GUEST STRIP – VIC TAPLIN AND DING
October 15th, 2007 | by Tom- Comics »
- Comics »
- Guest Strip
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(5 votes, average: 8.20 out of 10)
This is going to be a weird week for me because I’ll be in Chicago undergoing a three day training seminar about Flash ActionScript. Hey, it never hurts to learn new things!
As such, I’ve recruited the services of a few guest strip artists to fill in the blanks. Many thanks to Vic Taplin and Ding for their excellent guest comic today. Could the Ministry of Cinema actually be something in my future? Let’s hope so!
You might remember Vic and Ding’s previous guest strip back when the first Fantastic Four movie came out. If you like what you see, be sure to check out their site Ninjabread. Vic told me they were having some PHP problems, but they expect for that to be cleared up by the end of the week. So keep checking back.
As for me, it’s Sunday afternoon and I need to wrap this up. My flight leaves in a couple of hours and I haven’t packed yet! I’m probably going to spend the evening holed up in my hotel room watching Planet Terror and writing a review that’ll go up on Tuesday – that is, if I can find some cheap wireless to connect with somewhere.
As for Monday night (tonight) I’m still planning on chipping in with The Triple Feature podcast at 9:00 PM CST. Since I’m in The City of Big Shoulders, I might be getting together with Gordon McAlpin from Multiplex and we’ll broadcast together. Gordon calls The Windy City his home, so it will be cool to hang out with him.
That’s all for now. Sorry for the short post. Gotta kiss my wife and baby goodbye and then I gotta jet!
DVD REVIEW – GRINDHOUSE: PLANET TERROR
October 16th, 2007 | by Tom
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(5 votes, average: 6.00 out of 10)
When Grindhouse came out in theaters back in April, I wasn’t able to see it in theaters as I was busy taking care of a newborn son. At the the time I felt badly that I wasn’t able to participate in what was supposed to be the great film geek-out of the spring. But as word spread, I was actually kind of relieved. Not because neither of the two films that made up the double feature were bad movies. But from everything I heard, the fim’s first half – Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror – was a goopy, gory mess and I wasn’t enchanted by the idea of being trapped in the theater for an hour and a half before getting to see Quentin Tarantino’s contribution in Death Proof.
I’m not a great fan of zombie movies, excessive gore or things that jump out of you looking for a cheap scare. Familiar with Rodriguez’s work in Sin City and From Dusk Till Dawn, I knew that there wasn’t the explicit whim of his inner 14 year-old that Rodriguez wasn’t adverse to indulging. You can imagine my anxiety sitting down to watch Planet Terror – available extended and unrated on DVD today, October 16.
The plot is typical zombie fare. A greedy bio-chemist played by Lost’s Naveen Andrews unleashes a chemical agent on a small Texas town that turns it’s residents into the walking dead. It’s up to a rag-tag group of misfits to fight their way to safety.
True to form, Rodriguez heaps on the carnage and mayhem. There isn’t an explosion too large or a sound effect to squishy or crunchy to be used in his arsenal. Everything in this movie is turned up to 11. When zombies are shot at, they explode like ripe water baloons filled with plasma.
What the movie lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up for with it’s excellent cast. Six Feet Under’s Freddy Rodriguez turns in a surprising and commanding performance as the mysterious El Wray. Michael Biehn shows up as the town’s true-grit sherrif and Jeff Fahey shows up as his BBQ-obsessed brother. Bruce Willis plays it straight as a tough-talking army general and Rose McGowan, her acting somewhat wooden, creates one of modern cinema’s most indelible heroines in Cherry Darling – the go-go dancer/amputee with a high-powered machine gun for a leg.
In terms of visual excess alone, Rodriguez delivers the spirit of Grindhouse cinema. I can’t compare this extended version to the theatrical release because the DVD fails to include both. But nothing here feels overtly extrenious or draining to the film’s running time.
The DVD comes with an excellent collection of extras on the second disc including Rodriguez’s traditional “10 Minute Film School.” In it, he reveals a lot of the tricks used in the film to achieve it’s large number of practical effects. Everything from the explosions, the car wrecks, to composit shots and the CG magic behind the infamous machine-gun leg.
In “The Badass Babes and Tough Guys of Planet Terror,” we get to see how the casting of each of the roles influenced Rodriguez’s script as he was writing it. There is some slight discomfort listening to Rodriguez effusive praise of star Rose McGowan’s prowess performing her own stunts as well as what personality quirks she added to Cherry Darling in her ad libs. Considering the on-set affair the two of them had that resulted in the end of Rodriguez’s marriage to his wife and co-producer, Elizabeth Avellan, it feels like some of that could have been scaled back.
