Tattered Page

Work’s been rather nuts.  Jenn & I are still playing City of Heroes.  Issue 10 still seems fresh to us (and only a few of our characters have been able to go through most of the content) but the Halloween event is soon upon us and Issue 11 has entered into closed beta.

Issue 11: A Stitch in Time adds time travel to the game. The community team did an awesome job leading up to the announcement: news stories in the Paragon times that tell of different outcomes to events very familiar to the players as well as cryptic clues in the player-run City Scoop! newspaper.

It also inspired my own Teaser Comic leading up to the event.  Time travel & Superheroes.  What did you expect?

Well, I got my prizes from the Comic Book Contest.  I figured that, with City of Heroes’ Issue 10 on the way, I’d give the new software a run doing a comic book based “guide” to the issue.

My goal was to mix a brief overview of the features with a little humor.  I hoped to make it target the casual City of Heroes player- no hard numbers or DPS stats- but also make it understandable to the curious outsider… maybe enough for them to want to give it a trial run.

Anyway, it’s currently available through hypercomics as well as .pdf here.  Let me know what you think.

Ok, maybe now I’ll have time to write again.

I managed to squeeze together an 8-pager for the comic book creator contest.  It’s available at hypercomics as is my original for any interested.  I had to cut short some of the ideas I wanted to meet the deadline, so I may revisit the piece in the future (once the judging’s done- I don’t want to risk a disqualification at this point).

Now that the contest’s over, I encourage everyone to go over there, pick a random comic, and post a supporting comment.  With 320 entries and 3 prizes, the vast majority will not realize any reward beyond a comment on the page, and with so many posting and so few reviewing, even that’s not likely to happen.  Only a few dozen have any comment at all.

Some of these comics are obviously kids- or adults that haven’t tried something creative since they graduated college.  That’s a bit of a leap, but something we sould all encourage.  Give them some confidence to keep creating.  Find a forgotten story, find something you like in it, and give feedback.  It can mean the world.

Ok, I decided to play around with Comic Book Creator this week.  It’s a fun tool that lets you make comics from clipart, screenshots, or virtually any image file you have at hand.

I made a City of Heroes 36-pager.  It’s something of an “origins” tale, I guess.  There was alot of bungling, and it still has some rough edges, but I figured I’d share it in “Beta format” and see what people think.

You can  download the pdf here (7.5mb). 

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