Showing posts with label comic books. Show all posts
Comic Book Makeup Tutorial (4 Different Ways) for all you cosplayers out there
Credit to Madeyewlook!
Has Hollywood Destroyed Comics or Brought Them New Life?
I personally think Hollywood has been a mixed blessing. It gets more people aware of comics, but reinforces the belief that they are all about superheroes. Anyway, this isn't my post, this article was written by Tom L Coad.
Source
Comic books have been around with us for well over a
century, but the origins to the "Golden Age" of comic books; the DC
and the Marvel comic superheroes as we know today have been around since World
War II. The first major comic book hero was Superman, a character who donned
himself with tight colourful tights and a bright red cape. Through the
following decades we have seen our most favourite comic book heroes' change and
develop dependent on the world around them. Over the last 10 years we have seen
different faces portray the character of Clark Kent and actors ready themselves
for the position of the Dark Knight himself, Bruce Wayne. But has Hollywood
displayed our most loved characters in the best way, or have they gone against
the origins and fans and developed a character that will be a lot more than its
character profile predecessor and in turn be more approachable to a wider
audience?
The transition from comic book strip pages to the small
screen wasn't a short one. The early life of comic book superheroes was short;
emerging in the late 1930's characters became stars over the war period however
the massive fan base began to diminish around the 50's. The superhero genre was
coming to an end, but characters did not die off. They were revamped and
brought to life through the magic of TV. Captain Marvel, Captain America,
Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman had already begun to hit the smaller screen over
the 40's but over the next decade these comic book heroes became television
superheroes. This movement saw a resurrection of characters to comics, as well
as new breed of hero's that came along with them. The result was a snow ball
effect of comic book characters to the bigger screen. Batman the TV series with
Adam West was one of the earliest transfers of action hero's to big theatre
screens, and with the success of Star Wars the "Sci-Fi" genre was
born. This capitalized into further feature films such as the commercial hit of
Superman with Chris Reeves.
This began a new age of comic heroes; printing became
expensive so comics were minimal but the cinema provided a new venture and
provided the expansion to a larger audience. Comic characters were now becoming
main stream and were no longer for geeks or sci-fi buffs but acceptable to the
entire public domain. The momentum carried from the 80's with sequels to
Superman and Tim Burton's Batman being a phenomenon as well as a cult classic.
However do our comic caped heroes really work when stripped from the pages of a
graphic novel? Is it a true representation of the character as we know them
when they are brought to the big screen? For most this could cause a great
debate. The cinematic view of Batman for instance is a theatrical and dramatic
performance which contains the gothic nostalgia of Burton, but as for the
character, he seems sadly missed. The film briefly depicts the killing of his
parents that all fans will all know of; however the character behind the mask
has little development. We do not get to see the character step through life;
we do not see the stages that led Bruce to become the Bat as it is never
displayed on the screen. Instead we sit back and admire the theatrical display
as most will know the back story. The Joker (as played by Jack Nicholson) is
more of a namely title. The character has much greater presence within the
motion picture, just because his character is so fun to watch although the
comic character is no more developed.
I believe this film had a significant influence to future
comic heroes that have been developed into film. If you look into the many
comic heroes that have come to the big screen and are now onto DVD it's easy to
see how Hollywood may have changed the characteristics of our favourite
superheroes, or like this motion picture the character was never depicted, a
story of when good fought evil is told. However there has been a new age of
comic books and films. Late comic novels such as "The Watchmen" (also
produced into a blockbuster hit) began a generation of "dark" comic books
that displayed not just similarities to us a character but to the world around
us. We can now begin to see how our caped crusaders are not much different to
you and me. They face a moment of weakness; we see how the character can relate
to us as a mere human. In the same narrative we see that a hero is also
affected by notions of love and affection like ourselves and a hero can also
face pain, grievance and other feelings. In the same way we can relate to these
characteristics, we ourselves can believe that we are superheroes in our own
right if we live with the belief justice will prevail.
