Monthly Archives: November 2020

26Nov/20

Silverline creators share Thanksgiving memories

Creator Spotlight, , , , , , , , , , , ,

On Thanksgiving, we’re encouraged to take the day out to be thankful for our many blessings. We here at Silverline are thankful most of all for YOU, who continue to support us and read our comics…and that allows us to continue to make comics, which we love doing.

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, we asked Silverline Creators: What’s your favorite Thanksgiving memory (childhood or otherwise)?

-Barb Kaalberg
I grew up on a farm in Iowa a half mile from my Grandparents, a stereotypical old farmer couple with bib overalls for my Grandfather and a dress with an apron for my Grandmother. For Thanksgiving, my Aunt and Uncle and my 3 cousins would join my Dad, Mom and us three kids on my Grandparents farm for the usual huge meal. My Grandmother would make every single person their favorite dish and their favorite dessert in addition to the expected Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy and homemade, yeast raised dinner rolls. Everything, of course, was made from scratch. There were so many dishes of different kinds of food and desserts that she could have fed half of a small country, but she cherished making everyone happy with her (amazing, drooling good, from scratch, homemade) cooking that she relished making everyone’s favorites. Desserts would include pies, cakes, cookies, jam filled kolaches and homemade cinnamon buns. An awful lot of food for 12 people! But it was all made with love, and that was the best thing of all.

-Thomas Florimonte
My Grandmother’s turkey “Dressing.” Not that nasty “Stuffing” stuff that northerns pass off as a “side dish” during the Thanksgiving meal. I’m talking about good ‘ol Southern Cornbread Turkey Dressing. In most cases, it’s not a side dish to the Turkey itself. It’s a “Main Dish” served along side, right next to the turkey. In “my” house, if you don’t serve “Dressing” during the Thanksgiving meal, then you might as well not serve a turkey at all. And my Grandmother made the best dressing in the world- Fight me.

-Mike W. Belcher
Best Thanksgiving was probably the one time that both sets of my grandparents came to our house for the holiday. Until then, everything was very separate with my family going to one or the other every year. Having everyone together for once was nice and one of the few times I enjoyed Thanksgiving. Can’t say it’s one of my favorite holidays for whatever reason.

-Sid VenBlu
I only have one Thanksgiving memory because I’ve celebrated it just once. That’s a holiday only in the United States after all.
Sean Wolfe invited my close friend Sarah and I to have dinner together at his house, there I not only got awesome food, but also I got to meet the man behind “Cooking with Stupid.” It was a very pleasant evening all in all.

-Rob Davis
My father attempting to pull off turkey and stuffing ( which at our house were prepared separately) one Thanksgiving when my mother was in the hospital. He nearly pulled it off, but he came close to burning the stuffing. It was pretty dry and needed a lot of gravy to be edible. Seeing my WWII era dad a bit out of his depth but soldiering through was priceless.

-Ron Fortier
Okay, I’ve lots of them but they are all jumbled together.
My mother was one of ten children so Thanksgiving were pretty much us celebrating at home. On those rare occasions when she and her sisters decided to do it up big, we’d all go to my grandparents home in Maine. Now consider, my grandfather and grandfather, their ten children and their spouses…and all their kids. Honestly I had more cousins than the populations of small towns. Mom and my aunts would do all the cooking, each of the five ladies bringing individual dishes like some giant pot-luck gathering. Dad and his brother-in-laws would take out the extra tables and chairs from the attack and set them up through the living room and kitchen area. There was one giant table for the grown-ups and at least three smaller round tables for us munchkins.
I remember mounds of food, deserts and then when all had eaten their fill, we kids were cut loose to go out in the huge backyard to play games. Growing up in a big family is an amazing blessing and though the elders for the most part are all gone now, the memories of those gatherings keep me warm as I move on in this journey.

-Jaxon Renick
The Thanksgiving that comes to mind is the one when I was in art school, away from home and my buddy opened up the pizza shop he worked at for all of his friends and co-workers to have a Thanksgiving Dinner and not be alone. That was some damn fine pizza!

