Making of "Supercats" (all of it!)

Way back before the world went upside down, Sven contacted me about doing a big collab for National Superhero Day (which is apparently a thing!)  His plan was that a bunch of webcomic artists would create superhero alter-egos who all exist in a parallel universe together.  That sounded like a lot of fun, so I signed on!

First we had to come up with the characters.  I haven't done anything about it yet in the comics, but Fran is really into sci-fi and horror, so I went in that direction for her superhero identity. 

Butt Boy for Vincent seemed like a obvious choice and I loved how it was the sort of innocent thing a kid would come up with, but had extremely rude connotations.  I knew from the very start that he was going to be Green Lantern, he just CHOSE to make only butts.

A hulk type character for a baby seemed right.  J's the pro at drawing "proper" comic book characters, so I set him on the task.  The results had me rolling around laughing!

Dad Cats alter-ego was a little more in flux.  The 1st draft had him as Dad Joker, which I still really like, but we had some troubles cramming all this dad jokes into the script, plus -villain.  We toyed with the idea of actually having him the villain, but I didn't like them not being a proper family.  Dad Joker is on the back burner for now though, maybe one day I could do another where they're all villains instead of heros?

J came up with Edgelord, a cross between Batman and Spawn.  The dramatic shots of him saying mundane things were just too funny.

Next came the story itself.  I knew there was no way I could introduce 4 characters and tell a story in one strip, so this had to be an arc.  

J came up with the idea that it could be set AFTER a big fight and they are then having to do normal family things like finding food.  I thought about how that usually goes for us and that ticking timebomb of increasingly hangry small kids!  I wrote out the broad strokes for the script and passed it over to J to polish up and pep it up with a few more jokes.

Once we had that, it was up to me to storyboard out this monster.  The 1st comic was pretty easy as I could mainly just use the characters I'd drawn already.  I decided on a ferret reporter because he could "ferret out" the news! 

Next strip was more challenging!

I deliberately had them flying and up high on buildings so the backgrounds would be easier!  The birds-eye view on the 3rd panel was tricky though.  I used this pic I found online as reference.

I used the silhouette of an Austin skyline as a nod to where we live.  I originally had the sky colored blue in all the panels, but it looked a bit boring!  I thought if you can't have fun with weird colored backgrounds in a superhero comic, where CAN you?!  So I played around with the sky colors to up the drama.

Starting out on the next strip I hit a snag.  Originally I had them simply readying to attack, but it struck me as a bit off that they'd suddenly start beating on a baby, even if he had just hulked up!  He had to do something to prove he was a threat and it had to be something he could do on the roof AND done in as few panels as possible!  J saved the day and came up with lobbing the satellite dish at a helicopter.  I storyboarded it out and then J came in and added the proper anatomy.

I was worried at this point that we might have overdone it on Tantrums threat level, so I added a little parachute in the 5th panel to show "it's OK folks!"

Again I had to be slightly careful in the last installment.  They were technically beating up a BABY.  I moved things around a bit to show that Mommy Brain was trying to get through to Tantrum, the suggestion being they had to weaken or restrain him to help out.

I'm proud to say I managed to do all of this one without a J assist!  I googled "hulk roar" and found this picture to help with Tantrums pizzzzzza mouth:

I went all out on the background and FX during the fight and then brought things back down to "normal" for the final panel to emphasize the dumbness of the punchline.

And there you have it!  It was a really fun exercise, but such hard work!  I'm looking forward to getting back to the original Litterverse! :)