That’s right folks we’ve been telling you for a while now we had things brewing just waiting to be revealed and this is just one of them! Scottie Ray Watson and SPLASH! tore it up big time on this baby, and we’re rolling it out as an exclusive 11×17 print just for the Wizard World Austin show! Scottie and I will be on hand to sign them and Scottie will be sketching as well, so you gotta come out and get them while they last!
What, you thought we forgot to make with the visual aids? No way! As those more observant folks may have heard, Scottie Watson and I are gonna be out at the Austin Comic Con this weekend, signing, selling, sketching, and generally causing trouble! Here for your convenience is a hand dandy show map, giving you our exact location at the show! So come on out and check out the great stuff we have to offer, get a sketch, shoot the bull, and just have a great time! Comic conventions are awesome no matter if they’re your first or your thousandth. Get caught Red Handed this weekend in Austin! (Helpful hint: Click it to make it larger, and then print it so you can take it with you to the show!)
What, you thought we missed you this week? Nah, the SKETCH Friday post should be up shortly, we just had to add some other cool stuff first!
Like, for example, Red Handed Studios Presents: Talon and other stories!
That’s a 60 page perfect bound trade featuring a whole bunch of cool stories we’ve been itching to get out to the fans and just haven’t been able to before now. We’ve got Talon the way it was always meant to be, in FULL COLOR! Plus we’ve got Totem, Grace, and the original Dead Reckoning story reworked a bit with corrections and some minor edits! We’ve got a ton of stuff packed in there for you, and all for $12.95! You can’t beat that action! Head on over to the Indyplanet store and pick that baby up now! We will have limited quantities for sale at conventions, but when they’re gone they’re gone so make sure you don’t miss out!
We’ll also be releasing some more cool stuff and some updates here very soon, so stick with us, you won’t be sorry!
So yeah, for a while, the website updates are done! woo! Not that I’m content, because I’m not. I’ll always be tweaking things to make them easier to deal with from an admin point of view, and better looking from an end user’s point of view, but for now, I think we’re good. If you find any broken links or something that doesn’t seem right, please let me know and I’ll tune it up post haste!
I got the most awesome news this week! Dead Reckoning artsmith Scottie Ray Watson is attending Wizard World Austin! YES! He was all calm and nonchalant about it too, like “What would you think if I said I’m attending the Austin show?” Needless to say I replied with a high level of mad excitement and it’s a done deal! Scottie and I will both be there signing books, rocking sketches, and generally making a public nuisance of ourselves. I haven’t been able to get clearance for the dunking booth yet, but I’m still trying!
So this week marks the last page of Dead Reckoning: Square. Peter asked an excellent question last week, which was “What happens next?” Well, we’re taking care of that right now in fact! Scottie is feverishly working on new pages, and sending me new stuff almost every single day, at a pace that’s hard for me to even keep up with! But as fast as he is, we’re not gonna be done with the brand new Dead Reckoning graphic novel “No Other Way” in time to give you a page next Friday, or anytime soon. In fact, we wouldn’t if we were done, because that’s never really been the intention here. We’re not planning to run Dead Reckoning as a webcomic, but as a series of print graphic novels, so while you can always get some cool stuff here, you will have to buy the book to get the whole story.
But back to Peter’s question, what’s next?
First up, SKETCH Fridays. That’s where Scottie picks something to sketch out of his random brain and goes to work, producing a piece of brand new original art. Sometimes it’ll be characters you know, other times it’ll be original stuff from Dead Reckoning, Talon, or even Dynagirl! You just never know! What’s more, once we preview that sketch right here on the website, it will go live on eBay and be available for purchase to the highest bidder. Now we could totally pocket that cash, but we’re not. Instead every single penny of the money made from SKETCH Friday will go to charity. You read that right. EVERY. SINGLE. PENNY. Why? Because Red Handed Studios is now and has always been about doing what’s right. In keeping with that, we’re looking at several charities focusing on military families and we’ll have that nailed down and finalized before we start our first auction.
In addition to that we’ll be starting a prose story right here on the site, serialized and accompanied by some excellent art! It’ll be written by Scottie and I, with art by Scottie, and it’ll be 100% in continuity with everything else we’re doing so you’ll need it to keep up!
Beyond that, you never know what you’re going to find popping up around here. But rest assured, it’ll be fun!
So Comicpress is holding on by a thread today, but it’s still hanging in there. I discovered a couple of weird little glitches last night while I was checking everything over and in an attempt to rectify them, I found myself stuck up to my hindparts in code. To say I was not impressed would be an understatement. Ends up most of the problem was simply my lack of familiarity with the platform, so once I dug back into things a bit I figured it all out and things shaped right up. So now we’ve got the post text on every page instead of just the home page, meaning when you click forward and back through the archives you get the post descriptions I’ve taken great pains to write out for your enjoyment. We’ve also got some nifty little navigation buttons there at the bottom, and I think, they dress things up quite nicely if I do say so myself.
By way of new production updates for you, I can relay that Scottie has roughed out the first 15 pages as of last night and is hard at work finishing those pages. Our projected complete date for Dead Reckoning: No Other Way is October 1st, so we’re shooting to wrap art production no later than the end of September to give us time to color and letter it. As someone lucky enough to get to sit here and check it out when Scottie’s slaving over the art table, I gotta tell you it’s looking incredible just in the roughs! In addition to all that Scottie’s also rocking some SWEET promo stuff, and the odd little fun piece as well, like this sketch he did up last week:
Sweet huh? Next week I’ll show you the colors I spilled all over it. 
Enjoy this week’s page, because we sure did!!
*sigh* So I feel like I’ve given over fully to the Dark Side. The sad part about it is, I also LIKE it!
Heh. So yeah, prior to this week I was a die-hard Webcomic plugin guy. I test drove the Comicpress theme when I was first building the Dynagirl site over a year ago and hated it from top to bottom. HATE HATE HATED it! Then just when I was at a moment of pure despair…TA DA! I found the Webcomic plugin! It had everything! It was easy to use, it looked kick ass, and the learning curve was suitably quick enough that I didn’t have to buy a manual or spend a month trying to figure out a million lines of code! Woo!
Fast forward to yesterday. I tooled up the Dead Reckoning site about three months ago, and our hits have shot through the roof since we started putting up new pages of the Dead Reckoning: Square story Scottie and I did last year. Since we were getting lots more interest I figured I’d clean things up a bit and get it ready for the release of some brand new initiatives we’re working out right now. A sort of working ahead sort of thing if you will. I know, rare for me. But anyway…when I went in to basically rock a clone of the Dynagirl site, it all went to hell in a handbasket. For one thing, I hate the new version of Webcomic. HATE HATE HATE it! It’s nothing like the plugin I fell in love with and still use on the Dynagirl site at all! That’s one of the biggest reasons I haven’t updated to the new version over there yet, because I feared the worst, and it has come true.
So now what?! I mean Webcomic sucks ass, I’d already found dislike for Comicpress…ARGH! So I messed around with things a bit and decided to bite the bullet and give Comicpress another try. Like Webcomic they’ve gone through a couple of revisions in the interim, so why not right? Turns out, I don’t completely hate it. It does have some incredibly annoying aspects that make me want to strike my head repeatedly on a cement wall, but once I learned work-arounds for most of them, I found it not completely unpleasant. So that’s what you’re seeing around here now, the results of my falling to the Dark Side and finally embracing Comicpress. I’m still not completely convinced there’s not a bounty hunter waiting to encase me in carbonite lurking around the corner…but it’ll do for now.
Awesome piece!