-John Metych
We used to go to my grandmother’s each Thanksgiving. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would all be there. The dining room table was large and accommodated seating all the adults. My cousins and I, however, got to sit at “the kiddie table.”
That wasn’t a bad thing, as it was an exclusive table for our generation. We would talk and act goofy, common for our age.  The table was always placed against a small wall separating the dining room from the kitchen.
My grandparent’s house was older – built in 1921 – and had age appropriate wear. During one Thanksgiving, we took note of a small crack in the wall. As kids are goofy and do silly things, one of my cousins used a spoonful of the instant mashed potatoes from their plate as spackle! They filled the crack with rehydrated potato flakes… surprisingly, the colour was a fairly close match!
We cousins still laugh about that impromptu Thanksgiving “MacGyvered This Old House” style repair!

-Brad Thomte
When I was young, my family would have the traditional Thanksgiving meal each year.  It was my mother, father, my younger brother, and me.
One of the items on the menu was cranberry sauce.  It wasn’t homemade, it was canned.  This was in the 70’s and 80’s and the cans had an embossed expiration date on the bottom instead of an inked stamp.
This caused an imprint of the date to transfer to the gelatinous blob
that was the cranberry sauce.
This phenomenon created a rivalry between my brother and I.  We
constantly fought as to who “gets the numbers.”  It got so bad that we
had to keep track of who got the numbers the year before.
Unfortunately, the last few years we were at home together, the cans
had switched over to the inked stamp instead of the embossing, so we
were unable to continue the rivalry.

-Peter Clinton
As I spent the last 3 years studying in the US I did get to participate in 3 thanksgivings. Usually those of us staying in student accommodation and near by would gather to have a ‘Friendsgiving’ where we’d all bring food and drink and have a bit of a party.
And one year my class mate Jose invited me to spend Thanksgiving with him and his family out in Pennsylvania, where his wife made a hell of a lot of food and I made sure to confuse his kids with a great many lies about life in the UK. Yes, we all live in castles!
We ended the evening with their family tradition where they all sit down and watch White Christmas, which I’m embarrassed to say I had never seen!

-Kevin Gallegly
I do t have a single one… just the ceremony around it… the good dishes… candles… the spread of snacks and finger foods… a college football game on because my grandfather was a big USC fan!

-Scott Wakefield
This is a tough question, because I have a large family and we love being together. Childhood Thanksgivings have been in New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and places I’m sure I’ve forgotten. Our gatherings are always noisy and full of laughter, often requiring the ability to maintain multiple conversations at once.
One of my favorite Thanksgivings was at my aunt & uncle’s house in Indiana. I think I was 12 or 13 years old. They had a big house, with a big finished basement and tons of Nerf guns. My cousins, my brother, and I played almost non-stop, running, jumping over furniture, laughing and yelling and being sweaty adolescent lunatics. They also had a new computer with games I had never seen before, and I wanted to stay up all night playing. To make it even better, my grandparents lived nearby, so we were all able to spend time together. I think the meal was good, but then, I’ve never had a bad Thanksgiving dinner.
Family is a big part of my life, and I’m glad to have trouble finding one happy memory.

-Rory Boyle
Being from the great state of Ohio, we’re guaranteed to be graced with a healthy dose of lake effect snow. It shows up and accumulates in a hurry. Every Thanksgiving my family would pack up some classic dishes and make the drive along the coast of Lake Erie to my Aunt & Uncle’s house for our annual feast. Usually by then feet of snow had fallen. My Aunt and Uncle’s house was tucked away down long winding roads not frequently trafficked, leaving the roads paved with fresh white powder. The trees, being either blasted and caked with snow or standing tall and silent, their limbs would frosted with snow looking like skeletal fingers reaching over the road. We’d reach their driveway in our station wagon and turn onto the snow covered gravel. Pulling up to the party of cars, and rushing out to meet family, we were always greeted by the aroma of a turkey roasting on a spit, and the joyful shouts of welcome from the rest of the family. It was a beautiful start to every winter season.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Silverline to all of you!
#MakeMineSilverline!

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24Nov/20

Silverline Creator R.A. Jones on Thanksgiving

Creator Spotlight,

by R.A. Jones
In recent years (and in part because a very small part of my ethnic make-up is Native American), mention of Thanksgiving inevitably brings to mind a great bit by The Daily Show’s then-host John Stewart.  It went something like this:

“I intend to celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional way.  I’m going to invite all my neighbors over for a big feast – then kill them and take their land.”

