True to source?

There's a difference between "true to source" and "true to character. " I have been hearing a lot of people dismissing criticism against Dawn Of Justice by saying the movie was not true to source, but it was at least true to character.

What makes a character his unique self and not someone else?

Let's say I write a book featuring Antoine De  Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince.

In my story, the prince is a shallow, materialistic hedonist who does smack,  shack up with women,  and kills people on a whim.

Is that "a version" of The Little Prince,  or does the character share so little with the core concept of the creator's character as to be really nothing more than a pastiche character being passed off as the original?

There are core elements to a character that can't be removed without making him into a totally different character.  As Carol Channing once told us at a meeting,  every story has a backbone- similarly,  every character has a backbone that makes him or her who they are.

Superman without his optimism and faith in humanity is not really Superman.  Dawn of Justice gave us a man who looked live Superman but barely ever acted like him.  The true flaw of the cinematic universe so far is that it simply isn't true to character.

Guess who got here?

Yep, she's now at my desk!

Wonder Adorb

Ok, let's be honest here and talk about how thoroughly adorable this little figurine is? This wonder toy is the child of Hawk's feverishly vivid creativity.  You need to go and snatch this up at Qmxonline, this is a must have for any Wonder Woman fan... like myself!

Here we go!

 So! We're doing this for real here.

Grinners & Losers is a project that I've been working on and off since Summer of 2015. In short, it involves the adventures of an up-and-coming superhero who goes by the moniker of Vorpal. He is, as you can see, very much the Cheshire Cat. Actually, he is the Cheshire Cat (sort of) turned superhero!

Vorpal (Vorp for short) is a character who has been rattling around my brain for many years now, but the setting in which he was supposed to exist didn't really emerge until last summer- and even then, it was very much an incomplete picture. Originally Vorpal was to be the only character with any Wonderland themes in the comic… and then I came to my senses. Of course, I had to then figure out how on earth Wonderland came into the whole affair, so I had to start world-building and taking care of the background history of my world, its cosmology, etcetera, before I could get down to the nitty gritty of the plot proper, and then on individual issues.

The result is, I hope, a world that you will enjoy reading- . The finer details are still being fleshed out, but I have the entire backstory and world in general done, and the scripts are being worked on as we speak. Type. Read. You know what I mean.

So, in preparation for everything, I have told myself that I need to make regular posts and put content out there- even if it’s just writing about writing, snippets, sketches, anything of that sort to keep myself in the creative vein.

 

This comic, which will be initially published online, is a one-man effort sort of thing. I currently cannot afford to pay an artist to illustrate, and I have far too much respect for artists to offer them work at less than their art is worth, so for the time being you’re stuck with my art style, a sample of which can be seen above in the character shot.

I am new to the process of publishing comics in this decade. Between the years of 2000 to 2003, I did publish a slightly successful webcomic called The Nightyard, though it was more of a gag-a-day strip than an actual plot-based comic. This will definitely be an interesting new experience and a somewhat terrifying prospect. Let's see how it turns out, shall we?

 

BOOK OF THE DAY

 

In order to prepare for my ordeal, I have been reading several books on the subject- one of the most useful and interesting ones being Jason Brubaker’s Unnatural Talent:

 

Brubaker is the creator of ReMind and Sithra: Kingdom of the air, so he has a good deal of experience from which to draw on for this book. Unnatural Talent deals primarily with how to build your audience, how to create a long plan in which you can make a profit out of your creations, and what the best ways about reaching the audiences in question are. There’s also a lot of good creative advice, so I highly recommend this book for anyone who is thinking about creating their own comics with commercial purposes.