In honor of Free Comic Book Day and Iron Man 3 opening the same weekend, we’re pleased to present IRON SMASH!
(Click on the image for a larger version)
We’ve received the proofs for SMASH: Book One. These are the cover, plus the first 16 and last 16 pages, which we’ve been sent to double-check the colors and make sure everything is printing correctly. Here’s Kyle looking them over:
Please join me in wishing a very happy birthday to my younger brother and SMASH artist extraordinaire, Kyle Bolton. (I love reposting this every year.)
(Click to read parts one and two.)
By January 2012, we’d suspended Season 2 of our webcomic. On reflection, it wasn’t the best idea to post that while Kyle was simultaneously working on the book. The deadlines started to clash, and we agreed the book should take first priority.
What’s more, as we were posting the new pages, we were already noticing a lot of changes we’d like to make before it became Book 2. It’s MUCH more fun to create something new than revise something old. Neither Kyle nor I were looking forward to finishing Season 2 of the webcomic only to redo most of it for publication.
If nothing else, working on the first book taught us the value of getting it right the first time. We were no longer even comfortable having Season One online, knowing how much had already been improved for the book. It felt an awful lot like having your mom post your baby pictures online. So we took the whole comic offline.
Kyle finished the revisions in May. We went through a few more rounds of editorial changes and suggestions, all of them for the better. By July, we were finally ready to color the book, which was the last stage of the process from our end.
(Click to read part one.)
We went back and forth on changes and suggestions with our editor at Candlewick, Mary Lee Donovan. Kyle doesn’t like drawing thumbnails, so he put together rough sketches of new pages and panels. Sometimes Mary Lee and our book designer, Nathan Pyritz, weren’t sure what they were looking at. A few panels had to be redone entirely to make the idea clearer for the reader.
This process continued until September 2011, when Kyle was given the thumbs-up to start drawing the finished pages.
Kyle wasn’t the only one who had work to do. Although there were no significant changes to the plot, there were scenes and moments I wanted to expand on, not to mention those 30 new pages that had to be created from scratch.
In addition, Mary Lee had a few concerns about dialogue. The one I remember most vividly was a discussion about the the bad guy Pulse saying, “And now this is happening!” while shooting at Smash during a chase. Mary Lee wasn’t familiar with the phrase and was confused about its intended meaning. After several attempts to explain the pop culture reference, I sent her a YouTube clip from Anchorman where Jack Black tells Will Ferrell, “And now this is happening!” before he kicks Baxter the dog off a bridge. I have no idea if that helped or hurt my position, but the line survives.
It’s important to note that none of this was a drag. Mary Lee prefers handwritten notes to email, so she sent each of us a print-out of the comic with her notes in the margins. We couldn’t have been more excited to receive that bulging package!
When I opened my copy and sat on the couch to read, I paused for a deep breath, expecting at least some of the notes to sting. Instead, I was thrilled to find a ton of useful critiques and suggestions, most of which had never even occurred to us. Our eyes were being opened wider and wider.
Smash was our first comic work — not only together, but at all. Even for lifelong comic book readers, there’s a learning curve.
Vote for Smash here