It gets more unsettling still as an entire bonus feature titled “Casting Rebel” focuses entirely on Rodriguez’s casting of his youngest son Rebel in the role of Marley Shelton and Josh Brolin’s son. “Meet your new Mommy, Rebel! She has a machine gun for a leg!”
All in all, those looking for a visceral thrill will find more than enough to wrestle with in Planet Terror. While the movie is intense, my initial fears of the movie being TOO intense were unfounded. Rodriguez injects just enough humor into the script to keep the scales from tipping over completely – All the while pushing the film into greater and greater parody of itself. At the point that Quentin Tarantino’s infected solider affectionally credited as “The Rapist” comes on screen, you’ve pretty much given yourself over to the cartoonish ridiculousness of things and just enjoy the ride.
GUEST STRIP – JOE DUNN
October 17th, 2007 | by Tom- Comics »
- Comics »
- Guest Strip
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(2 votes, average: 6.00 out of 10)
Wednesday is my last day here in Chicago while I am undergoing training in ActionScript for my 9 to 5 job. As such, I had to call in the big guns to provide some support. Today’s guest strip is courtesy of my good friend Mighty Joe Dunn!
If you don’t know Joe’s work, you’re living under a rock. To shine a little light under that rock, I strongly advise you to visit Joe Loves Crappy Movies.
I love this strip. Joe was a little self-conscious about it when he sent it to me because it wasn’t in color and not up to the standard that he usually holds himself accountable toward. But I told him not to sweat it. I thought the joke was great and I love the multi-panel approach.
You have to keep this in context, folks. I dropped my guest comic request on Joe at the 11th hour just as he had one foot out the door to attend the Small Press Expo that was going on in Bethesda, Maryland last weekend. He got this strip done while he was on the convention floor. Giving up his valuable time when he could have been making mad money. So, more than a tip of the hat to Joe. The man is awesome. Period.
If you’re a fan of The Triple Feature – the weekly talkcast that Joe, myself and our friend Gordon McAlpin run every Monday night – you might have noticed we were out of commission yesterday. Notorious TalkShoe “technical difficulties” got in the way and we had to scrap the show.
The deck was kind of stacked against us to begin with. Joe was going to log in as me since I was without an internet connection and then Gordon and I were going to call in from my hotel room. Y’see, Gordon lives in the Chicagoland area and swung by after work to hang out.
Due to no fault of our own, the show failed to materialize, so we had to abandon it. We’ll be back next week to talk more movies with you!
Speaking of movie talk, did you guys get a chance to check out my DVD review for Planet Terror? I posted it yesterday. You should read it. I’m going to post another review tomorrow. One for Transformers. So be sure to check that out as well.
By the way, I still have this awesome piece of movie memorabilia to give away:
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It’ll probably be another mailing list giveaway like I did with Evan Almighty last week. Mailing list message go out every Friday, so if you want a chance to win this action figure, sign up now!
Something else happening Friday – I have some important site-related news I want to share with all of you, but I have to hold off until Friday until things settle down a bit. There is a subtle change behind-the-scenes that I think will improve what I’m doing on the site that I want to talk about. It’s kind of a long-winded deal and I want to wait until I’m back home and in my routine again before I talk about it.
Have a great day and be sure to visit the site again tomorrow!
Watching the Transformers two-disc special edition on DVD feels like an unfairly muted experience. A spectacle of this proportion is better served on the big screen. I reviewed the film during it’s theatrical release and found most of the problems I experienced in that initial viewing remained intact. The plot is spread too thin over too many characters. There are logic and pacing problems and there is still too much signature “Michael Bay-ness” in the film to endear itself to me.
One thing I became more forgiving of was the designs of the robots. Engulfing your entire field of vision on the big screen, the bodies of twisting, twitching metal were tough to identify. Confined to your TV, Optimus Prime and the rest of the Autobots become more manageable and recognizable.
As the movie progresses to it’s big downtown battle sequence, I found myself even more impressed with the complexity of their design and the fluidity of their movements. Once you get past the knee-jerk “But Ironhide doesn’t look like that!” reaction from your childhood, these modern updates makes more and more sense.
That aside, the two-disc edition includes an excellent set of extras on the second disc. Two hour-long documentaries broken into different chapters detail brilliantly the filming of the movie from concept to completion.