In my own life, there really is no single specific memory of one Thanksgiving Day above all others, but simply a warm trove of collective memories.
First, naturally enough, there is the food.  I came from a very large family, and while we never experienced anything remotely resembling a shortage of food on our table, no day saw an abundance so great as on that special Thursday in November.
Turkey, of course (one of the largest you could buy in those pre-steroid days, I imagine).  Dressing and dumplings (homemade: nothing that came in a box or a can), green bean casserole, corn.  Hot dinner rolls dripping with margarine.
And desserts, too.  Pumpkin pie (which I always liked, but largely as the simple loading platform for generous dollops of whipped cream!).  And my mom baked homemade apple/cranberry pies that were out of this world.
After a certain age, I became mom’s unofficial “taste tester” as she prepared the fixings for her dressing before popping it into the oven.  It took a sophisticated palette like mine to tell her when she had added just the right amount of sage!
We would continue to dine off the leftovers for several days afterward.  The final stage came when dad would scrape off every last shred of meat still stubbornly clinging to the turkey bones and mom would serve us creamed turkey on toast.
That’s right: Our final and still fondly remembered meal of the holiday consisted of a feathered version of what GIs, doubtless with equal fondness, called “s#!t on a shingle!”
Then came the football game.  The connection of this game with the holiday goes back, if I’m not mistaken, to the very first Thanksgiving: when the two sides played a rousing post-feast game of touch football.  (The Pilgrims, naturally, being the “shirts” while the Indians were the “skins.”  Ouch!)
I’ve been a lifelong fan of the Dallas Cowboys (or nearly so; they are actually a few years younger than I am!), and watching them play was and still is considered by me to be one of my personal “traditions” of the holiday.
That does in turn play into one Thanksgiving memory that is very specific.  A couple of decades or more ago, about a week before Turkey Day, I received a phone call from an old buddy of mine (who was and is a much bigger name in the comics biz than I ever was or ever will be).
The reason behind his call was rather amusing (to me, at least.  Probably less so for him.).  The lady he was dating at the time had invited him to her parents’ house for Thanksgiving.
This would also be the first time he met her family and he understandably wanted to make a good first impression.  One thing that made him apprehensive about this was the fact that her father and brothers were football fans and he would almost certainly be expected to watch the games on TV that day with them.
Only problem: Having no interest in the sport, my buddy also had virtually no knowledge of the teams involved or the nuances of the game.  Yet he didn’t want to just sit there like a lump on a log and make no contributions to the kind of conversation that always surrounds a game.
So, knowing I did possess at least a modicum of such, he called on me to be his living version of Cliff’s Notes for Football!
Alas, his relationship with said lady did not progress to the point of matrimony and eventually ended altogether.  I hope it wasn’t because I failed to adequately school him on the finer points of football.
Finally…I know it might be easy in such perilous times as now – pandemic, unemployment, fires, hurricanes – to think that you have precious little for which you can really be thankful.
I don’t know if this will be useful to you, but something that helps me, at least a little, in such times of my life derives from the chorus of a wonderful tune Bing Crosby sang in the classic motion picture White Christmas (if I may be excused for tapping into a different holiday):

When I’m worried and I can’t sleep,
I count my blessings instead of sheep.
And I fall asleep
Counting my blessings.

One of those blessings for me this year is my inclusion in the Silverline “family.”
Hope you all have equal reason to feel thankful!

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17Nov/20

Fulfillment done…and ComiConway 2020!

News, , , ,

Fulfillment done!

We’re happy to report that fulfillment for Cat & Mouse #3 and Trumps Book 1 is done! Well, with the exception of one…and then five whose addresses I don’t have (if you’re reading this and don’t have your comic yet—please make sure I have your address). Some of the digital rewards have gone out—mostly the “catch-up” comics. I’m still putting together the other pdfs, but hope to deliver those to backers by the weekend (I’m shooting for Friday).

Please drop us a line and let us know what you think! We know you’ve got a lot of stuff to read…but we’re anxious to hear your thoughts!

ComiConway 2020

Despite the fact you may have heard the world is in the middle of a plague, life moves on…and that’s what ComiConway is doing…and they’ve invited Silverline to be a part of it in a big way—and we couldn’t be more excited. Roland Mann and Jeff Whiting were both guests of the show in 2018 and both had only great things to say.

