Magno is a playboy adventurer with the super powers of magnetism and invulnerability who fights crime and battles the Axis. He uses his magnetism to fly and to draw or repel metallic objects. Later, he gets a sidekick named Davey. He is never seen in a civilian identity or wearing anything expect his costume. The Clown was his archnemesis, but he also fought villains such as the Cobra. ~Public Domain Superheroes
WEB SITE CUSTOMIZATION
BONUS - If you're into fonts, and you've not discovered BLAMBOT then you should check them out. They offer both paid and free fonts and are supported by an active forum. Many of their fonts are used by professional comic publishing companies and will give your lettering a slick look you won't get with your standard freeware fonts.
ListiMonkey allows you to monitor your brand and its products on twitter (focusing on twitter's new list feature).
Google Translate tools offers some cool translation tools for both webmasters and the average internet user who wants to read webpages in different languages. The three tools offered by this service are Google’s website translator, translation bookmarklets and the translation feature in Google toolbar. The website translator lets you translate your site by creating a drop down translation widget. It generates a snippet of code that can be easily added to the site. ~MakeUseOf
Where do you get your inspiration?
Once you become a professional... there is one thing you learn.... if you need to wait for inspiration... go find another job.
Once you start working on a project.... there is no room for waiting around for the Muses to come and visit you.
You usually have some pretty tight deadlines that must be done “yesterday”.... so the last thing you can do is wait for some sort of inspiration.
Inspiration is for amateurs.
It may seem harsh, but it’s the truth.
Under a tight deadline, there is only one thing you can do.
You sit down at your desk/drawing table/computer and you get started, and you work, work, and work. You work until you are done... or until you hit your deadline.
As an artist, you have no choice... you must be able to sit down and be able to draw whatever the client needs on demand.
Sure some research will be needed, and some of that research might be more “inspiring” then some others. Or some projects might be more inspiring to work on then others. But in the end, you have to be able to sit down and just produce the work.
Sure sometimes you will be happy with the result, some other times you will not. But you cannot afford to wait around. You HAVE to get the work done.
John Romita JR has a great name for this. He calls it the “deadline style”.
Essentially, when you must pay the bills and the deadline for the project you are working on is just around the corner.... there is no two ways about it... you sit down at your work station and you produce the work.
There is no miracle or magic formula.
You sit down and do the work.
I know that I am somewhat repeating myself over and over.... but I often hear the same thing from aspiring creators.
Once in a while, when people find out that I draw for a living, aspiring artists will want to know how to become a professional artist, or aspiring writers will want me to draw their “great idea” of a project that they have come up with.
When I ask them to show me their portfolio or some script samples.... often the answer is the same...
“I have nothing to show, I am not really inspired right now.”
Usually, if I did not know it already, that confirms to me that what I am dealing with is an amateur... in the worst sense of the term. Depending on how well I know the person, I may just tell them that that was a very amateurish answer.
Too often, what that means is that they are just waiting for someone to take them by the hand and “help them” produce the actual work.
By “help them” what I really mean is doing the actual work for them.
Amateurs will sometimes get the germ of an idea, and stop there thinking that someone else can do the rest of the work.
They think that now that they did the hard part, they think that now that they have “created” the idea... they can let someone else put together their “brilliant idea”.
Coming up with the idea is just the tip of the iceberg. After that... the REAL work actually starts.
You sit down and you work.... work and work.
That is how you provoke inspiration.
By working.
Not by waiting around for the work to create itself out of thin air.... or by waiting for someone else to do the work for you.
Not that you cannot have a partner with whom you are creating the work. Heck Flashback universe was done from Jim and I collaborating with each other.
But what I am talking about is when someone just waits around for “divine providence” to do the work for them somehow.
It can take just a few minutes to come up with an idea. But putting that idea together (doing the research, writing various drafts of the script, designing the characters/props/locations) that can take weeks and weeks. Heck that can take months and months.
And sadly there is no time to just wait around.
I know that some will also use the white page syndrome as an excuse... but that is pretty much the same excuse as “I am not really inspired right now”.
Once as I tried to explain to someone that, you do not wait for inspiration, you provoke it. I was told by that person that she did not what to do like Van Gogh and cut off her hear in other to kick-start the creation process.