Through this era and into the millennium we have seen an
array of DC and Marvel comics fly onto the big screen, although the debate over
these films will continue to whether they are bad or good. I for one enjoy the
majority of comic book characters that face the Hollywood make-over, although
some have been better than others. Arguments will still occur over the fact
comic book characters transfer to cinematic superheroes but the process has
been in place for years. Marvel have worked long and hard to produce the best
action sci-fi films over this decade and with upcoming films like "The
Avengers" and "The Amazing Spider-Man" I believe they are trying
to amend any previous mistakes. With prequels to these both movies, all
characters from the main plot line have been displayed before so there is no
need for a back story to them so let's hope the action storyline any negative
reviews against the films. Along with the films there is sure to be gifts,
novelty goods and figures. These will be collectables for most, but for others
this is their first generation of super hero so these entities will bring these
characters a new life through the face of Hollywood.
Source
Limbo Creators Edition Pt.1 | Dan Watters & Caspar Wijngaard | Strip Pan...
TPub Alums Dan Watters and Caspar Wijngaard talk through their IMAGE comic Limbo with the sharp commentary from the great Hassan.
Organisation Is Key For Successful Film-Makers
With the first entry in the Twisted Dark Film Competition already received, we thought we'd do a series of posts on filmmaking.
First up - Organisation
by Harvey McEwan
Source:
First up - Organisation
by Harvey McEwan
Film making is a highly collaborative medium, and that means you need to be able to not only balance large amount of organisational information, but you also need to be able to relate to and manage large groups of people. Anyone who is setting out to make films for themselves is well advised to make sure they have plenty of practice when it comes to writing lists - and following through when it comes to being able to score items off said lists.
From insurance for your actors and crew to props and costume design, there are many factors that must be considered when it comes to creating a short or feature film and it's a very good idea to put together a timeline and planner far in advance of your actual proposed filming dates. You're sure to find that many people and businesses require you to book in advance, and finding out that you're missing one piece of the puzzle at the last minute can cost you a large whack of cash as well as valuable time.
Equipment is one of the biggest expenses faced by film makers, so making sure you are able to optimise your time to help you make sure you never, for example, have a camera sitting unused for an afternoon while you re-write a scene or re-costume an actor. Guaranteed there will be last minute hiccups and distractions to your plans, but if you have already thought out as many scenarios as possible in advance, you are far more likely to be able to minimise the disruption to your schedule and your shoot.
One of the hardest things for budding film-makers to manage is filming on location, especially when it's an outdoor or tricky place. The best way to ensure you are organised and ready to deal with a difficult shoot is to make sure you set aside plenty of time to scout out all of your locations. Plan your trip with any other key members of crew you have, your camera or sound man is sure to be able to spot potential problems that you may not. You should also ensure you take a notepad with you and write down everything from the kind of toilet facilities there are in the area to anything you think could be considered a health and safety risk.
If you're planning to film scenes on location, you will need to make sure your team will not be put at risk while you are there. This could mean you need to take account of things such as food provisions, or even consider things such as heater rental if you are planning on filming in a cold location for an extended duration. Without a happy and healthy crew and actors who are well taken care of, you'll soon find your film floundering before you've even managed to catch the footage.
Source:
And the Theatrics Kickstarer is LIVE!
We launched a kickstarter for the graphic novel THEATRICS.
In less than 2 days we have already received over $3,500 in pledges! Thank you guys for your support.
Please share the kickstarter where people can read the comic for free - together we can get this book printed and in stores!
Here's the link! ==> http://tiny.cc/Theatrics
In less than 2 days we have already received over $3,500 in pledges! Thank you guys for your support.
Here's the link! ==> http://tiny.cc/Theatrics
Another review of Theatrics!
Just found a #nice review on the internet. Apparently the #comic is 'something special' #Thanks to the great guys ReviewFix.com
Click here to read ==> http://rite.ly/l/j9DM
Click here to read ==> http://rite.ly/l/j9DM
Competition winner
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Remember this:
We asked you to guess what the story was about and the winner was Nimesh who was spookily accurate with his guess (we think he hacked our computers).
