VOTE For The Last Comic For 2022! PLUS: How To Build A Superhero Universe!
MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD!
Our next and final project for 2022 launches in the first week of November. I had planned on one in particular, HOWEVER I haven’t done too much preliminary work on it, so I thought I’d post a poll to get some feedback. Depending on how the voting goes, I might do one project first over the other.
Which project would you like to see launched next?
Neon Dreams 2, an 80s-inspired erotic action-adventure
Grimms’ Girls 2, an erotic fairy tale fantasy inspired by classic fables
Let me know, guys! Voting will run for one week.
BUILDING A SUPERHERO UNIVERSE
Remember the good ol’ days of classic DC and Marvel when stories and character mattered? For some, that was many, many years ago.
I grew up in the 80s, what some call a “Golden Age” of comic books when everything was firing on all cylinders. My favorite comics were about characters existing in extraordinary worlds. Most were what I call “premise characters”, whom are created to entertain a particular idea (a baby sent from a doomed world to Earth who is realized to have god-like power; a young boy’s parents are killed, sending him on a campaign of vigilance against injustice in his city, .etc) and every month we we’re treated to another adventure featuring our favorite hero.
I wasn’t particularly interested in tight continuity unless it was within a self-contained story within the numbered canon. I was always of the mind that great stories should be cyclical; they have a beginning, middle and end and if the character is to continue, they need to be returned to square one for the next adventure.
I was a consumer of these comics for years until—for a variety of reasons, mostly economical and logistical reasons—I lacked access. When I had the means to get back into them, I realized I had little interest. I felt that I “got” their stories and didn’t need to be a persistent customer of comics that really just continued existing to keep the creative talent employed.
Superman is my favorite comic book character. I really got into the comics when John Byrne came out with his momentous run starting in 1986. After Byrne left, I jumped off the Superman titles only sparingly checking back in, but I was still a fan. After reading The Death and Return of Superman in 1993, I felt like that was a great jumping off point. The reintroduction in 1986 to the Death and Return in 1993. A good seven years of stories that culminated in an epic climax and resolution to the Superman story.
Kingdom Come—which came out in 1995—was then the perfect epilogue to the DC Universe for me. No need to really read any further on a regular basis. I got my story fix.
After thinking about how Jex and I would craft our own superhero universe, I realized that there were three different kinds of approaches to characters in publishing: PREMISE, CONTINUITY AND STORY.
PREMISE characters are about a setup that’s high-concept and not meant to have any strict continuity because there is little to no character change from one story to the next. Episodic cartoons and comic strips work this way; short stories where there are no concerns as to where they fit within a timeline.
CONTINUITY characters can have a premise, but they’re more about a continued adventure that tells a linear, ongoing story linked by successive issues/volumes/episodes. Comic books and Mangas work like this. There can be drastic changes to characters within continuity, but since the world is persistent, these changes carry over in a timeline whose end is often unclear and unspecified.
STORY characters are usually created to tell a specific, finite story and once the story is over, the character’s purpose of expressing a certain value set or moral message is fulfilled. Many movies and novels work this way.
If you’re a massive publishing company with abundant resources, you can go the CONTINUITY route and hire people to just make ongoing issues of certain characters with no planned conclusion.
If you’re a single artist, you could conceivably go the PREMISE route and make daily comic strips for a newspaper where continuity is completely unimportant.
However, Jex and I felt that our business model works best with producing STORY; singular, self-contained tales with a limited page count where characters are designed with the sole purpose of telling a specific story. Once it’s told, it’s concluded and then you move onto the next completely original idea.
THIS IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO.
Earlier in the year, I mentioned in a Substack post that SinR Studios was treading into more story-based, mainstream storytelling. This is going to be a large part of that initiative.
Over the past few months, we’ve put together ideas and plotted out stories for hero characters that will be presented in the graphic novel format. Each graphic novel will present a singular complete story that can be enjoyed independently. HOWEVER, all of these characters will exist in the same world. This will present us with the opportunity to tell an overarching macro story to hopefully bring them all together for a crossover to conclude their universe’s story.
Details to come!
BECOME A YOUTUBE PATRON!
Become a YouTube Patron and get credited at the end of every SiNR Studios YouTube video!
SIGN UP HERE: https://shadedraws.com/yt_patrons/
NEW YOUTUBE VIDEOS
GET SOME COMICS!
Get the digital PDF copy of Shade’s Goodtime Girls for $7.50 for a limited time!
Xtended Edition Comics are now available for purchase and instant digital delivery!
AFTER DARK 1 XTENDED EDITION - DIGITAL COPY - $15
AFTER DARK 1 XTENDED EDITION - PHYSICAL COPY - $35
SUPERHERO S*XCAPADES XTENDED EDITION - DIGITAL COPY - $15
SUPERHERO S*XCAPADES XTENDED EDITION - PHYSICAL COPY - $35
NEON DREAMS XTENDED EDITION - DIGITAL COPY - $15
NEON DREAMS XTENDED EDITION - PHYSICAL COPY - $30
Back to work!
Shade
shadedraws.com