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(From "Strange Fantasy", 1953.)
Comments Off on Random Panel: An all-time great opening line
Posted in Daily Random Panel
I like John Byrne's art. It's clean, simple, anatomically accurate, dynamic, and interesting. And usually, I like his costume designs, particularly his "Alpha Flight" team, but one of those Canucks has always bugged me:
I sympathize with Puck's dilemma. He wants a big ol' letter on his chest just like Superman, but he's so small the letter takes up his entire body. It still looks ridiculous, though, as if his mom wrote his initials in his costume so he wouldn't lose it at camp, only she drew them REALLY REALLY BIG.
The other problem is that the short-shorts conspire with the fireplug helmet to make him look even shorter. It'd be like Fat Albert wearing horizontal stripes; why accentuate your problem areas?
I do appreciate Byrne throwing a bone to the more hirsute members of his reading audience (werewolves, yetis, and me) by throwing on the copious amounts of body hair, but any time you have a character whose head is at waist-level to most people, the last thing you want to do is to make them think "pee". I'm just sayin'.
Comments Off on Get the Puck out of here
Posted in Bad Super Costumes
Comments Off on Random Panel: Great moments in leaping to conclusions
Posted in Daily Random Panel
When you're developing a new application (at least, when I am), a lot of really boring stuff has to happen in the background before you get to all the sexy bits of clicking buttons and drawing laser guns. Here's one example of that.
Comments Off on HM3 Journal: An array of solutions
Posted in HeroMachine 3
Four previous Caption Contest winners -- Meg, Lyogi, Redrain, and Steve -- have yet to get me their requests for their winning illustrations. I've been in touch with Meg, but the other three are e-mail incommunicado, so if you're one of them, please drop me a line. If you don't know yet what you want for your prize that's fine, I'd just like to let you know the offer's still out here.
Comments Off on Paging Meg, Lyogi, Redrain, and Steve
Posted in Challenge Favorites, Challenges
I wanted to do a caption contest with a big ol' onomontoPOWia, so here you go! Come up with the best replacement dialog for this panel and you'll win your very own custom black and white illustration of whatever you like (within reason):
The rules are simple: No more than three entries per person; all entries must be left in the comments to this post; and try to keep it clean (appropriate for late-night TV). You have one week, the winner will be chosen and announced next Tuesday.
Good luck everyone!
Comments Off on Caption Contest 48: BRAM!
Posted in Challenges
I am happy to announce that the winner of Caption Contest 47 (and his own custom black and white illustration of whatever he likes) is ... Steve!
As you'll see from the Honorable Mentions below, there were a lot of good entries this week. While Steve's wasn't necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, I did think it had a great sense of snark about it.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who entered, particularly the long list of Honorable Mentions (like I said, it was a good week):
Keep your eyes on this space for the next Caption Contest and YOUR chance to win a professional illustration, coming up later today!
Comments Off on Contest 47 Winner
Posted in Challenge Favorites, Challenges
Comments Off on Random Panel: I don't think that qualifies as a super power
Posted in Daily Random Panel
Comments Off on Poll Position: The Kurgan Konundrum
Posted in Versus
The biggest challenge so far in designing HeroMachine 3 has been how to let the user control multiple items in the same slot, particularly multiple examples of the same item in that slot. For instance, if you want three Colt .45's on the character, trying to present the controls for them in an intuitive way is hard. Today I've been working on how that might work, and I have a screen shot of the simple test movie:
The idea here is that when you click on an item to add it to your character, a tool bar gets added to that item's preview box. At a glance, then, you can tell which items are loaded and which are not, which is a deficiency in the current round of Minis. The first item in the new item tool bar is a number with a little drop-down arrow next to it. The idea on this is that if you have the aforementioned three Colt .45s loaded, clicking on the dropdown will cycle through each one in order, from 1 to 2 to 3 and then back to 1. I would probably add something that would briefly highlight the actual item on the character, too, so you know which number goes with which of the guns.
The next button on the tool bar is a lock/unlock toggle. Clicking that will lock the current item so it doesn't get removed when you add another item from that slot.
Next comes the Delete Item button, which would remove that item from the character (and the toolbar from the preview box, so you know that item's not loaded any more).
Finally you have the Reset button, which will return the item in question to the default rotation, scale, and colors.
The "Dupe" button would go away in this scenario. I think it was confusing and non-intuitive to use, and hope that this new way -- focusing on the items -- might be easier.
What do you think?
Comments Off on HM3 Journal: Duplicity
Posted in HeroMachine 3
Three middle-aged nerds (including yours truly!) review all of the MCU movies in chronological order. Short, funny, and full of good vibes, check it out and let us know what you think!
Nerdmudgeon.com