We then asked you to submit scenarios for Kenny to escape from for this as yet untitled comic (because the darn producers STILL can't make up their minds).
We have had over two dozen responses (most by email) and we are pleased to announce the first winner - Zoe!
Zoe's story idea involved Kenny getting injured and having to get to medical supplies whilst in pain, with limited movement and while being chased. We plan on featuring that in one of the stories. The actor will make a short video shout out to Zoe on set soon, but in the meantime, Zoe will feature in the comic as a zombie. See her images below.
Thank you for the great suggestion Zoe. If anyone else has any more scenarios for Kenny to escape from, send them in! Any ones we use will mean you get drawn as a zombie and featured in the comic.
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"Theatrics is an INCREDIBLE comic!" "Page after page of masterpiece"
In the latest review for Theatrics, we got 5 Stars! A big thank you to the team at Pipedream comics for reading it and giving such a glowing review. Big props to Leonardo Gonzalez and Jan Wijngaard for making the visuals what they are (awesome).
Our favourite quote was the last line:
"The curtain has been raised on a masterpiece so get your tickets and enjoy the show."
If you haven't read it yet, give it a shot and let us know what you think. It's free to read:
==> http://tiny.cc/Theatrics
Brian K Vaughn's RUNAWAYS gets picked up for a series
You can read the whole article at ICV2 here:
We're in the top 1%
Wow!
We have been listed on Topwebcomics for less than a week and already #Theatrics has jumped into the top 1% of rankings. Thank you to all our fans who have helped us on this by voting. You really made a difference. You can vote everyday so please do take 10 seconds to vote by clicking here ==> http://topwebcomics.com/vote/21558 (voting can be done in 7 seconds!)
We're very proud of this achievement and it wouldn't have happened without you so THANK YOU for supporting TPub Comics!
www.theatricscomic.com
Comic Book sales figures for July 2016
July 2016 Comic Channel Market Share
DC Entertainment 35.36%
Marvel Comics 34.20%
Image Comics 8.15%
IDW Publishing 4.49%
Dark Horse 2.83%
BOOM! Studios 2.05%
Archie Comics 1.36%
Dynamite Entertainment 1.19%
Oni Press 1.14%
Valiant Entertainment 1.06%
Other Non-Top 10 8.18%
Top 10 Comics -- July 2016
Marvel Comics 34.20%
Image Comics 8.15%
IDW Publishing 4.49%
Dark Horse 2.83%
BOOM! Studios 2.05%
Archie Comics 1.36%
Dynamite Entertainment 1.19%
Oni Press 1.14%
Valiant Entertainment 1.06%
Other Non-Top 10 8.18%
Top 10 Comics -- July 2016
- Justice League #1
- Justice League Rebirth #1
- Batman #2
- Civil War II #3
- Batman #3
- Nightwing Rebirth #1
- Civil War II #4
- New Super Man #1
- Nightwing #1
- Hal Jordan & The Green Lantern Corps Rebirth #1
ICv2: DC Tops Marvel's Market Share in Comic Stores for July
German Twisted Dark coming soon!
Stories from Twisted Dark have been translated into Spanish, French and even Welsh, but this is the first time a whole volume has been translated. Léon Othenin-Girard met us at Fantasy Basel in Switzerland and very kindly translated vol 1 into German.
It will be available on our app soon. If anyone else would like to translate any of our stories, please get in touch!
Webcomics 101
Traffic in the last 90 days:
Sorry for the blurry pic but it's Neil posting this time and I suck at technology.
Naturally we're excited and we thought we'd share some basic tips to help others who are thinking about making their own webcomics. We could list everything we've learned, but @jasonloveslife has a nice short article so we thought we'd just let him lead the way. Take it away Jason.
