COMIC BOOK MAKER 2.0, PART 3: COVERS AND CROSSOVERS

[MattBrady]

by Ryan McLelland

Welcome to Comic Book Maker 2.0 – following the creating of the Arcana Studios comic book Philly from initial conception to pitch to production to release.

In the last column I talked about our pitch and how we signed on with Arcana Studios to publish our superhero comic Philly. It was a glorious time to be had especially for myself and artist Jim Hanna, but not for our inker/colorist Raph Hedon or letterer Jim Reddington. It wasn’t that either of them didn’t enjoy the project but as we went from pitch to completing issue one, both gentlemen found that they couldn’t continue on with our project and the various other projects they already had in motion. They both left the product and Hanna and I found ourselves already hitting a stopping point.

Hanna and I decided that we’d start looking around for our new compatriots by posting adverts over on Digital Webbing. As Hanna got to work penciling issues two and three I started thinking about getting our book out there, no matter how little of it there really was. The first place was MySpace, a site I’d been on for awhile and now one of the most popular websites on the World Wide Web.

I started the webpage myspace.com/phillythecomic for a comic that no one ever heard of. We already had some art, our logo, and a synopsis of the comic so why not create a page so that we could start introducing the comic to those who might have interest in purchasing it in the future? Of course, at first, the ones who joined Philly’s ‘friends list’ were a lot of friends of both myself and Hanna, but slowly and steadily we joined groups within MySpace and we started getting contact from those interested in the book. When ComicSpace popped up, a great site for comic creators and fans, comicspace.com/phillythecomic was a page that went up right away as well. That was a complete no-brainer as the site started to grow by leaps and bounds from day one. The site is still limited at the moment and the only information there is the same reiterated from the MySpace page but it doesn’t matter. Fans might find one site then browse on to the next. Friends grew and grew and our grassroots campaign quickly began. Without spending a dime or having to show off massive amounts of what we were trying to do we had a small loyal group of comic fans interested in looking at what we have.

The ads at Digital Webbing began to pour in while we worked on our biggest selling point: the cover. Hanna drew up several designs and we finally nailed one down that would feature all of our main characters on the cover for issue 1. A friend of mine, Jean-Paul Mavinga, agreed to contribute an alternate cover featuring our sexy vigilante Katt. Why have a sexy woman on the cover when it really doesn’t tell the reader anything about the book? It’s probably because I’ve always been a fan of hot women on comic book covers. Who doesn’t stop when they see an incredible cover by Adam Hughes, Phil Noto, or Greg Horn? Who didn’t see Lady Death back in the nineties and say, “Who cares what this book is about? This chick is hot!” I was one of those guys and so I thought Philly might benefit from having a very sexy gal on the cover. Mavinga was just the man for the job and he delivered a cover that completely blew us away. We were also lucky in snagging Marat Mychaels (known for Brigade back in the early Image days and X-Force: Shattershot) who provided an excellent cover for our third issue. We premiered the covers on both of our pages and the Arcana Comics message boards and the comments seemed fairly positive on all of them.

Now a strange turn of events brought the first Philly crossover together long before issue one even hits the stands. At this year’s SPX I was very happy to meet Kevin McShane, creator/writer/artist of a great indy title called Toupydoops. I’d reviewed two issues of Toupydoops in my Your Indy Weekly column and was finally glad to meet the man behind the pen because his book is one of those books that everyone who enjoys comics really should be reading.

Toupydoops is a comic where comic books, not movies, are produced in Hollywood. Superheroes are the biggest stars in the world and Toupydoops moves to L.A. with his best friend Teetereater when he gets an audition to play a bad guy in an issue of Superman. The comic is a great ‘behind the scenes’ comic and reminds me a lot of Swingers featuring funny looking animals. Kevin and I got to talking for a long time and it was then when I had my Tobias Funke idea.

Those who had watched Arrested Development while it was on TV might know what I’m getting it, but if you never watched the show there was a character named Tobias Funke, played terrifically by actor David Cross, who was a former therapist that decided he wanted to be an actor. For the length of the show he tried his hardest to get parts like Frightened Inmate #2 but never achieved his goals. Series creator Mitchell Hurwitz had wanted to get Cross as a guest-star onto another television show and credit that part to ‘Tobias Funke’ and not to Cross, chronicling the experience of Funke getting the part on Arrested Development. The idea never came to fruition however as Arrested Development was cancelled in its third season thus killing off one of the best comedies ever to hit television.

So I had a thought. If Toupydoops is about a character trying to get roles like Frightened Inmate #2 in comic books and I had a comic book coming out with a bunch of superheroes, why not combine the two, especially with such an amazingly written book like Toupydoops? While Philly’s first story-arc had already been plotted by this point, Kevin and I talked about what if Toupydoops got a part in Philly to finally play a bad guy and the behind-the-scenes of it all would be showcased in his comic. Kevin loved the idea and got to work on it for his very next comic. Of course this would mean that my crossover issue would come out about ten months later with Toupydoops #5 hitting stands in January, but I thought it very cool. The best part? Toupy’s roommate, Teeter, ends up getting the role instead of Toupy and ends up playing the villain in the book, much to Toupydoops chagrin. Philly doesn’t play a huge part in his issue, but it’s fun to still see both comics intertwined.

In the end the Digital Webbing ads paid off in spades. We landed an incredible inker by the single name of NichX. Who goes by a single name these days? Sting? Madonna? Forget all those people because the inking and coloring this man does was so incredibly amazing that his style fit in perfectly to our book. We were also very lucky in landing Andrew White as our new letterer. White has already lettered multiple books in the industry including books for our publisher Arcana. White’s style was different from that we saw in the first issue, but different turned out to be great. NichX and White both agreed to come aboard and we were off on the finishing touches to our issue two and the other issues we had coming up.

It was a sigh of great relief. Nothing is worse then having to replace those who helped launch our pitch but we knew that NichX and White understood what we were hoping to accomplish with Philly and those first pages they did for our issue 2 turned out to be outstanding. No more worrying about who was going to put the book together, now we all just needed to worry about putting the actual book together. Why? Because even though we had one issue in the can, Arcana wasn’t going to solicit our book until we had at least three issues ready to print.

In Two Weeks: Meeting the cast of Philly and the skepticism that suddenly creeps up.

Ryan McLelland is a writer/columnist for Newsarama known for his columns ‘It Came From The Quarter Bin’ and ‘Your Indy Weekly’. Having stretched his legs with his Wise Intelligence series, Ryan’s ‘Philly’ will be released this April 2007 from Arcana Studios. Send love/hate mail to: rdmclelland@hotmail.com.

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[PawelGoj]

Ah the troubles of getting a book out there. Somehow it would not be as satisfying without the hassle. Well...good luck guys, I am sure something will come of this and I will be looking for a TPB in the future.

[tiso_spencer]

A comic about the city I live in. Ok, well time to check this out.

[mavinga]

Good man, good article and good work. Keep at it.