The Publishing Gauntlet – Part Six

Posted by on June 22, 2005 No comments

The next article about the creation of the Exalted comic is up:

The Publishing Gauntlet – Part Six

The art process and importance of good panel-to-panel storytelling. I also reveal the guest artist who’s going to be drawing the ‘History of Exalted’ back-up story in issue #1 and it’s a doozy.

The solicitation info for the Previews catalogue got sent off yesterday. Exalted #1 will be solicited for October release. It feels a bit crazy. The issue one cover is pretty much done and it kicks all kinds of ass. I’ll show it off later this week.

Posted by on June 20, 2005 No comments
My boss Erik was married yesterday. A really nice ceremony in the morning, a traditional Chinese tea ceremony in the afternoon and a reception/banquet at night all served to make Sunday a busy, busy day. After the massive dinner and things died down around 11:30pm or so, a pile of the Udon kids dashed out to a Chinese karaoke place to keep partying until 3am or so. I learned a bunch of new drinking games, ate really spicy food I’d never had before and pasted off a bottle of red wine and shots of vodka. I guess my body is getting ready for con season 🙂

Tonight Gal was hankering for some Gatorade and when the variety store within walking distance didn’t have any we drove to one a few minutes away. I walk over the fridges there and all of a sudden I see that they’re selling pop from The Pop Shoppe.

Holy shit! The Pop Shoppe! Memories flood back growing up and my Dad taking us to the Pop Shoppe store in Oshawa to refill our bottles and pick out the cool flavors. Red crates of Pop Shoppe pop in our basement staying cold beside the old freezer. Unbelieveable.

I bought two bottles just to have them. Next time I see Dad I’ll give him one and he’ll be super surprised. Kind of a neat day-after-Father’s-Day memory out of the blue.

Heh. Groggy day, but a good one and relatively productive. Heading to bed early. G’Night.

Batman Begins

Posted by on June 18, 2005 No comments

I saw Batman Begins last night with some friends and ran into more friends at the theatre in a nice little coincidence.

I remember seeing the 1989 Batman movie with my brother. I took him to the flick as his birthday present and we had a blast. After that was the first time I ever read a DC comic. Up until that point I’d been a real Marvel zombie.

Flash forward 16 years and here we are.

I may have nostalgia for the original Tim Burton film but Batman Begins is the best Batman that’s been put to film so far. The casting works incredibly well. All of the characters have a very strong sense of self that keeps the movie entertaining even though it takes over an hour before even Batman appears in costume. It’s character-heavy, menacing and well built with some really effective interactions. The supporting cast makes the whole thing click – Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman), Alfred (Michael Caine), Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and Ducard (Liam Neeson) in particular really knock it out of the park.

In fact the Bruce Wayne scenes work so well that when Batman is in costume kicking ass he’s oddly less compelling. I think that was also hurt by the scatter-shot editing and shaky cam they used for the action shots, which projected up on the big screen just made it look like visual jumble instead of sleek and cool fighting.

The plot has holes and there are scenes that could’ve been done better, but the characters are so sharp you can let the little things slide. It’s a smart comic book movie in the caliber of Spider-Man 2, X-Men 2 and Sin City as far as quality of adaptation. It’s really good.

A 13-year-old Zub would’ve been hypnotized all over again and gone absolutely comic book crazy.

Maybe I’ll ask Joe if he wants me to take him to Batman Begins as his birthday present this year…

Mine Instead

Posted by on June 17, 2005 No comments

Hey Jim,

Remember how you used to enjoy sketching and just fooling around in Photoshop trying to make stuff look neat? Back before it was part of your job?

No, neither do I and that’s a damn shame.

You’re pretty stressed with all these projects, screwed up schedules, weird sleep patterns and upcoming cons. You don’t have time to indulge in art for yourself or just messing around with some different techniques. You have stuff to do, people to see and sleep to catch up on.

Screw it, I did a sketch up anyways:



Turn of a Phrase II

Posted by on June 16, 2005 No comments

Remember I told you about Gala’s wonderful turn of a phrase?

We were talking about Erik’s wedding on Sunday…

Gala: “Dinner isn’t served until 7:30? Man, I sure hope they have some of those… *pause*… pumpkin wumpkin dribblets… you know what I mean?”

Jim: “You mean appetizers?”

Gala: “Yeah.”

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Posted by on June 15, 2005 No comments

Holy Moly… I don’t know where the Exalted wallpaper got linked from, but my personal website has just gone down which means that all my LJ pics are toasty as well.

I’m happy the image is popular, but now I have to figure out how to get my website back up and find some alternate hosting for that image.

Gimme a few hours here…

The Publishing Gauntlet – Part Five

Posted by on June 15, 2005 No comments


Exalted Wallpaper Image
click for large version
 Up at Newsarama this morning:

The Publishing Gauntlet – Part Five

It looks like the articles are going over quite well with readers, professionals and retailers which is quite gratifying. I figured that peeking behind the scenes like this would be a bit risky, but it seems to be paying off so far. 2 weeks until Origins and Exalted #0 goes on sale.

Like all the special con issues Udon has released over the past 3 years, we’ve done a low print run since sales are almost entirely through the conventions and/or for promotion to retailers. We’ll be selling issue #0 at the cons for $5.00 each. The regular issues starting in October will be priced like regular comics… final price is still undetermined, but I expect it to be between $2.99 and $3.50 per issue.

We’ll also be selling a 19 x 25 art print of Jasara for $25.00 each. This limited to 500 copies numbered print is a large litho-style 4-color print, vivid and quite frame-worthy… you’d usually pay $40+ for something like this at most conventions. The line art was drawn by Noi Sackda, the character penciller for the comic, with incredible paints by the talented Christine Choi.

So for $30 you can have the special edition comic and a gorgeous art print. Not too shabby.

On the left I have a wallpaper image done up of the Jasara art print piece… click on the thumbnail for the 1024×768 version… then imagine that picture vivid, crisp and almost two feet tall on your wall 🙂

Zero Dinner

Posted by on June 13, 2005 No comments

Here’s the Exalted comic crew (minus our colorist Roberto, who doesn’t live in Canada) celebrating the zero issue’s arrival:



Greg Boychuk – Background artist extraordinaire
Noi Sackda – Killer Character artist


Gally – Shy but skilled Co-Writer
Erik Ko – Udon Head Honcho


Zub – Ringleader on this mad project.

Delivery!

Posted by on June 13, 2005 No comments

What’s this?

Many strange boxes have arrived postmarked to Udon…. here are some of them stacked neatly together:

and inside…

Exalted #0 arrived today from the printers! I can’t wait until Origins at the end of the month and all the conventions beyond. For me, the summer starts today 🙂

More photos later… we’re having a celebratory dinner in a couple hours… I’ll get some goofy photos of the crew with their copies of issue zero.