Creating a Good Action Comic | Moon Knight (2014)
We have just discovered a new talent! Look for more postings from Hassan soon! IN this episode he analyses Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey's Moon Knight.
My time at TPub is coming to an end(ish)
It's hard to believe three months has already passed since I got here. I honestly wasn't sure what I was in for when I initially joined, would I jump straight into making comics with them? Would I be doing normal office stuff? Would I be making tea all of the time? The answer is all of the above. Granted I've not started the comic until recently and most of the tea was for myself.
In my three months here I probably did more work generally than I did my last year of school. There was never a shortage of things to do that Neil wouldn't prod me about finishing. Whether or not I actually finished the work depended on
Con work was my favourite part of working here, and even after I leave I intend to keep on working at conventions with TPub. The early starts and late ends are total killers but working at the tables is very fun when I'm not falling asleep (see top of post).
My biggest gain from this was probably the feedback I had for my art. In the past three months my art has improved rapidly with the feedback of Neil and co. My end goal is art, there's no doubts about it, so having my art improve in such a short span is extremely valuable. Another big change I've seen is my work ethic. Before I joined my work ethic was total shit (and kinda still is) but working here has set me to be more diligent in the future, although I still have to work on that.
Although my internship is coming to an end I'm still sticking around TPub part time. I'm getting a part time job in the meantime to make some money while I do comic stuff at TPub. Me and Neil are making a comic about Hapkido founder Choi Yong Sool which will be my first proper comic book. After that I might do art for some more TPub projects depending on what they've got planned, or see if I can try my luck elsewhere, only time will tell.
Overall the internship has been a very positive experience for me. Although I was initially adamant to the idea of work with no pay I feel like I've come out more focused and with industry connections/experience that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
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| Neil the Beaut |
What is selling well in comics this week?
Top cash-register sales last week:
·
Saga
V6 (978-1632157119, $14.99)
·
Monstress
by Marjorie Liu (978-1632157096, $9.99)
·
Walking
Dead V25 (978-1632156594, $14.99)
·
Saga
V1 (978-1607066019, $9.99)
·
Southern
Bastards V3 (978-1632156105, $14.99)
Bookscan bestseller
list:
·
Saga
V6,
·
Walking
Dead,
·
Brandon
Sanderson’s White Sand,
·
Monstress,
·
Paper
Girls a
·
Southern
Bastards V3.
New York Times bestseller list:
Saga V6 remains at #1.
Monstress debut at #3.
Key titles shipping now:
MARCH BOOK THREE by John Lewis (978-1603094023, $19.99)
DISNEY’S DESCENDANTS CINESTORY V2 (978-1772753288, $9.99)
DEADLY CLASS V4 by Rick
Remender (978-1632157188, $14.99)
If anyone has any theories on what Rudy is going to do next, tell us!
Blog advice (to help market your comics)
Blog Statistics – A Guide for Small Business Owners (Part 1)
Lynn Serafinn explains how a deep analysis of your visitors, page views and bounce rate can help you understand the effectiveness of your blog marketing.
One of the business andmarketing services we offer our clients isblogging support. As part of that service, we review their blog statistics every six weeks, to get a better idea of how well our marketing efforts are working. While just the WORD statistics can make many business owners’ eyes glaze over, I find them fascinating. I like to look at them from different angles, and try to understand the underlying picture they are painting.
For statistics to be genuinely useful business tools, they cannot be examined solely on a quantitative level. You have to know how to get the ‘juice’ out of them, and how to turn numbers into qualitative information that speaks about how your audience is engaging with your brand. So, in the next two articles, I’ll be taking you on a whistle-stop tour of some of the basic statistics for your blog, and what they can tell you.
The ideas I’ll be sharing are taken from ‘Chapter 16: Pay Attention to Stats’ of my upcoming book The Social Entrepreneur’s Guide to Successful Blogging, which I am aiming to launch in January 2016 (you can get a sneak peek of it if you click the link). While abridged from what I share in the book, these two articles will hopefully provide some useful tips and insights.