So how will Silverline be participating? Thanks for asking. On three consecutive Saturdays (Nov 7, 14, and 21), Silverline will be hosting four panels each day starting at 10am (Central time). The panel schedule looks like this:

November 7
(to view these panels, head to the video at ComiConway’s facebook page: https://fb.watch/1P48vkfEEZ/  Be warned…the first one starts late…we had technical difficulties)

10 am
Who and what is Silverline?
Panelists: Roland Mann (moderator), Thomas Florimonte, Kurtis Fujita, and John Metych.

11 am
Silverline: What are Cat & Mouse, Kayless, Divinity?
Panelists: Kurtis Fujita (moderator), Roland Mann, Barb Kaalberg, Brent Larson, Alex Gallimore, Wubba Fett, Roberta Conroy, Mike W. Belcher.

12 pm
Breaking into the comic industry
Panelists: Kurtis Fujita (moderator), R.A. Jones, Roland Mann, John Metych, Thomas Florimonte, Aaron Humphres, Roberta Conroy, John Martin.

1 pm
Silverline: What are Twilight Grimm, Friar Rush, Sniper N Rook?
Panelists: Scott Wakefield (moderator), R.A. Jones, John Metych, Rob Davis, Ron Fortier, Aaron Humphres, Mike W. Belcher, John Martin.

November 14
(to view these panels, head to the video at ComiConway’s facebook page: https://fb.watch/1P45qqAGLz/ )

10 am
Tools and strategies of comic book penciling
Panelists: Kurtis Fujita (moderator), Aaron Humphres, C. Michael Lanning, Peter Clinton, Wubba Fett, Rob Davis.

11 am
Silverline: What are Steam Patriots, White Devil, and The Rejects?
Panelists: Kurtis Fujita (moderator), Scott Wakefield, Rory Boyle, Dan Hosek, R.A. Jones, Roland Mann, C. Michael Lanning

12 pm
Tools and strategies of comic book Inking
Panelists: Scott Wakefield (moderator), Thomas Florimonte, John Martin, Haley Martin, Jeff Whiting, Rob Davis.

1 pm
Silverline: What are Trumps, Beah, and ChampFury?
Panelists: Roland Mann (moderator), Thomas Florimonte, Sid VenBlu, Haley Martin, Peter Clinton, Roberta Conroy,

November 21
https://www.facebook.com/ComiConway/ is the link for this coming Saturday (times are CENTRAL. We’ll need some questions for the Q&A, so y’all come!)

10 am
Tools and strategies of comic book Coloring
Panelists: Kurtis Fujita (moderator), Roberta Conroy, Sid VenBlu, Jeremy Kahn, Dan Hosek, David Rios. Tentative-Haley Martin.

11 am
Silverline: What are Teen Beetle, Wolf’s Hunter, and Satin’s Ways?
Panelists: Kurtis Fujita (moderator), John Crowther, Tim Thiessen, Ron Fortier.

12 pm
Tools and strategies of comic book Writing
Panelists: Scott Wakefield (moderator), Roland Mann, R.A. Jones, John Metych, Scott Wakefield, Tim Thiessen, John Crowther, Tentative: Brent Larson and Dan Hosek.

1 pm
Silverline Q&A
Panelists: Roland Mann(moderator), Kurtis Fujita, Alex Gallimore, Roberta Conroy, Mike W. Belcher, Rob Davis, Aaron Humphres, Thomas Florimonte, Sid VenBlu, C. Michael Lanning, R.A. Jones, Peter Clinton, John Metych, Tim Thiessen, John Crowther, Haley Martin, Scott Wakefield, Wubba, John Martin, Jeremy Kahn. Tentative: Brent Larson.

Again, we’re pretty excited to be participating, as 2020 Plague year has pretty much shut conventions down. Like you, we’re ready to get back to things!

Signings!

Roland Mann and Thomas Florimonte will be signing copies of Trumps (and other stuff) at Coliseum of Comics in the Fashion Square Mall on Saturday, November 21, from 4pm-7pm. Coliseum supported the kickstarter and they have special editions of the comics that sport their store logo. VERY limited copies are available. You can bring your other stuff for us to sign, too, or pick up something different from them while you’re there.