ILM comes off looking the best explaining the Transformers look and feel – how they developed the complex programming that gave every last nut and bolt a place to fold and lock into shape between vehicle and robot transformation. The detailing given to each character down to every last nick and scratch is the hallmark of this film.
The writers of the film – Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman – do a good job of explaining why some robots made it into the film and others didn’t. They also made a good case for fan favorite transforming into an “alien jet” and not a more terrestrial vehicle – more glaringly, why he doesn’t transform into his signature form, a Walther P-38 handgun.
“We decided there would be no mass-displacement in the movie. Megatron can turn into a gun in the cartoon and you don’t think twice. But we found in the movie that Megatron turning into a gun was the equivalent of Darth Vader turning into his lightsaber and having someone else swing him around.”
Although they make no explanation about the mass-displacement of the condensed Allspark, they make a good point about Megatron.
Between the writers and the animators, there is clear affinity for the characters and an understanding of their histories. But not everyone comes off so well. In their interviews, Michael Bay, Shia LaBeouf executive producer Steven Spielberg and representatives from Hasbro all look like money hungry opportunists trying to revive a 20 year-old franchise. It’s really not worth going into detail, but more often than not, you get the sense that these parties are looking down their nose at the geek culture that spawned this level of success for their film.
Despite the general unpleasantness Bay exhibits on a regular basis (yelling his direction through a megaphone is one of his more “charming” traits) you have to give credit to him as someone who knows how to deliver a visceral thrill and for insisting on doing it with practical effects. Watching the behind-the-scenes on how many of these complicated shots were achieved makes the film a much richer experience and makes the two-disc edition well worth the money.
Gone Baby Gone comes out this weekend and it’s about a pair of Boston cops whose personal and professional lives unravel as they try and solve the mystery of a missing 4 year-old girl.
If the setting and the police procedural sound somewhat familiar, it should. The author of the novel from which the movie has been adapted is Dennis Lehane – the same guy who wrote Clint Eastwood’s 2003 award-winner Mystic River.
Not only is true that Ben Affleck is behind the lens on this one, but he also adapted the screenplay, finally returning to the screenwriting roots that won him an Oscar ten years ago for Good Will Hunting.
I have to give points for the casting on this one. Any movie with Ed Harris gets my attention. That goes double for Morgan Freeman (as long as it isn’t Evan Almighty). I’ll tuck in for a Morgan Freeman movie even if he’s narrating.
Casey Affleck is getting good notices for his performances in this one. It’s odd that my mind doesn’t leap to nepotism when Casey Affleck is starring in a Ben Affleck film, but he’s just that good. Who would have guessed that Casey Affleck would not only have grown out of the shadow of his brother, but have Oscar talk swirling around two performances in one year (the other being The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the elder Affleck lately and how he plugs into the Theater Hopper mythology. Long time readers of the comic know that he’s been a punching bag for us going on four years.
It was all good fun for a while. Remember, this was at the height of the whole “Bennifer” media craze. Plus, he was churning out a lot of crap movies at the time. So he was very easy to hate.
Clearly his time with Jennifer Lopez has made him a little camera shy in recent years. I think he’s done the smart thing by marrying Jennifer Garner and not talking about it, having a baby girl and not talking about it and keeping a low profile by taking bit parts in movies like Hollywoodland.
That said, it’s becoming harder and harder to hate Ben Affleck for the things he does. These days he doesn’t DO anything! That’s why I’m wondering out loud if I should maybe transfer Jared’s hatred onto a more timely celebrity.
I think I have a storyline in me that will tackle this subject and I think I’m going to try and make a play for it next week.
This actually dovetails into something else I wanted to talk about. I hinted at it on Wednesday and now I need to spill the beans.
As you may or may not know, Theater Hopper has been regionally syndicated in the youth publication Juice for the last year or so. It’s available in and around the Des Moines area and is a sister publication to the Gannett-owned Des Moines Register.
After next week, Theater Hopper will no longer appear in Juice. The publication does not have a local reviewer due to the difficulty they’ve had working with local theaters. As such, they’re scaling back their movie section and expanding their style section and Theater Hopper has been dropped as a result.
I realize that, for the majority of you, this information does not impact you in the slightest. But what you don’t know is that if you’re a fan of this comic, it affects you significantly.
In the last year or so, have any of you noticed that I haven’t attempted a significant or lengthy storyline? Sure, there’s been the occasional 3 or 4 strip arc. But nothing in terms of character progression like Jimmy losing his job, introducing Charlie or the time Tom got a monkey?
