!
I wish I could have shown a little bit more robot carange because that would have been a lot of fun. But at the same time, I’m a real slave to the concept of ending storylines on a Friday. I can’t end them in the middle of the week or on a Monday. It just feels… wrong.
So if I ended up stretching out this arc to next Friday, I think it would have worn out it’s welcome. I really didn’t have much more to say beyond Jared walking home with Ben Affleck’s head in a bag.
I had a cool experience yesterday that I want to share with you guys.
You’re all familiar with the web comics newspaper Zoinks, right? Well, if not, you should really get a subscription. Because these guys do a bang-up job of promoting a really wide variety of comics. I got the first few issues and they make all of it interesting. The interviews, the articles… they even publish individual comics from all over. Great stuff.
Anyway, I had the opportunity go to one of my favorite local comic book shops and sit down with Nathaniel Payne – who, incidentally run a great web comics commentary site called The Evil Network – for a two hour interview appearing in the June edition of Zoinks. Nathaniel happens to work in the Des Moines area, so the opportunity was there to meet face-to-face and we went for it.
It’s really nice to do an interview with someone in person rather than through e-mail because when I answer questions through e-mail, the answers always feel a little bit canned. I think Nathaniel got some really good answers last night because he asked really good questions that extrapolated into other subjects. It doesn’t hurt that he did his homework a little bit. It was really a good time.
I should probably mention that Chris Cantrell from Please Rewind is also being interviewed in the upcoming issue. Basically it’s Zoinks "BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE EXTRAVAGANZA!" issue. So it should hold a lot of interest to everyone here. Be sure to reserve a copy before it goes to print!
To get you guys excited about it, I’m posting the cover to the issue that Chris and I collaborated on. It was a lot of fun. The whole Zoinks experience was aces all around.
That about does it for me. Remember to pre-order a copy of the book and have a great weekend!
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Apologies if today’s comic isn’t knee-slappingly funny. But much like my illustrated avatar, I too am suffering the ill-effects of Spring. So things that sound funny in my head probably don’t translate well in the real world. Damn you, pollen!
I don’t have a very strong opinion about the Scary Movie franchise. I’ve seen the first one and the third one and they were alright. Not especially clever, but a mild distraction. Really, is the horror genre still as large of a powerhouse as it was during the days of Scream to continue lampooning?
It seems to me like the creators of Airplane! and The Naked Gun – two of the funniest modern comedies – would have something better to do with their time than scoop up the Wayans brother sloppy seconds. But then again, David Zucker also directed BASEketball, so maybe he’s lost the capacity for original thought.
Since I’m feeling a little under the weather, I’m just going to cut to the chase and remind everyone about the book – "Theater Hopper: Year One" – available for pre-order now. You might have seen the little bar graphic in between the comic and the blog – The one that charts pre-orders of the books? Well, it’s slowed down a little. I can’t fill up the bar without more pre-orders! So, please – pre-order your book today. Do it for the bar! Help him grow up to be big and strong!
As always, the street team offer is still going on. Shocking that no one has taken advantage of it yet! I know it may seem impossible to round up five friends and get all of them to pre-order the book. But if you travel in web-comic circles or post in forums other than ours, you should be able to root out other Theater Hopper fans who might not know about the book! Spread the word and you might find yourself twenty Fandango dollars richer!
That’s about it for this morning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to empty a quart out of my head.
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Something I totally forgot to do about a week or so ago when I added them was to draw everyone’s attention to our newest sponsor Realm Media.
Realm Media is a great video game review site and discussion blog with lots of focus on the upcoming next gen systems. I don’t usually have a lot of extra cash to spend on video games. Truthfully, I play about three a year. But I’ve been a gamer since the NES 8-bit days and I like to keep up on what’s current. Realm Media is an excellent place to go for up-to-the-minute information. I strongly encourage you to check it out.
Apologies to the good folks at Realm Media for not mentioning you guys in the blog sooner. I’ve been real distracted with this book pre-sale!
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Ugh, this comic stressed me out.
Caricature isn’t my strong point and deciding to spoof Michael Douglas in The Sentinel was not an easy task. He’s a goofy lookin’ dude, no doubt about it. That high forehead. The eyes set a little farther apart. The checkbones. The butt chin. I’m tellin’ ya – Douglas DNA is nothing to mess around with!
I haven’t seen The Sentinel, but I’m curious about it. I gotta admit, I’m a sucker for these political conspiracy movies where people are wrongly accused like U.S. Marshalls or Murder at 1600. Or maybe I have a secret fetish for Wesley Snpies. Who knows?