Join us this Saturday for our signing with Roland Mann – Writer and Thomas Florimonte Jr from 4PM – 7PM! 🎨#Orlando #OrlandoFL #ComicBooks

Posted by Coliseum of Comics on Monday, November 16, 2020

So make your plans and come see us.

Keep your eyes peeled here, too…we’re planning something special in the days to come!

 

10Nov/20

Craft: Dan Hosek – Lettering: From Hand to Digital

Craft of comic creating

Hey Silverline Family,

I was able to grab a snippet on lettering from Dan Hosek.Dan is a Silverline creator currently doing the colors on Steam Patriots, but he has done just about every job in the business and he has done them well. That makes him a total beast in comics and someone definitely worth listening to. Here he talks about lettering, and how he developed his style as the industry was changing.

Lettering: From Hand to Digital

Typically, five tasks have to be completed to make a comic book: writing, penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering. Of those five jobs, lettering is probably the least glamorous, but it is also one of the most important in making a comic book feel “professional.” While good lettering might not make a comic a masterpiece, poor lettering can make it stick out like a sore thumb.

Let me start with a little history. I worked at Marvel Comics as an assistant editor in the mid-90s, a time that was seeing the medium move from traditional “hand” methods of creation to the digital methods used today. The two jobs (at the time) that were most directly impacted by this move were coloring and lettering. Before the move to computer lettering, all comics were hand-lettered.  The tools of the trade were an Ames lettering guide, speedball pens—with different tips (or nibs) for bold and plain text, an Exacto knife to cut out all the caption and word balloons, and rubber cement to paste it to the artboards (the great Todd Klein has an awesome visual description here: https://kleinletters.com/HandBasics.html)! If there were corrections, they had to be pasted on top of the errors in the balloons. Hopefully, editors (like me) wouldn’t want any serious dialogue overhauls, but when they were needed, Marvel’s fabled Bullpen came to our last-minute rescue many times!

Pat Brosseau’s pasted up lettering from Jim Lee’s run on X-Men. The rubber cement has yellowed over time.

Sometimes I don’t know how things got done in a timely matter in publishing before computers. The switch to digital made the process of lettering (and corrections) simpler. The first person I remember working with who switched to all-digital lettering was Richard Starkings. Though I’m sure there were other pioneers blazing the trail with him, I remember Richard’s company, Comicraft, being the first computer letterers used by Marvel before other “traditional” letterers also began to make the switch. These days, hand lettering is very rare.

With that brief history lesson out of the way, let’s talk about the positives and negatives of digital lettering. The traditional method required a greater skill set than what’s required of lettering with a computer.  On top of knowing where to place balloons, how to place them to read in the correct order, and the basics of laying out a page, a letterer also needed the skill to create letterforms that were uniform in size, legible, and could even convey emotion.  A skill that had to be learned and honed. Not to mention the talent needed to hand-letter killer sound effects and title treatments!

With digital lettering, the latter part of that skill set is not needed. Places like blambot.com have many comic lettering fonts available for free and Comicraft licenses their fonts for a fee, just to name a few resources. And while it’s nice to have this available, as with other things that have entered the digital realm, having the fonts and Adobe Illustrator does not necessarily make one a letterer. I have seen many indie comics with beautiful art destroyed by amateurish lettering (thankfully that’s not the case with any Silverline titles!). My first attempt at lettering had many flaws, the worst of which was way too much space in my balloons (thanks to my friend and letterer extraordinaire, Paul Tutrone, for pointing that out). Over time and with practice, my skills have gotten sharper, but I’m of the thinking that one is always a student and always has more to learn.

You could fit a Star Destroyer in all the “air” in those balloons. And I should take my own advice—just because I have a pencil, it doesn’t mean I’m a penciller!

My lettering somewhat improved over time.

A letterer’s job is always to help tell the story. Today, some of the most important things a computer letterer can do are not get in the way of the art by keeping balloons and captions off of important story elements and make sure everything reads in the proper order. Although computers have taken some of the “human touch” from the art of letterforms, the digital age has opened the door to allow more people to try their hands at lettering. With time, new styles and forms will likely evolve from this change, a small example being how some comics use upper- and lower-case letters in word balloons, something almost absent in comics before computer lettering. Innovation and change are something comic books have always been good at and I look forward to seeing what the future holds.