Analytic Tools
To monitor and review your blog statistics, you have to start by choosing the right analytic tools. While I talk about these in the book, for the purpose of these articles, I don’t want to launch into a comparison of the various tools available. Rather, for those of you who do not have one in place, below are three free analytic tools that can perform the functions we’ll be examining. Of course, there are many others from which to choose.
- Google Analytics – http://piwik.org/
- Piwik – http://piwik.org/
- AWSTATS – typically available from your control panel (cpanel) via your web host.
Visits (or Visitors)
Depending on which analytic tool you use, this parameter is called either ‘visits’ or ‘visitors’. This refers to the number of times people have come to your website (per day, month or year), regardless of how many unique/individual people it represents. For example, if one person comes to your site four times over the course of a month, it counts as four visits. Simply landing on your website qualifies as a ‘visit’, regardless of how much time they spent on it.
For this figure to have any meaning, it has to be evaluated in conjunction with the next four parameters – unique visitors, page views, bounce rate and average time on site.
Unique Visitors
The ‘unique visitors’ parameter is the number of individual people who visit your site during the selected time period. Well, technically, it is the number of IP addresses(individual computers or mobile devices) that have accessed your site. ‘Unique visitors’ differs from ‘visits’ because one person/computer might log into your website multiple times on the same day/month. Conversely, one person might log into the same website from multiple computers or mobile devices. Here are two examples demonstrating how these two possibilities might show up in a site’s statistics:
- A public computer at a cybercafé counts as one IP address. If 100 people a month viewThe New York Times online every day for a month on the same public computer, it would count as one unique visitor, but 3,000 monthly visits.
- Let’s say you regularly read a specific blog once every week, sometimes on your home PC and sometimes on your mobile phone. On that site’s stats, it would show up as twounique visitors, but four monthly visits.
Page Views
As the term implies, pages views represents the number of pages people openedduring a selected time period (per day, month or year). Notice that I said ‘opened’, not ‘read’. Just because someone clicked on a link does not mean they actually read the content. (We’ll come back to this very important point in Part 2 of this article series.)
The ratio between page views, visits and unique visitors can tell us a lot about how our readers are consuming our content. For example, if your stats reveal you have had 1,000 unique visitors, 4,000 visits and 8,000 page views over the past month, it would tell you that – on average – each of your readers comes to your site four times a month, and reads two articles every time they are there. Of course, averages never tell the actual story.What is more likely true is that about 70% of your 1,000 unique visitors viewed your site for less than a minute and then clicked away without returning, and a small percentage (10% or less) consumed several articles in one sitting, or perhaps bookmarked an article to reread it later that month.
The only way to get a clearer picture of what might actually be happening is to look at this ratio in the context of two more parameters – bounce rate and time spent on site.
Bounce Rate
Years ago when I first heard the term ‘bounce rate’, it scared me. I thought it meant something was wrong with my site, causing people to receive an error page. Fortunately, ‘bounce rate’ doesn’t mean your site is broken; but a consistently high bounce rate is still not something you want to see in your stats.
‘Bounce rate’ refers to the percentage of your blog visits in which only a single page was viewed. In other words, if someone comes to your site, looks at one page and then leaves without checking out anything else on your site, that’s called a ‘bounce’.
Analysts frequently make a big deal about bounce rate, saying that a high bounce rate is always a sign that visitors are not interested in your content. But, again, without context a bounce in and of itself doesn’t tell us much. Here are a few different scenarios, ALL of which would show up as a ‘bounce’:
- A visitor landed on your site, took one look at it and clicked away without bothering to read your article.
- A new visitor read one of your articles from beginning to end. They didn’t feel the need to read anything else during that visit, but they liked the article so much they ended up subscribing to your blog so they could get future updates.
- One of your regular blog visitors came to read your latest article. They didn’t read anything else because they’ve already read it all!