There’s a specific reason for that.
While Theater Hopper was running in Juice, I made the conscious decision to avoid lengthy storylines or continuity of any form largely due to the fact that I only had enough time to produce three strips a week and one of them was being repurposed for Juice. I couldn’t do a longer storyline because the people reading Juice didn’t know anything about the character histories and would not understand the narrative. So, instead, I stuck to a gag-a-day format and fell into a pattern.
If you were a cynical bastard, you could call this “selling out” – limiting one’s creative output for monetary compensation.
You would be right. I wouldn’t argue you on that point.
Don’t misunderstand me. I was grateful for the opportunity to have my comic in a print publication that was produced locally and shared with a wider audience that I would never have access to otherwise. I will ALWAYS be grateful for that.
But it never sat well with me that I couldn’t do a longer storyline or that I didn’t have the free time or creativity to come up with another solution.
I could have walked away. I could have quit at any time. But I didn’t. What would you do if someone was giving you free money? I was a sell out.
I’m actually kind of relieved that my comics are no longer appearing in Juice because it takes the decision out of my hands. I could have never willfully walked away from the opportunity or the compensation. But now that they’ve made that decision for me, it’s a lot off my mind.
So now Theater Hopper is going in another direction. I suppose there was no reason to tell you why. I could have just let the change in the storytelling speak for itself. But I guess I wanted to get it off of my chest. If there was ever anyone out there reading the comic and thinking I was just going through the motions, I wanted to let them know the reasons why.
Now that everything is out on the table and I can go in any direction I want, I feel liberated. I just wanted to share that.
I think I’ll leave it at that.
Have a great weekend and I’ll see you here Monday, fresh as a daisy!
So today’s comic is a continuation of the story arc I kicked off last Friday in which Jared has a crisis of faith in the wake of Ben Affleck’s directorial debut of Gone Baby Gone. Lest you think I’m pumping up the quality of this picture to service the needs of my story, check out the 93% positive rating over at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s got to count for something.
I know today’s comic doesn’t exactly deliver the funny. But sometimes you have to sacrifice a day for the greater good of the story. Jimmy getting thrown out of his house (lo, those many years ago) didn’t exactly illicit chortles, either.
Exposition, folks. Exposition.
As to why I’m going back to storylines, if you didn’t read last Friday’s blog, I strongly encourage you to do so. I posted it a little last week and it explains a lot. Including stuff going on behind the scenes that prevented me from doing what I’m doing now.
Back to movie talk (sort of), I didn’t get a chance to see Gone Baby Gone this weekend. I mostly spent my time catching up on household duties after being in Chicago last week. I had kind of let the grass grow in our yard a little too long before I left and then we got a full week of rain. So I spent about 2 hours mowing, re-mowing, raking up clippings and fertilizing the front yard and another 3 hours the next day doing the same in the backyard. Plus, I had to clean out the garage and, well… isn’t the minutia of suburban living interesting?
At any rate, if you want to see some photos of a walkabout I took in The Windy City, I posted them to my Flickr account. I was bitching and moaning about it in my personal LiveJournal about it all last week, if that interests you. It might give you some context, especially about the crap-tastic Congress Hotel, where I stayed.
Incidentally, while I was in Chicago last week, I hung out with Gordon McAlpin from Multiplex and we tried to get our weekly installment of The Triple Feature talkcast off the ground with our good friend Joe Dunn from Joe Loves Crappy Movies. Talkshoe was broken, or something, so we had to abandon the show. But we’re giving it another try tonight! So be sure to participate this evening at 9:00 PM CST. Hopefully we won’t have any problems!
That’s about it on my end. See you Wednesday!
I was trying to think of something witty to talk about in today’s blog post or at least something movie-related. But this is the down side of doing a longer story arc. There’s not much to say. I can’t really tease too much what’s going to happen. So I feel like this blog post is the internet equivalent of two people sitting in a room together staring uncomfortably at each other.
*cough*
I guess I can say that I’m having fun writing Jared as emotionally conflicted. It’s probably funnier for me since I know the real-life Jared and he’s about as mild-mannered as you can get. To depict him as aggressively bi-polar (and violent, to boot) is endlessly hilarious to me.
I know that for you, the reader, your perception is somewhat different. After all, this isn’t the first time that Jared has demonstrated random violence in the strip. Some readers have come to know him as mostly quiet, but secretly unhinged. I’ve read descriptions of him where I think to myself “No, that’s not him at all!” But then I look at the comics and think to myself “Well, I can kind of see how you came to that conclusion.”