03Nov/20

Silverline Creator Spotlight: Mike W. Belcher

Creator Spotlight, , , , , ,

Each month we’ll be shining the spotlight on a Silverline creator and sharing their secret origin story, learning what makes them tick, and giving you the scoop on how they came up in the comics world.  

Up this time is Mike W. Belcher, a graphic designer by day and a comic maker by night. Mike provided letters for Scary Book #4, Divinity #1 and #2
Twilight Grimm #1 and #2. Mike is also the creator/writer/artist for Man in the Mask, a comic he does with his son Aiden on color.

Now, without further ado, we present to you…

12 Questions with … Mike W. Belcher

SILVERLINE: So, who are you and where do you hail from?

I am Mike W. Belcher  I hail from the great state of Kentucky, eastern Kentucky to be exact. Little place called Prestonsburg. Other than when I went off to college, it’s been my lifelong home.

SILVERLINE: What would you say it is you do here at Silverline?

I am the production designer and letterer for some of the fine books at Silverline  I developed the trade dress design overtop the logos of the books to give credit to all the hard working creator. Currently lettering Divinity and Twilight Grimm with more to follow I hope, including my buddy Ron Fortier’s new project, Satin’s Ways, coming soon from Silverline.

SILVERLINE: Where might Silverline readers have seen your work previously?

I also self publish and create my own comic under my AMK Comics banner called MAN IN THE MASK. Some have called it a throwback to a more fun time in comics. It’s story of a regular guy trying to live up to the masked legacy of his grandfather. It’s my attempt at trying to do a old fashioned masked man book where the guy is actually a hero to his community for many reasons not just because he can throw a good punch. I think a number of us were, of course, influenced by super hero comics. But the last 20 or so years have been very dark and not very fun. I’m writing a comic that I hope fills a need for something a little more fun and hopeful.

SILVERLINE: When you’re not making great Silverline comics, what do you do in your spare time? What are your hobbies?

I’m kind of boring. If I’m not creating comics, I’m typically reading them. I do like to cook for my family. That’s one of the many things I learned from my grandfather who I loosely based the grandfather in Man in the Mask on.

SILVERLINE: Many creators at Silverline have been in the comics industry for years — what’s kept YOU plugging away at comics?

I legitimately love comics. Ever since I discovered them, I have had no other interests. They are a fundamental part of my life. I found that I didn’t just want to write them, I needed to make them too. When I sit down to write or draw, I’m instantly transported to a new world and remember the fun I had when I was younger drawing on my board.

SILVERLINE: What was the first comic you remember reading that made you think, “Hey, I could do this!”

I found myself lucky enough to live through such an imaginative time in comics 1985-86. John Byrne’s Superman and Frank Miller’s Batman Year One made me want to create comics and it just went from there.

SILVERLINE: What’s on your playlist? Who/what music do you listen to, and do you listen to it while you work?

Wide range of bands like Metallica, Pearl Jam, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Huey Lewis and Johnny Cash keep me inspired and I can tailor my list to the type of page I’m drawing. I work in silence when I write though.

SILVERLINE: Who were some of your earliest influences on your art ?

John Byrne, Frank Miller, David Mazzuchelli, Matt Wagner

SILVERLINE: What was the first comic you ever worked on professionally?

Scary Book #4 for Silverline 2.0 in 1998

SILVERLINE: Can you still read that comic today without wincing?

I was just learning to digitally letter and it shows, but yeah.

SILVERLINE: What are some non-Silverline independent comics you would recommend to readers?

Lavender Jack by Dan Schkade on Webtoons. The Baboon by Jamie Jones. Mr. Jigsaw by Ron Fortier and Gary Kato. Fire Power by Chris Samnee.

SILVERLINE: If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice that would help them better navigate the comics industry, what would it be?

Don’t strive for perfection or that right time of ability. I was very hard on myself and it kept me from fulfilling my need to create comics earlier in life.

SILVERLINE: After you die, would you rather your memory be memorialized with an overpass or a parking lot?

Parking lot. I would like to think people could relax and kick back at my lot.