- A new or returning visitor checked out one of your blog posts. They were on their way to work and didn’t have time to read it, so they bookmarked it to come back to later.
As you can see, not all ‘bounces’ are created equal. In my opinion, only the first of these examples is an actual ‘bounce’. While, as a rule of thumb, you want to see your bounce rate go DOWN over time, you cannot really evaluate the impact of this figure without considering the other statistics, including ‘average time spent on site’, which we’ll look at in the next article.
SOMETHING TO BEAR IN MIND: There is another possible cause for pages to ‘bounce’ – comment spammers. Most comment spammers use robots that simply land on your site, leave a spam comment and leave. While that might be a relief to know, you should also bear in mind that comment spammers are probably also responsible for a certain percentage of your other statistics, e.g. unique visitors, visits and page views. While many analytic tools are able to tell the different between a legitimate viewer and a robot, your stats may include visits from these insidious invaders.
A Few Calculations
All of these statistics must be looked at collectively to get a feel for their possible meaning. For example, let’s say your stats for last month looked like this:
- Unique visitors = 5,000
- Visits = 10,000
- Page views = 20,000
- Bounce rate = 75%
Now let’s see how these stats work together to form a clearer picture of what’s going on:
- How many times did our visitors come to our site last month? Statistically, we can see that on average, each of our unique visitors visits our site twice a month (10,000 divided by 5,000) and views a total of four pages per month (20,000 page views divided by 5,000). Most analytic tools will calculate this figure for you. However, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
- How many times did our visitors REALLY come to our site last month?Going deeper requires looking at the bounce rate. A bounce rate of 75% means that only 25% of our 10,000 visits resulted in more than one page been accessed. 25% of 10,000 is 2,500. Thus 2,500 visits resulted in more than one page view.
- How much content did our visitors REALLY look at when they came to our site? To get a better idea of what that means, we could then subtract all the visits that contained only ONE page view (7,500) from the total page views (20,000), giving us a remainder of 12,500. That figure represents the number of pages accessed on those 2,500 visits where more than one page was accessed. If we then divide 12,500 by 2,500, we can estimate that an average of five pages were accessed on each of these visits.
- How many people does this REALLY represent? The answer to that question is more difficult to pin down. As we said earlier, due to fact that people access our webpages from so many different points of origin these days, the ‘unique visitors’ figure probably does not give us an accurate picture of how many people are actually viewing our site. But if we were to ignore those inevitable discrepancies and take them at face value, I would be inclined to subtract the 75% bounce rate from the unique visitor total, leaving us with a figure of 1,250 unique visitors who viewed more than one page that month.
Putting all that together, we might estimate that about 1,250 individual visitors each came to our site on two separate occasions last month, during which time they accessed a total of about ten pages.
In real life, however, it is far more likely that a small percentage of these 1,250 individuals were significantly more engaged than the others. And as we said, many of those ‘unique’ individuals are likely to be the same person, accessing your site from different locations. Thus, your 5,000 unique visitors might actually boil down to about 500 – 1000 (5% – 10%) actively engaged readers.
Admittedly, I am being intentionally conservative with those figures. Many modern marketers talk about an ’80/20 principle’, meaning that the top 20% of your audience are the most likely to be the most engaged.
So that leads us to the next logical question:
To answer that question, we’d need to look at another set of statistics, measuring the amount of time our readers spend on our site.
That’s what we’ll be looking at in Part 2 of this short guide to blog statistics. I think you’ll be fascinated by what the actual numbers reveal. I know I was…but I confess I’m geeky that way.
If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, I invite you to do so, so you will be sure to receive Part 2 via email when it comes out in a few days’ time. I promise it will give you a real feeling for that ‘juiciness’ of your blog stats, which I mentioned at the top of this article.
And, hey, you just might learn to love statistics.
Source
And, hey, you just might learn to love statistics.
Source
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About
TPub are a British comic book publisher and the creators of Twisted Dark, Tabatha, Tortured Life and The World of Chub Chub.