The tone of today’s comic is somewhat apt because I’ve been in a cranky mood lately. I can’t discuss it. I’m not even sure if I can put a finger on it. But let’s just say that I’m someone who is very in touch with his anger. I’m not advocating violence as depicted in the comic. That’s just taking a mood and exaggerating it for effect. But my personal interpretation of anger is that it can be an effective tool and not always a negative. Anger is the flip side of passion, if you ask me. It can be scary, it can be confrontational, it can be ugly. But anger should never censor itself or be censored by others. People wouldn’t work themselves up into a frenzy if they didn’t care.
And that’s the opposite of anger. Listlessness, uncaring, unengaged. I would rather have someone angry at me than disinterested in me.
Wow. What a weird little essay to attach to a comic about a guy who has lost his hatred toward Ben Affleck.
Not much else for you today. Download Monday’s Triple Feature talkcast if you’re so inclined. It was a really weird show. It just kind of… stopped. I guess that’s what happens when we go a week without talking to each other like we did last week due to technical difficulties. We get rusty.
At any rate, download the show. Complete your collection! Gotta have ’em all!
See you later.
There are some pretty serious problems in the world. But, really – who cares, right? Britney Spears just Botoxed her forehead!
Okay, I know that’s a little sanctimonious. But I’m making fun of myself just as much as the culture that spawned me. Jared’s discriminating taste in regard to a celebrity he chooses to focus his hatred on is a fairly minor concern in the large scheme of things. But how many people do you know retreat into the world of celebrity-bashing when the Real World becomes too oppressive. Exactly. They have a whole network that revolves around it, for goodness sakes!
Has anyone noticed that I’ve been trying to mix things up with the panel arrangement in the last few strips? Something I overlooked during my time with Juice was creative panel arrangement. In the strips I would have to repurpose for the publication, I would have to remain really rigid about the four-panel layout. Because instead of the two-on-two stacked arrangement we have on the site, it was four panels wide in print.
All part of those pesky “patterns” I fell into.
At any rate, I’m really enjoying mixing it up a little. It’s weird to keep drawing Jared so exaggerated. But I suppose since now I’ve established that he’s aggressively bi-polar, I can get away with it.
I’m very excited because I finally scheduled a day off for myself Friday, November 9 to work on the redesign of the site. My good friend Brian Arnold has got us all hooked up through WordPress and now it’s just a matter of me sitting down and designing a page template that I’m going to turn over to a generous reader by the name of Keith Solomon who will transform it into something I can use for WordPress.
Believe me, this is going to be great. The archive system will be beefed up, there will be a calendar on the home page, the commenting system will be back and we have WordPress’s power running the whole thing.
Optimistically, once I get this up and running, I might bring the THorum back, too.
It’s time to circle the wagons. Theater Hopper had a great year in 2006, but 2007 was a little fractured for me. I really want to take the time to make this site a destination for people again – a community. Because that’s a big part of why I got into this in the first place.
Anyway, I guess I can’t share anything more exciting than “I’m taking a day off!” I can’t say for sure when the changeover to WordPress will occur. But I have my sights set for January ’08. Stay tuned.
That’s all for now. Have a great weekend, everybody!
Originally, I planned on posting before the 9:00 PM broadcast of the The Triple Feature talkcast this evening. But for some reason, the site was slow earlier and wouldn’t let me log in to the content editor. So instead of telling you to listen to the live show, I’m telling you to visit TalkShoe.com and download it. I think Joe, Gordon and I had a very good broadcast. Much stronger than last week. This week we went in with a plan. We discussed Dan in Real Life, Lars and The Real Girl, the recent box office success of Saw IV and much more. Including the revelation that Dumbledore is gay and this bad boy from the forthcoming Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem…
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Man, I can’t wait for that movie to come out.
Quick note: You’ll want to be sure and listen to next week’s show live if possible. I have one copy of Michael Moore’s Sicko to give away. The movie hits stores on DVD November 6.
I am remiss that I did not inform my local readers that I would be attending the Iowa Mini-Con comic book convention at the Iowa State Fairgrounds last week. It was a major faux paus on my part. My apologies to the show organizers for failing to help promote. This was the first year for the Mini-Con. I’m sure they could have used the boost – however small.