No need to go that far or to be that drastic.
A very simple trick... make a mark... any mark on your white page. A circle, an “X” or a triangle. Anything. And once you have done that... you have no more excuses. You are no longer facing a white page and can get to work.
The same thing for someone who is facing a blank Word document on the computer screen. Write something.
Anything.
And then keep on writing. And once you have done so, you are no longer facing the blank Word document and you can go back and edit what you did write.
Now if you will forgive me, I will go back and edit what I wrote for this Blog. ;)
Until next time.
Mister Crimson Episode 46
Editors Note: Normally on Wednesdays, Pierre regales us with stories of growing up reading comics in Canada.
And of course there were the TV and movie tie-ins of Dell comics which were: Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Lone Ranger, Cheyenne, Range Rider, Tales from Wells Fargo, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Tonto, Rawhide, Maverick, Gene Autry, Rifleman, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Texas John Slaughter, Elfego Vaca, Lawman, Sugarfoot, Jake Pearson and Tales of the Texas Rangers, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Rex Allen, etc.
By this time, my budget was strained because I was entering college and could not afford the imported titles that I used to like. Besides, some new local titles were worth considering. I am referring to the titles by CRAF Publications. CRAF was born out of the ashes of the defunct Ace Publications, which was closed down due to labor problems. Ace Publications was considered to be the premiere “komiks” publications of the Philippines then. It started in 1947 and ended in 1962. The best local artists and writers were working for Ace then.
At Marvel I also did the same thing, that of buying titles which featured Filipino artists such as Conan the Barbarian, and others. My attention, however, was focused now on the magazine format, black and white comics by publisher Jim Warren. I was amazed at the consistent high quality artwork and scripts being spewed by Eerie, Creepy, Vampirella, and 1984. The “Spanish conquest” and “Filipino invasion” of warren magazines added to my interest. My favorite Spanish illustrators toiling for Warren were: Joe Ortiz, Esteban Maroto, Jose Gonzales, Luis Bermejo, and Auraleon. It was like an all-star list.
By the 2000’s I stopped buying entirely. Graphic novels are unaffordable at P500 pesos and above and now I have resorted to borrowing from aficionados.
The other one to check out is Out of Print, produced by Michael Parkinson. OOP is a parody web comic that uses a lot of familiar Public Domain Heroes in some pretty funny situations.
Out of Print uses characters from the golden age of comic books that are now in the public domain. In fact the strip itself is set around a support group for superheroes that find themselves in that very situation.
Today Flashback Universe presents a unique slant on the illustrious; much rumored, and often hyped, (every digital techno nerd's fantasy come true) mobile hand held computing device. Called many things: iTablet, WebTablet, iPad, HandHeld, & even the wifi touchscreen multi media device, rumors of it's near existence saturating the Internet make it the next SMALL thing in the field of Internet usability.
"We are working to develop new products that contains technologies that our competition will not be able to match. I cannot discuss these new products, but we are very confident in our product pipeline.
Apple believes that the software is the key ingredient. We believe that we are many years ahead of the competition and we welcome any and all competition as long as they do not step on our Intellectual Property.
We plan to deliver state-of-the-art products that I cannot discuss today and are very excited about the products in our pipeline." ~ZDNet
With pictures, pattens, announcements, the lack of announcements, and even phony viral video footage all over the Internet for the last sixteen months the iTablet is definitely the largest & hottest tablet rumor all over the web. Seemingly developed as an extension to Apple's all ready successful mobile device department, the iTablet seeks to fill a niche most would label "needed". All who wait patiently, and some who don't, hope that they'll be able to do 85% of what a desktop will do but on the go while using the iTablet. This includes movies, music, COMICS, ebooks, content management, and even a camera has been mentioned.
It's HOT. You couldn't really avoid hearing about the iTablet even if you wanted to! People want it yesterday, some want to develop for it seeing $$$, and some are clambering Apple for it on an almost daily basis.
It's NOT vaporware (to the best of our knowledge). There has been far too much information about it's hardware and other physical technology, including new pattens and many unnamed sources, for this hot item to fizzle into obscurity.
