Author Archives: AFDStudios

Caption Contest 45: Group action

Who doesn’t love a good group scene? I know I do! Thus your challenge for this week’s caption contest is from the pages of Image Comics’ “Brigade”, issue 2:

brigade-2-groupshot

Come up with the funniest/best replacement dialog for the balloon and you’ll receive a free black and white illustration of whatever you like from yours truly, so put on that thinking cap and get busy! Keep it to no more than three total entries per person, left in the comments to this post, and relatively clean and you’re home free.

Good luck everyone!

(P.S. I can’t post this image without pointing out that the artist is Marat Mychaels, who can only be described as a Liefeld Wannabe. In other words, he is an even worse illustrator than Rob, and yet someday aspires to be just like him. You can certainly see that wordless longing in the way the figures all seem to have their feet (off-panel, naturally) at different levels. Seriously, they’d all have to be standing on different stages for this to make sense. And the giant in the background either has his feet crammed into his buttocks or he’s standing in a well. Which of the two foreground figures, and which of the two flying figures, is in front of the other? Can you tell? I can’t. Add in the horrible coloring, the amateurish inking, and the awful character design, and you have the only thing worse than a pure Rob Liefeld drawing — someone who wishes they were Rob Liefeld but isn’t as talented as he is! Oy.)

Caption Contest 44 Winner

I am happy to announce that the winner of Caption Contest 44 is … Cory!

contest44-winner

Something about headless Conan enemies seems to bring out the best in people, so I thought something happy as the winner was appropriate. A number of other entries were also very funny, including the following Honorable Mentions:

  1. marx: Frankincense, Myrrh, Gold–those are traditional gifts from a wise man to a king. But this… this is just creepy.
  2. Frankie: “Yes, yes. (sigh) I’m indeed his ‘little friend’.
  3. Zorbas The Awesome: Before you say anything….yes I AM his One-Eyed-Willy
  4. Danny Beaty: Jenny Craig helped me lose over 170 lbs.!
  5. Malachi the great: *Never* agree to the magic trick.

Many thanks to everyone who entered. For coming up with the winning entry, Cory will win a custom black and white illustration of whatever he likes (within reason). Keep your eyes peeled to HeroMachine.com for your chance to win with the next Caption Contest!

Random Panel: The horror … the HORROR!

song2

Super-hero theme songs

Every hero needs a good theme song, and thanks to this web page, you can hear the music and read the words as you go. Which for people like me, who can neither sing nor remember lyrics, is a Good Thing.

Comic book idea

I had an idea the other day for a comic book while watching “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.” You never get any kind of backstory for the victims in any of these stories, whether it’s sombrero-wearing banditos in spaghetti Westerns or red-shirted security guys in Star Trek. They’re just cannon fodder. But they’ve got friends, loved ones, and stories of their own. Someone somewhere is probably going to cry just as hard for them as we will when our hero gets it.

So I thought it might be interesting to have a comics series where every issue features a different story of someone who gets killed on the last page. Sometimes it may be a gladiator losing in the pits of Rome, sometimes it might be a Hydra henchman getting blasted by Iron Fist, sometimes it might be one of Brainiac’s cyborg assistants getting evacuated into space by Superman because hey, it’s just robots.

Clearly the meds are working today, because the ideas just keep flying!

Poll Position: Batman vs. the Big Baddies

Since the Dark Knight proved so popular in our last question, let’s raise the bar a notch by getting rid of all those pesky constraints the latest movie franchise puts on us, and get down to some real power-game silliness:

n

{democracy:66}

Discussion to follow.
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HeroMachine 3.0 begins

Today I am officially starting on HeroMachine 3.0; I even created a folder for it on my hard drive, so you know it’s serious!

It will be built on the same code base as the recent Warrior and Horror Minis, meaning it will have all of those features (scalability, custom colors, line colors, movable items, rotation, transparency, multiple items in a slot) and more. During the discussion of those minis, I kept a list of feature requests that seemed like particularly good ideas, and I am listing them below. Take a look and let me know any other stuff you’d like to see HM3 have.

  • Magnifying glass zoom feature
  • Pre-set pose/body style buttons to recreate classic builds.
  • Preview mode.
  • “clone” button
  • On the scaling tool, a button “keep proportion” would be useful.
  • Pop up asking if you really want to delete ALL items.

I’ve still got some work to finish on both the Zombie Mini and the general Horror Mini but hopefully that’ll be done in the next two weeks, and can go on concurrently with the HM3 stuff.

I’m very excited, and I have high hopes that this will all come together very quickly!

Random Panel: Bygones

skyman-1-brooding

Contest 41 Winner: Thunder

John D and I have finished his commission for winning Caption Contest 41, of his character “Thunder”:

You can get your own custom black and white illustration of whatever you like by winning Caption Contest 44, going on right now!

Random Panel: I'll take "Subtle racial slurs" for $1000, Alex

indian-girl