Don't forget, Shortpacked! Book 4 is still up for preorder! It's still $1k short of our preorder goal. If that goal isn't made, neither are the books! Meanwhile, I'm still plowing through the nitty gritty of Book 4's creation, and it's going to be huge. I mean, I said it was gonna be 200 pages, but 200 pages covers a lot of ground! That's almost a whole year of strips. (And it would be, if not for the additional content, such as the TNI strips.)
Frenzy (left) and Rumble (right) DO NOT ARGUE THIS POINT
I've got a pair of ex-Recordicons here from Japan! See, Frenzy and Rumble are tanks now. Well, okay, I guess maybe they could still be Recordicons. Maybe they still record! They're.. recording tanks!
I decided to get the Japanese release of these guys for two reasons. First of all, there's no sign of Rumble being solicited over here, so chances are when he does come out stateside, it'll be post Movie 3 period, which is a long time from now. Hell, there's little chance of Frenzy (er, "Demolition Rumble") showing up here, either! He has been solicited, but the way distribution's been going, I dunno if he'll make it into stores before the movie stuff hits. Retail stores drop non-movie stuff like a bad habit once movie stuff arrives. They know where the money is.
I'M SERIOUS
Secondly, Japan names their cassettes right! Frenzy is blue, dammit! His toy is blue, he's blue in the Marvel comics.... it's just in the pesky American cartoon that the blue guy is Rumble. When Japan dubbed the American series way back when, they wised up and called the blue guy Frenzy. And so their set is named correctly. And thus I required it.
They're just a pair of Scout Class guys so they're not too big. When I first opened the box, I worried that they'd be too fiddly. They do look very... involved. But they aren't! They transform pretty quickly back and forth. There's some frustrating bits involved, but it's mostly due to the spring-loaded piledrivers. Those things sure like to launch when you're trying to push everything together for tank mode. Kind of annoying. I also wish their forearms weren't jointed in the middle. It makes posing them more complicated than it has to be, but that joint is required for transformation, so oh well.
I WILL DESTROY YOU
Like the rest of their contemporaries, they're compatible with C Joint snap-on weaponry. Their double tank cannons attach this way, and there's a bunch of rungs here and there to place them elsewhere if you desire.
As I sort of mentioned in passing before, these guys have piledrivers, just like they did in the cartoon. (Well, Frenzy's not really SUPPOSED to have piledrivers, since he's a sonic-scream kinda guy, but Rumble's piledrivers are too iconic to leave out and they kinda have to share a mold.) You flip the entire arm over at the shoulder, tuck the forearms away, and then the tip of the piledriver springs forward when you press the silver section on the side. The instructions also ask you to move the tank cannons to their shoulders for this mode.
And then he's crushed by the contents of the entire parking lot.
My favorite of the two is Frenzy. Not just because I like Frenzy more (he was in my earliest comics and my brother I had his toy), but because I like his colors better. I'm a blue kinda guy, moreso than black and red. And the electric "Allspark blue" with the darker blue is more visually striking. Like the rest of Japan's "United" toyline, they both have metallic paint. Rumble's is metallic black, which is barely noticable at all. Which is fine by me. Frenzy has some metallic blue that is so dark that I thought he just had dark blue or black plastic. It doesn't really look metallic at all. I guess, uh, A for effort there, Takara.
I'm keeping my Frenzy away from my new Wheeljack. That showdown won't end well for him.
I also demand an Enemy from this mold. BOTCON AND/OR E-HOBBY, DO NOT FAIL ME IN THIS REGARD.
Hello, everyone! I'm sitting in SFO airport, where I'll remain until 10:30 tonight. I had a really great time at Wondercon this weekend!
Yesterday (Sunday) was my birthday. I turned 32! It was a weird birthday for me, what with me being at a convention instead of lounging around at home taking it easy. Not that most of my days are grueling fights to the finish anyway, being a webcartoonist, but you know what I mean. I was a little apprehensive blowing my birthday weekend at a convention since my birthdays have a Routine. They've always had a Routine. They're not a difficult Routine, I mean, they usually involve leaving the house for Taco Bell at some point, watching a movie I like, and drawing a comic, all things I enjoy. Even back when I had a Real Job, I had a semblance of the Routine, albeit smooshed into a smaller portion of the day. But this year I wouldn't have the Routine! I would be "stuck" behind a table in a strange city far away from my home.
By Sunday, I was starting to run out of blacks. Helloooo 70% gray!
