rolodex we ve moved find us at barrelmag.com hello to the few and faithful big time attic readers zander and i are pleased to announce that we both have brand new graphic novels that are going to be published through top shelf next spring . zander s heck is about a washed up high school football player who discovers a portal to the underworld in his basement . and my book crater xv is the sequel to 2009 s far arden . army shanks is back and this time gets himself caught up in a black market space race heating up in the canadian high arctic . but the better news is that we ll be serializing both books through our brand new monthly magazine double barrel two cannons ... double barrel ... get it . double barrel is a digital only monthly magazine that will serialize the aforementioned graphic novels plus have lots of great bonus content like short stories guest strips a letters page and an in depth tips & tricks section . the first issue comes out in just two days on wednesday june 6 and you can get it pretty much anywhere you get your ebooks comixology iverse ibooks or the top shelf digital app . each issue will have over 50 pages of content for just 1.99 . yep . a buck a barrel . i m going to put this next part in bold because it s pretty important zander and i will now be writing all of our blog posts on barrelmag.com the double barrel homepage . please add barrelmag.com to your rss feed if you re in town on thursday swing by big time attic for our launch party . here s your official invitation with that we re going to shut off the lights here and shutter the windows . we re not shutting the big time attic blog down completely but we might be gone for a while . thanks for reading and we ll see you at barrelmag.com posted by kevin cannon at 9 53 pm 3 comments email thisblogthis share to twittershare to facebookshare to pinterest thursday april 26 2012 mn original video on the cartoonist conspiracy thanks to joel zimmerman over at mn original for producing this great video postcard . it s a snapshot of what we do during our monthly jams and i apologize if i screwed up any facts in the interview if you re a twin cities cartoonist and want to kill some time hanging out and drawing with some of the nicest folks around stop by diamond s coffee shoppe on the first thursday of every month . the jam officially starts at 6 30pm but people trickle in and out between then and 10pm . if you re shy and worried about being the new guy don t worry just come in and put your head down and draw that s basically what i did for the first two years of conspiracy . but seriously these are the nicest people in minneapolis . and if you d much rather draw on table cloths and drunkenly shout out answers to trivia questions i mean write them down quietly while eating the best food in uptown then come to the monthly bad cartoonist trivia night hosted by danno klonowski . last mondays of every month at the bad waitress on 26th & nicollet . the next one is monday april 30th . 9 pm start time but come early and grab dinner posted by kevin cannon at 1 05 pm no comments email thisblogthis share to twittershare to facebookshare to pinterest tuesday march 06 2012 game infarcer the making of the mortal kombat gag cover it s game infarcer time everyone i only tend to do a handful of actual illustration jobs each year that is single images that are colored by me and i always look forward to game infarcer game informer s snotty look at various games and game trends . i ve provided the cover first page that is to this section for seven years now and it s always great fun to call upon my funny makin skills as well as my coloring ones to crank this sucker out.conceptas usual the process starts with a meeting at game informer and i knew i was in for a bit of trouble when joe juba said i didn t really think it was funny when they first told me but now i do . uh oh . is this drawing going to need a paragraph next to it so anyone will know what they re talking about but really i thought anyone can make a funny illustration when a rock solid concept is laid in their lap ; it s just going to take a little of that little thing i call the zander cannon magic . okay so . if you think that this sounds like foreshadowing for the part later in the story when i shoot the whole thing to hell i say to you shh you re going to ruin it . so i met with joe juba dan ryckert tim turi jeff cork and probably ben reeves . i don t know . probably . ben s always creeping around somewhere . they told me that the game we re riffing on is mortal kombat then gave me a little back story . the company that makes mortal kombat netherrealms was purchased by warner brothers and they ve done some crossover things like mortal kombat vs. the dc universe and now they ve permanently added freddy krueger from nightmare on elm street to the mk roster . so the gag is that mortal kombat isn t going to stop there ; they re going to start grabbing characters from all of warner brothers movies . they give me a list of notable movies in wb s film catalog and we start brainstorming . the big idea they wanted in there was to make