(Non-backers can pre-order the book here!: https://super-mega-comics-store.myshopify.com/)

Hey guys!  Sorry for the delay between updates, it's been too long!  I've been working super hard on the book, and will finally be ordering them from the manufacturer within the next couple weeks.  It'll take a couple months after that to receive the books from China, then I'll send them to you.  It's been a long road and the book is late, but it'll all be worth it!  Let's get to it and start showing some stuff.

Let's See The Rest Of That Preview Page!

The Pages Are Taller Now

So one thing I quickly found is that Super Mega's comics are, on average, longer than I thought.  I expected most of the comics to be about 6 frames long and fit on the pages shown on the Kickstarter page.  But a huge number of the comics are 9 frames, which led to a lot of awkward splitting of comics between pages that made everything difficult to read.  So I ended up making the pages taller.  This means that now a lot of comics fit on one page instead of two, so overall the book has a bigger page size but less pages.  I kept the exact same amount of comics that I had originally planned on though, and the printing costs will be about the same, though slightly more. 

A Glimpse Into The Work Process

This is a glimpse into the Adobe Indesign file that I've been working on.  Adobe Indesign is "computer" "software" used to make books.  The coolest thing about it is that I can view all the pages at once and quickly switch between them, whereas in photoshop I would have had to have a different file for every page spread.  So basically I get to use 1 file instead of 50+!

Page Types

Here's a quick primer for the pages types and what they look like.  "Bonus Frames" are new extra frames I created to expand the comic and add something funny.  Doodles are funny drawings related to the comic.  Fan Art is old fan art from the 2004-2013 era of Super Mega.

Another Preview Page

Here's a page with a doodle below the comic.  The amount of time I spent coming up with good doodles and bonus frames was immense!  For months (!?!?) I would spend time almost every day re-reading comics and trying to come up with ideas for them.  The problem was that after a while of reading the same comic over and over my brain starts to retrace the same steps.  There are comics that I couldn't come up with an idea for back in September but have re-read 100 times since then, until I finally came up with an idea in January or February.  The long development process of the book helped make sure I had time to come up with lots of good ideas.

Preview Page 2

This is one of my favorite pages.  I had to buy stock art and use the pen tool in photoshop to trace the outline of the skiiers to cut them out from their backgrounds.  The result is worth it though in my opinion, as this book is going to be the legacy of the first 13 years of Super Mega.  Generally in this and other projects I've done my motto is "If it's a good idea then make it happen no matter what, Brett Brimmer!"  (As you can see, this slogan will not work for you unless your name is Brett Brimmer but hopefully you understand the concept.)

One More Small Teaser

For this page I took the Davecow comic from Super Mega and recreated it using stock photos of real cows.  I had to buy the stock photos, trace each image with the pen tool to cut out the cows from the backgrounds, then use editing tricks to remove ear tags and other inconsistencies from the images.  I also had to do color correction so the cows looked similar from frame to frame.  I also had to spend a lot of time finding cows whose expressions fit the comic.  In total this comic remake took me at least 8 hours to create.  This is the last comic in the book, as I consider it to be the "end of an era" since it was the last Super Mega comic for a long time.  I wanted to do something special for the last comic so that you left the book with a warm fuzzy feeling.

I'm just going to show you a teaser of the page, it'll be too small to read the text but you can see the general idea.    The new version has an equally existential alternate storyline about what it means to have read the Super Mega book.

In Closing

Whoa this book took forever and was crazy!  I feel like it went from being a pretty good comic collection for fans to a sweet book with lots of weird stuff that anyone can enjoy.  When it's printed I'm going to try to get it into some local book stores and see if I can get it distributed in any other ways.  I'll update again when I'm ordering the books from the manufacturer which should be soon.  See you then!

-Brett Brimmer

(Non-backers can pre-order the book here!: https://super-mega-comics-store.myshopify.com/)