At any rate, I was watching Ebert & Roeper review the film this weekend and they totally pegged Douglas as the guy who takes roles where his character makes a supremely bad decision at the beginning – usually involving a woman or infidelity of some kind – and who spends the rest of the movie making up for that mistake. Maybe that was more of the nadir of his work in the 80’s, but it seems to be a theme to refer to from time to time.
I guess I shouldn’t really single out Douglas. After all, there are plenty of middle-aged action stars that tend to take the same role over and over. Harrison Ford, for example. Don’t believe me? Watch this clip.
That’s about it for the movie commentary. Now we move onto the book commentary.
I won’t lie to you. Pre-orders have come to a stand-still and I’m a little nervous. Yes, I know that I just announced the pre-sale last week and you’re probably putting your money together. But it would take a huge load off my mind if a few more of you would send in orders!
The site has been doing gangbusters lately in regards to traffic due to all the promotion I’m doing for the book. But before all the hullabaloo – we were seeing an average of 6,000 unique visitors a day. Believe me, I’m thankful for it.
But if less than one-tenth of you guys placed pre-orders today, that would solve a lot of problems for me – and help me sleep a little better at night. Believe me when I say the success of this pre-sale will dictate the direction Theater Hopper takes in the future in more ways than I can explain right now.
Look, I know $18.95 is a lot for book, but it’s totally worth your money. 200 pages in full color. Brand new commentary on every comic. 11 guest strips. A six-part crossover. Look around at some of the other web comics selling books and tell me if they’re offering as much. You’re getting more than what you pay for.
If you’re thinking about ordering a book, please – don’t wait. ORDER TODAY!
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United 93 comes out today and I desperately wanted to address it. Not so much in the comic because there’s really nothing funny about the subject matter. But I at least wanted to give it a passing mention so that it might open the door into some commentary for the blog.
I won’t lie. There’s part of me that doesn’t want to see United 93 at all. There’s part of me that finds the idea of a movie stitching together dramatized events from 9/11 and spitting them out for entertainment purposes repellant. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to touch this film with a ten-foot pole largely because I’m afraid of it. I don’t want to revisit the uncertainty of that day. "Too soon" has been the rallying cry of like-minded individuals.
But then I step back and think about it. All of the reasons I don’t want to see United 93 are exactly the reasons why I should.
So rarely are we offered art that challenges us in a mainstream environment. We cry and complain about the lack of good movies in the theater. Then when a director like Paul Greengrass takes an artistic leap, we all shy away and fail to catch him. Less and less movies like these are made and eventually all we’re left with is Deuce Bigaloo: European Gigolo. I think we owe it to ourselves not to approach United 93 with our hearts but with our minds. Some of that horror is good to revisit. It reminds us of how far we’ve come in 5 years and what needs to be changed.
Reviews for United 93 have been strong. Critics are not calling the film exploitive be almost a version of cinema verite in then sense that everything unspools from minute to minute. All of the actors are anonymous, so we’re not distracted. We literally become a passenger along side the others. The film doesn’t make judgements through hindsight. It doesn’t editorialize events with what we know today. The film literally does not know anything more than those people did as things transpired. I have to give credit to Greengrass. That was exactly the right way to handle it.
Maybe this is all a little much to dive into first thing in the morning. But I’m addressing it because I think it’s important. Even though it will be difficult to watch, I think United 93 is the kind of art that is good for the soul and I hope to see it soon.
That aside, I hope you enjoyed today’s comic. It was a real treat to draw. The whole "angel on one shoulder, devil on the other" thing has been done a million different ways. But I felt kind of proud of myself for drawing Pac-Man into the mix. I think his expression in the 3rd panel is one of the most favorite things I’ve drawn. I’d slap it on a shirt if Namco wouldn’t slap me with a lawsuit!
Regarding the pre-sale of "Theater Hopper: Year One," I want to give a quick word of thanks to everyone who responded so quickly to my personal appeal in Wednesday’s blog. Literally no sooner than 15 minutes after I posted it, a few more orders came across my inbox. That you guys understand how important this project is to me personal speaks volumes and I appreciate it.
I’ve gotten e-mails from people saying, "I don’t have the money right now, but I’m getting paid in two weeks and I’m totally there!" I think that’s amazing and I applaude those who are keeping the book in the back of their minds.
I know what it’s like – the whole money thing (or lack thereof). I’m living it right alongside you. So I understand not having the cash to buy my book. But for me it’s the launching point for 3 and a half years of catalogued work (and growing). I want to keep producing books and it’s vital that this one makes a strong showing out of the gate. Otherwise, the whole thing is in danger of disintegrating.
That sounds a little dramatic, I know. But I take it seriously and appreciate anyone else willing to support Theater Hopper who sees things the same way. You guys are aces in my book!
Best wishes to all of you this weekend. I’ll catch up with you soon.
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