WonderCon, Super Capers Comic, Etc.- UPDATED

As I mentioned before, I have suddenly found myself attending WonderCon in San Francisco beginning tomorrow and running through Sunday evening. This happened very much at the last minute… in more ways than one. Before I begin to go into the gory details, here is my official schedule of appearances at WonderCon:

Fri. Feb 27th:

• 4:00 pm- 5:00 pm: DC Comics Booth

Sat. Feb 28th:

• 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm: DC Comics Booth
• 5:00 pm- 7:00 pm: Super Capers Movie Promo Booth (1412)
  

Sun. Mar 1st:

• 11:00 am- 12:00 noon: Super Capers Movie Promo Booth (1412)

UPDATE– I will also be spending some time at the National Cartoonists Society booth, but have no definite times for that. Likely I’ll be there on Friday evening and possibly between my signings on Saturday and on Sunday afternoon.

I will have some copies of MAD #499 to sign at the DC booth, and will be signing the promotional comic book I did the art for at the Super Capers booth. I will also likely have some original MAD art available.

Which brings me to the last minute thing again…

Earlier this month I got a call from Super Capers director Ray Griggs about doing a promotional comic book for the film for WonderCon, where they had a booth set up and would have actors from the show as well as a panel on Sunday screening the trailer and discussing the movie. The catch was he needed to get the finished book to the printer by February 20th in order to get copies printed by WonderCon.

He delivered a movie type script that needed to be set up for comic book format, and we had about two weeks to get it done. I managed to edit the script down to 13 pages, and I enlisted the skills of comic book artist/inker Tom Nguyen of DC Comics fame to help out with the inking. I did the layout, penciling and inked all the faces plus two of the pages myself, while Tom worked on the rest of the inks. I then did the coloring and type/balloons, delivering a final CMYK page in EPS format to Ray, who placed them in a layout template I did for him and put together the cover (art from the movie poster by Drew Struzan!) and the other pages needed to fill the rest of the comic.

I have really no idea what the final results will look like, having had nothing to do with the printing or prepress… but hopefully it will turn out okay. It was definitely an adventure putting it together that fast. I was buzzing back and forth to Tom’s place to pick up finished inks and drop off fresh pencils, and he dropped off as well.

Here’s a few of the finished pages. There were some very necessary shortcuts taken to save time, but for only having 15 days to do the work, it didn’t turn out too badly:

Cover by Struzan! Click for a closer look

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It was interesting to see someone else’s inks over my penciling. That has not happened in a long time… not since my “Married…with Children” days. Tom did a fantastic job, especially considering the time crunch.

Yes, that is Adam West… he is in the movie (in a cameo… sans any superhero costume). In fact he will be taking up most of the time over the weekend signing at the Super Capers booth. I was supposed to have dinner with him and some other movie folks on Friday but that fell through.

If you will be attending WonderCon stop in and say hello!