This was a good idea! It was a very different birthday. I got to spend it with a very, very different group than I would have otherwise, like the Blind Ferret folks, Kel McDonald, Becky and Frank, Matt Boyd, Alina Pete, George Rohac... the list goes on. And since this was one of a half-dozen weekends of the year in which I am inexplicably a celebrity, it was really amazing. Folks kept on throwing cookies and cakes at me. I amassed so many baked goods that I still have some stuffed inside my backpack on my way home.
The only sore spot is that my wife wasn't here! She did happily end up on the phone with me on Saturday night when I got sung "Happy Birthday" to for the first time, which was incredibly fortunate, but she wasn't with me, which bothered me. We've only lived together for a few years! She was not yet a firmly established part of the Routine. I kind of want her to be part of the Routine forever. This was a misstep.
I was asked to draw approximately 30 million Soundwaves this weekend.
But enough of my #FirstWorldProblems. Since I had an extra day to goof around (I booked my flight waaaaay too late to get out of San Francisco at a reasonable time), I made sure to walk around the city for hours and hours and take lots of photos so I can use them as reference in the strip. After doing Dumbing of Age for over half a year (is that right? Over half a year? My brain is probably fried, so please check my math), I've grown a passion for making the environments more real. So look for that. I might even put my characters outside sometimes! Oh my God!
I'll be there with Kel McDonald (Sorcery 101), and we'll be in the Small Press area, at table SP-29, I believe. I'll have books and prints and some new posters! One of my old prints, you see, has just graduated into a new poster. I keep selling out of my 8"x10? Dinobot "HONOR" print at every convention, so I decided, okay, this is a sign, and I did it up as a 11"x17" poster on glossy cardstock. I redrew the art for the bigger size, since the original graphic was kind of iffy at the smaller size already, and the final product is friggin' spiffy, if I may say so. If you aren't gonna be in SanFran this weekend, you can also find the poster in the store.
It's my first convention in the city where Shortpacked! takes place! I'm excited! It's also my birthday this weekend. On Sunday I turn 32. If you're there, feel free to drop me some extra booze money.
Instead of doing the whole Paypal thing this go-round, everyone else I knew in webcomics were extolling the many virtues of using Kickstarter to raise funds. These virtues sounded even better once it was realized that Paypal can throw an enterprise-ending conniption fit if you raise too much money too fast. Let's, uh, avoid that, shall we?
Kickstarter does work a bit differently. You pledge money instead of giving it outright, and these pledges are only acted on if the required amount of money is pledged. If I don't reach the $8000 I need to make everything, nobody gets charged nuffin'. If I make more, that's gravy! To facilitate pledging, Kickstarter loooooves tiered rewards. For example, putting in enough money to cover the cost of a book and shipping is fine and good, but there's also things you can get if you put in less than that or more. If you only put in $5, you don't get a book, but you still get to help make it happen and you get your name printed inside the book along with the rest of everyone who helped out. And if you pledge more, depending on how much more, you can get a pile of original Shortpacked! lineart and/or a cameo in the strip itself. Sounds fun? New and different?
Also new and different is that I'm making the book thicker this go-round. The previous books were 136 pages, and this new one's gonna be 200. Full disclosure, the cost of printing's going up, and apparently I've been undercharging all this time anyway. Joel Watson laughs at me every time he sells his books for $20 and I sell my comparably-sized book for $15. (That bastard.) But I didn't just want to raise prices, I wanted to give something back for that extra $5. So books are thicker now. You get 60 more pages of content. Good deal?
Another thing I need to address. Last year, I tried to raise funds for a Book 1 reprint. This preorder was not popular. And I still have a lot of your money for it, and it's still not printed, what with the lack of preorders and such. I've been waffling on and off for the longest time, and I was just about to just give up and move on, but, again, webcomics folks extoll the virtues of Kickstarter to me. So here's what we're gonna do. After Book 4 is dealt with, let's try the preorder-book-1-reprint process again, but with Kickstarter. If that doesn't work, I will give up forever. If you don't want to wait that long and you've had enough, let me know. Send me an email (wiigii at gmail). I will make it up to you.
Of all the book collections of webcomics about folks who work in a toy store and tell jokes about Batman, this will be the greatest.
Sure, there were some pretty great book collections about folks who work in a toy store and tell jokes about Batman before, but this will far surpass them all. It's not that the previous collections weren't great. They are. They remain great! I mean, there was the strip-by-strip commentary and the additional content and the smattering of Toy News International strips and whatnot, but there was one tragic flaw.
They were only 136 pages long.
Well, screw that! Let's crank this up to 11. And by "11," I mean 200 pages. More comics! More commentary! And for the first time ever, excerpts from both the Tome of the Ages and the Gospel of Faz.