The general consensus across the Internet is that it will KILL all other tablets currently being developed right now. Sadly, this may include it's little brother the iPod for lots of people. It will also most likely be a huge contributor to the oncoming Paper Comic Apocalypse in 2012 (as predicted by the Mayans.)
"Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.
Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies." ~Gizmodo
Well, if the commenters at Engadget are anything to go by, this concept video pretty much sold them on the device.
Unfortunately, during his interview with Engadget, Steve Ballmer said he had never seen the video and claimed to have no knowledge of any plans of making such a device.
The ability to be able to read comics two pages at a time would be cool, as it would preserve the beloved two page splash, but the screens look tiny. Turning the device would give you a big one page viewing are, but that hinge strip in the middle sort of plays havoc with reading comics tall.
The Crunchpad:Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too." ~TechCrunch
While the above statement implies that the Crunchpad's development has been born out of necessity. The buzz surrounding it is really more indicative of a fanboy's dream machine come to life as the device has been spearheaded largely by a single individual not particularly known for hardware. Like the iTablet the Crunchpad has also permiated the internet over the last sixteen months with pictures, video, and plenty of speculation over it's intended use, it's intended market, and price point which seems to continue to climb.
It started out hot. The announcement of the Crunchpad were quickly followed with doubt and speculation, most of it surrounding the area of hardware production, many bloggers stating that it was MUCH harder than people thought.
Unfortunately, with climbing potential costs, plenty of setbacks, missed target dates, and missed announcements its looking more and more like the Crunchpad may very well be Vaporware.
Wile originally presented as a hybrid webcomputer the Crunchpad is looking more and more like a fancy netbook built on an unfamiliar operating system, with flashy underpowered hardware that will get killed by some, if not most, of the other mobile handheld products out there unless the price point comes way down.
The ARCHOS 9 PC Tablet:ARCHOS once again is leading the way in innovation with the introduction of the Netbook of the future, the ARCHOS 9 PCtablet. The new ARCHOS 9 PCtablet combines the performance of a high end netbook with breathtaking aesthetics, excellent ergonomics and a tactile interface on a superb screen.
Pure lines, extreme thinness (0.67''), 800g and a stunning black finish, the ARCHOS 9 PCtablet pushes the boundaries of elegance and simplicity on a Netbook, fulfilling the expectations of the most mobile users. It provides all the power and comfort needed for daily usage.
With this ultra-light and thin PCtablet, you can watch you videos (including Full HD format), browse the web, “video chat”, or write your mails or documents.." ~ARCHOS
With a 9 inch screen, and HD Video capability, this looks like not only a great solution for reading comics, but for videos as well. The downside is, well, it looks like the screen only works in Landscape (wide) mode, which means you might have to do some wrangling of your comic viewer to read pages in tall mode. (A quick test by me proves that CDisplay can do this very easily.)
Like I mentioned above, Achros are the first ones out the gate with a full sized Tablet device that should be perfect for reading comics on it.
The price is about $550, and the bulkiness is just a little bigger than what one might want in a tablet device. However, the Archos 9 comes loaded with Windows 7, so it's basically a full blown netbook, which makes it more robust than a simple proprietary tablet device. This could make its way into the Corporate world in a big way, which would drive the price down.
PLUG - This would make a great time to mention that Robot Comics has developed a Droid comic reader that can be used on the Achros 5 (their 5 inch Mobile Internet Device) as well as many of the new Android phones coming to the market right now.
These are far from the only tablet devices getting talked about on the internet but they are some of the most promising. (Actually, of late, there has been a new tablet device announced about once a week.) 2010 promises to be an interesting year for comics as these tablets make their way to the market place.
Have a great weekend!
- Caine
As I was talking about the Superman Batman Public Enemies DVD with a colleague at work…. I realized that my next Blog HAD to be about character design.
But at some point… the design work reached a point where when… again let’s say Jim Lee designed a character, it would look fine as drawn by Jim Lee…. But no one else could draw the darn thing and make it look good (for example… Omega Red… or even worse… Kyle Rayner with the “dog collar” Green Lantern design… damn that was a poor Green Lantern design).
