SUPER REAL NOTES / PREVIEW 12

It's official, Super Real VS The Movie Industry Special is done and off to the printer!

I'd planned to have the book wrapped by the first week of October, but missed that date, and have spent pretty much the last 4 to 5 weeks working on finishing it in every spare minute, so I'm very happy to be done. The book is massive, and proved to be much more of a challenge than I had thought. Originally conceived as about 35 pages and involving 4 additional artists, it wound up 43 pages and with 14 different creators (not counting me), with a 5 page artist jam section added, and a couple of awesome pinups. Also, for the four featured guest artists, I'd offered to color their sections of find colorists for them if they liked, and two of them took me up on it, and I never set up any coloring help, so that added 16 pages of coloring to my workload.

This was also the first time I had any help with lettering, with my friend Joshua Crawley of Wisconsin (a comic shop manager by day) taking on that task. As I suspected though, it took a lot of hands on from me to work with someone else on that. Nothing against Josh, he was awesome, I'm just not used to structuring things so that the lettering can be cleanly handed off... I can only imagine how much time and effort it would have took without him, and together we came up with some great stuff!

Setting up an artist jam section, collaborating with letterers, lining up pinups, it all helps make this new book something really special (no pun intended). Hopefully making for a great read for any fan of the book, or genre movies. The script is really a fun romp through elements of some of the most beloved movies and themes of recent generations. Kind of like taking the Epic/Scary Movie franchise approach, where a cast winds through countless familiar film scenarios, but taking an action slant instead of parody (not that there isn't comedy gold to be mined along the way), with the added bonus of sampling some amazing artistic talent, most of which no ones had a chance to see before! I'm very proud of this book, and all the many contributors and the amazing work they put in for this little project of mine.

And that's not the end of it either, I've also got the great folks at Ape Entertainment managing the printing of the book, and going to a lot of extra effort, mostly to help support other small press creators. Even with them trying to turn the book around in two weeks (well under there normal lead time), the books most likely won't hit Diamond and comic shop shelves until early December. I will keep the schedule updated here and at the website as things fall into place though.

In the meantime, I'll continue to share artwork from the book. Today, in celebration of the books completion, here's the artwork from the last page...

The bottom third of the page is left open because that's where the end credits go, movie style, to wrap things up.

Thanks again to everyone who's ordered and waiting for the book, and especially all my friends I've been honored enough to work with on the project!

STAY TUNED,
jason