Friday 30 January 2009

And now for something different...

Hello,

This week I thought I'd try something a little different with the blog and instead of giving you an update on a figurine, I'd give you some insight into the work involved in the creation of the magazine.

As many comic fans will know, the quality of the printing, and paper that comics have been printed on, has greatly changed over the years. While Marvel does re-print a lot of comics in graphic novel form, there are hundreds of Marvel comics that only exist in their original printing. More often than not the years have not been kind to the original pages with whites turning cream, colours fading and word balloons smudging. To illustrate the magazine we spend hours looking through old comics and lovingly restoring some of the images so that they can be re-printed in the best quality possible.

Below I have an excellent example of the work our designer (Dan) has put into an image from Strange Tales #178, which at the time we couldn't find re-printed. You can see the first image is the actual scan of the comic page, from this Dan knocks the image back to black and then adds a new layer of colour to the image, to match the original as closely as possible.








Obviously not every image requires this amount of work, some Marvel supply to us directly and some are from newer or re-printed comics but each issue we try to make sure that the images we choose best sum-up the character and the article they're in.

There's a lot more to the magazine than just the images but hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea into the workings of the magazine and its design.

And don't worry; I'm not going to bore everyone with a weekly update into how the mag works, apart from anything else Dan's head will end up growing too big to fit into the office if I keep it up.

More figurine news next week.

Have a good weekend.

Rich

Friday 23 January 2009

2009 - The Year of the Figurine.

Hello and a very (belated) Happy New Year to everyone.

It’s the first update of 2009, so I thought I’d kick things off with some new images of figurines.

First we have the final paint for Shang Chi. Based on the costume we’ve gone for it’s pretty obvious that he’d be wearing his lovely red gee. I’m very pleased with this figure, he’s a little more dynamic than some of our previous figures but come-on he is the Master of Kung Fu, how could we not have him in a martial arts style pose???




Next up is a sneak preview of the Dazzler sculpt. Anyone who knows the character will recognise that this is based on a classic John Byrne piece of artwork. After a lot of thought we decided to go with this classic look, rather than her new ‘short pink hair, punk’ look or the slightly boring blue costume. The main reason for this is that the character was designed specifically to capitalise on the ‘70s disco scene and we feel it’s quite simply one of the best X-Men costumes to date. I mean c’mon she somehow manages to wear high-heels at the same time as roller-boots.




Moving swiftly on, I’ve got some exciting news regarding the last character choices for the most recent extension (121-140). The guys over at the superherofigurineforum.com have put together eight excellent polls, each based on a different branch of the Marvel Universe. If you head over there you can join the forum and vote for your favourite. The plan is that we’ll make the top character in each poll.

Now, I know some people tend to be a little shy of internet forums but the guys running superherofigurineforum are some of the finest collectors you could hope to meet (even if it is in a virtual capacity) and they’ll make sure the voting is 100% fair. I’m assured that you’re all welcome to join (as long as you stick by the more-than-fair rules), even if all you want is to vote and then never be heard of again.

But check out the threads, you never know you may discover some facts about the collection that you never knew and you may even discover some like-minded collectors, who enjoy nothing more than badgering me for more info. (Just kidding guys, you know I love you!)

You can click on the link below, check out the forum help link for registration help or e-mail the chaps in charge.



http://www.marvelcustoms.co.uk/howtopostontheforum.htm

E-mail help : TGR@Marvelcustoms.co.uk

Right that’s me out of here, everyone have a good weekend and I’ll be back with more news next week.

Rich