Within these 200 pages, you'll read some of the best stories from Shortpacked!'s six-year run. There's Conquest's hiring and her various ill-fated sex-backed sales attempts. There's Robin's plot to seduce Ethan via "found" videos of her and Conquest making out in the back room. There's the first real appearances of Leslie, the love of Robin's life. There's Galasso's unveiling of the Tome of the Ages, Ethan's subsequent firing and rehiring, and Amber's faith-fueled battle with Ninja Rick. Plus, a talking car arrives, mayhaps?
Oh, right. And "Funky CancerCancer." It's in here.
So what is this Kickstarter thing trying to do? Well, obviously, printing books costs money, and I don't have enough sitting around to fund an entire book run. So I'm trying to raise the amount I need to print the books, plus hopefully enough left over to actually ship these things to those who paid in enough to earn their own copy.
You'll notice some tiered rewards on the right. Read them carefully!
Left to right: Angle Man, Heat Wave, Goldface, Evil-Star, and Killer Frost
Matty's "Collector's Appreciation Whatever" booth was selling three JLU three-packs that I guess they figured weren't gonna make it to stores. Instead of doing each set one by one, I figgered I'd just throw the new guys from each set into one big blog post. It's not like I have a lot to say about each individual guy here anyway.
Except for Heat Wave, that is! I had no idea that I'd like him this much. As a character, he's barely on my radar, since he's "That Other Major Flash Villain That Doesn't Show Up Quite As Much As The Others," so I figgered he'd be just another guy to throw on the shelf. But the unique tooling done for him really causes him to go above and beyond my expectations. He of course has a new head, like all new JLU guys. He also has a new flamethrower backpack thing, unsurprisingly. But what impresses me are his new arms. I guess Mattel decided to give him new arms ... for some reason. I thought at first that it might be because they wanted to give him a flame gun, but they sculpted Angle Man a little triangle to hold in one of his arms and his arms are otherwise unaltered.
Heat Wave gets two photos, he's so special!
Regardless, the new arms make me very happy. There's detail sculpted into them that would otherwise be just paint, and both handsculpts are deliciously new and crisp. You can really tell that the standard JLU handsculpts are ten years old. They're kind of blobby and lack the crisp edges that the newer handsculpts have. Even though Heat Wave's torso and legs are recycled, he really feels like a whole new figure, like the special one-off guys like Gorilla Grodd or Lobo that get all-new sculpts. And it's entirely the hands that do it.
The rest of the guys are all right. I was excited for Evil-Star for no real reason, and I'm pretty content to own Angle Man and Goldface as well. And Killer Frost was a frequently-appearing villain, so she fills a very conspicuous hole in my collection. But their tooling is mostly recycled, so they're less exciting than Heat Wave.
It's kind of insane that we got all these obscure villains, even late in the game. Good work, Mattel.
By now Hayate's nigh-total awesomeness is a matter of public record. But how did he come to master the twin disciplines of housekeeping and martial arts? In the ?ashback to end all ?ashbacks, we journey back to Hayate's hapless childhood and his cryptic encounter with the girl who would change his life forever. Be forewarned--the drama tag will be pulled.
(Bolding mine.) That's right! I'm in your language, dudes! I'm deep inside it! Like a splinter, you're gonna have to get a sterilized needle and just dig at me for days. You'll never get me out.
You should blame Shaenon Garrity for this. And the only way to enact your vengeance is to buy a copy.
And finally, a bunch of artists at C2E2 doodled onto a piece of art that's being auctioned with its proceeds going to the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund. I was one of these dudes, and when I got the piece of art in front of me, at the time it only had some robot thing unknown to me and a drawing of G1 Ratchet. So I, of course, drew Animated Ratchet next to him. That's just what I do. It's how I roll. And then all this other stuff was added later which was not Ratchets. I tried to convince Joel Watson to draw a Ratchet, but he's all "lol no" and drew his boyfriend Riker.
It's an awesome assemblage of cartooning! If you have the funds, please bid on it. Parts of Japan are underwater and they need buckets.
Speaking of Joel, I've appeared in twoof his C2E2 photocomics. I'm sorry.
The day is here! With Mike, Amber, and Robin now completed and out of the way, it was time for Patch Together to get to Shortpacked!'s main man, Ethan Siegal. And after a few months of back and forth between me and the sculptors, he's finished and ready for prime time.
He's seven inches tall, intended to be in scale with the other figures, and he's $45. The number of statues produced will depend on the number that are preordered. There may be some left over, but, like Mike's statue which is forever sold out, the remainder will be very small in number.