tom cruise s character from risky business be pulled across the floor by mk s scorpion the guy who says get over here . now whenever anyone says warner bros the only thing that anyone really knows that they made is looney tunes . i know people might know that the matrix or harry potter were warner bros movies but it s like disney you know the cartoon characters ; everything else is a little fuzzy . and obviously as a cartoonist bugs bunny elmer fudd daffy duck and the rest are very appealing things to draw particularly the idea of them bloodying up or being bloodied up by mortal kombat characters . we even had a gag worked out where bugs bunny would be front and center eating someone s arm like a carrot and the drippy blood letters that usually say finish him in mk would say that s all folks . now the problem came when i wanted to flesh this gag out for the full illustration . if you have bugs bunny front and center how do you put tom cruise s character in the background and have people realize what s happening bugs bunny puts you in a certain frame of mind and you re just not going to understand who some guy in his underwear is and what he s doing there . so i started putting forth the idea that we could have the rest of the illustration populated by the rest of the wb cartoons ; they make for great sight gags their art style clashes appealingly with the realistic mortal kombat characters and they re just plain old fun to draw . wow great it s the old zander cannon magic that everyone loves coming through in the clutch except ... that s not what the gag is supposed to be . and that s not what they asked for . and with the setup of freddy krueger it doesn t make a whole lot of sense . and finally it turns out in the world of video games and the internet the gag of cute characters killing or being killed has been done once or twice or possibly ten million times.so i went back to the drawing board and really thought about what the gi folks were asking for . the freddy krueger setup is there to prepare us for the idea of netherrealms going back into the film catalog and just looking for brand recognition at the expense of appropriateness . so i took another look at the big list of movies that dan ryckert gave me and went back to what we had discussed at the gi offices . so then i dropped in this sketch assembling it from various mini sketches into one document.we ve got free willy in the foreground getting uppercut harry potter getting struck by lightning tom cruise about to be speared by scorpion and the part i was most happy with bugs bunny as the uppercut toasty guy . this illustration and last year s illustration are heavy with movie references so i was really happy to put in a semi obscure video game reference . in the earlier mortal kombat games i.e. the ones i played every time you uppercut someone a little image of one of the programmers came out in a purple shirt and said toasty . and so there was my excuse to put in bugs bunny.line artsince this drawing was much more about the various gags in it than a unified composition i took a different approach to the line art . after getting approval for this sketch i printed out several 10 % cyan copies of this layout to use as guides for the final line art . what i ended up with was a pile of illustrations all having very little to do with each other.then i scanned them and assembled them all into one document to figure out the final placement as well as leaving room for the subhead text and logo.the nice thing about creating final art elements separately like this is that you can work on the layout and get some solid feedback about how they look together tweaking them at even a late stage . the tricky thing about it is that you end up with a lot of tangents that you have to futz with . tangents in this case are places where a line in the foreground just barely touches a line in the background and makes it look like these two things which are supposedly a large distance apart are touching . like this once everything s in its place and i more or less have the kinks worked out i go in and edit the lines so that things behind other things have their lines obscured and the whole thing looks like a real drawing . coloringi wanted to keep my ability to move the characters around as long as i could so i decided to keep all the characters in their own layers as i colored . as you may know if you use photoshop having this many layers in a high resolution file is extremely memory intensive and a slow computer like mine was at the time that also limited the amount of ram available to photoshop was not going to be able to handle it . so i saved the line art as a separate flat image and imported it into my new color file making it a channel instead of a layer . this places it above all of the other layers but saves on memory because photoshop doesn t have to contend with all of the layer properties involved . a nice workaround for a situation where your memory is limited.then i went in and colored that sucker . i usually struggle with color for the first 75 % of a job because you re basically putting