I’ve only been to two Iowa shows, but these guys also put on the FallCon shows up in Minneapolis and they always do a great job of taking care of the artists. I had a great time talking with the fans, so thanks to those of you who said “Hi.”
I just wanted to take a moment to share this sketch I did on the cover of Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America. In case you’re not a huge comic nerd, Marvel killed off Captain America a few months back and they did this retrospective mini-series that captured the reaction of the Marvel Universe to his assassination. Anyway, along with tradtional covers with their own artwork, Marvel produced these sketch covers for fans so they could take their comics to their favorite artists at conventions and get their take on this status-quo flipping “event”.
And someone gave me theirs.
I don’t know why, but this is what I came up with…
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I took the picture with my camera phone so that’s why it’s a little fuzzy.
This is probably an instance of me thinking that I’m more clever than I actually am. But whenever I saw Cap’s shield, I always thought it looked like a dish for sledding and this was the result. I guess I just like the spirit of the piece and thought you might get a kick out of it.
Last thing I’ll mention – I recently received a nice bit of fan work from one George Mackay, the creator of Eejits. George has done some advertising with us in days gone by, so we consider him a friend of the site. He sent his fan art completely unsolicited and I liked it a lot…
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I’m not sure why I’m not wearing any pants, but I’ll assume that’s just cheeky British humor.
If you’ve never been to Eejits before, check it out. George updates the site each day with a new, weird looking critter. I’ve always enjoyed George’s art. It’s simple and almost child-like in design, but expertly executed in coloring and shading. A fun little diversion.
Lot of images in this post! Hmm! Hope you liked it! I’ll catch up with you again soon. Have a good day!
Happy Halloween, everyone!
I’m a little disappointed that I can’t do a traditional dress-up comic in honor of the holiday. But right now the story consumes all. I care only about telling the story.
And what about the story? You didn’t expect a Jared arc about his Ben Affleck hatred to go on for too long without an appearance from Holden McNeil himself, did you?
Originally, I envisioned teasing things out a little longer. I wanted there to be a question as to if Affleck was actually visiting Jared or if he was just a figment of his imagination. It drew things out a little longer than I would have liked, so I pretty much let the cat out of the bag immediately. I think within the context of Jared’s fragile mental state at the moment, it doesn’t feel out of place.
This is the part of the story where Affleck shows up in a mentorship role. I figured it was the least I could do after regarding him so poorly in past strips. It’s a fun way to flip expectations.
It’s kind of a trick pacing these things. I have a rough outline in my head and lots of ideas as to where I can take the story. But I don’t want to leave you guys on the string for too long. Plus, now that we’re entering the holiday blockbuster season, there will be more films I’m going to want to talk about. I imagine it’ll probably take me another week to wrap this up.
Hey, in case you missed it yesterday, I posted to the site again. Worth a read if you wanted to know what I was up to this weekend.
More recently, we finished recording another Triple Feature talkcast. Check that one out if you have time. I think we put together a really good show on Monday. We came up with a schedule to discuss specific topics and we stuck to it! Amazing what a little organization will do for you!
Something I forgot to mention in Tuesdays blog was something I was doing while I was at the Iowa Mini-Con comic book convention on Saturday.
I totally forgot to bring any business cards or fliers, so I decided to make some business cards on the fly out of some 3 x 5 notecards I had with my merchandise. The idea was to give away these pieces of original art with the URL on them in hopes of motivating people to check out the site.
I gave a way a few and then drew replacements. Most of them are of the Theater Hopper characters in dress up as sci-fi and comic book characters. So I guess you get your Halloween dress-up after all!
Anyway, check ’em out…
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I got a real kick out of thinking of stuff on the fly. It’s a challenge I don’t often undertake. The cards were very well received. Some people asked how much they cost! For me, it was more of a goof. But it got me thinking that stuff like this might be fun to include for people interested in buying the Theater Hopper: Year One or Theater Hopper: Year Two books.
When I did the pre-sale for the first book, I made original sketches part of the deal. I didn’t do it for the second book because I found the process kind of overwhelming the first time. I think I did close to 100 different sketches.
But it’s been a year and I’m recovered. As of right now, I’m adding original sketches as a bonus to every purchase of Theater Hopper: Year One or Theater Hopper: Year Two.
Everything in the store is $15.00 and you save more when you bundle items together. If you make a book purchase and want something specific, e-mail me with your order information and I’ll make it happen.
The holidays are coming up. Get either one of these books for the movie fan in your family. It’s an original gift, to say the least!
Thanks again for your support. Have a great day!