Sucker Punch Review #2

The Art of Sucker Punch, a huge doorstep of a book designed by myself for the upcoming movie, has been reviewed on cult nerd site AintItCool. Here's a screen grab of the review - click to embiggen (or click here to visit the site). Nice!

Mart

Uncle Boonmee

I've long been a fan of designer and illustrator Chris Ware. Jimmy Corrigan is a benchmark of tiny-picture funny and some of his book covers are awesome, like this one.

This is a poster for a film I'm not at all familiar with, but it jumped out at me from the wall of other posters on Apple's trailers website and a bit of googling revealed it was, indeed, by Mr. Ware. It's an utterly joyous piece of work.

Invite

This is an invite we did for our Titan leaving party, based on the inspiration for our company name. Frankly we should both be ashamed of the arguments we had about who was gonna be Spidey…

And this is the original cover...

Martin

AMAZING!

Well it's probably well known now that Amazing15 takes it's name from Amazing Fantasy#15, the 1962 comic which features the first appearance of Spider-Man.

Since the last Spider-Man film was a whole four years ago, clearly the entire franchise is well over-due a reboot and Marc '500 Days of Summer' Webb (HA! HE HAS 'WEB' IN HIS NAME!) is helming a new movie with Andrew Garfield playing the wall-crawler. Following 'Spider-Man', 'Spider-Man 2' and the breathtakingly titled 'Spider-Man 3', the title of the new film was announced yesterday:

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN.

Amazing.

Hey! He has mechanical web-shooters!

The Office

For those who asked, here's a handful of photos of Amazing15 HQ.

Our desks. Marcus has the orange chair. We have christened that massive printer R2D2 for no other reason than we're idiots. That small door to the left is where we keep the naughty children. And the cold water tank. Keen eyes will spot that, along with some other bits and pieces, the Amazing Fantasy #15 cover canvas we got when we left Titan (thanks guys!) is up on the wall...

Behind my work station is another desk on which is my drawing board (in this photo the final page of issue #3 my comic The Absence is pasted up on it, fact fans).

As you might be able to see from this angle, when I'm talking to someone on the webcam, I have our year planner behind my head, whereas...

...when Marcus is on webcam, he has my book shelves behind him. The upshot of this is that I look all organised and stuff, and he looks all clever innit.

Martin

Olly Good

So there's this UK graphic designer whom I follow - goes by the name of Olly Moss. He's quite popular now as his work for the Levis Rolling Roadshow tour was shown on the Apple website. If you're not familiar, he does beautiful, usually three colour illustrations for movie posters and such. Very simple, but all about conveying the message in really clever/stark ways.

Yesterday Emily sent me this image:

It's called Wolverine or two Batmans? Good right?

So I went to Olly's blog to see what else he's been doing lately and, apparently, he's had commissions from Marvel and Lucas Film:

The Star Wars posters are so good. Check out how the forest trees make up Darth Vader's features on the Jedi poster and the two suns of Tatooine are 3PO's eyes - love that!

I carried on scrolling down his blog and came across this, posted end of last year, with the comment that just said, "Optimism!".

Made me smile.


Marcus x

Fiddling

My dad was, is, an engineer by trade. When I got my first car eighteen years ago we would spend hours upon hours, night after night in the family garage messing about with it. And if my car wasn't in the garage, my brother's would be, and if his wasn't, the family car would be, and if that wasn't - and sometimes even if it was - so was dad's motorbike. And if none of our cars were, then one of my friends would be round, their car up on the ramps while we passed spanners to dad through the engine bay while he lay on the greasy floor wrestling with the gearbox. These memories are some my fondest of my young adulthood (and I still remember how goddamn cold that garage could get cold in the winter). Sometimes there was an odd rattle, maybe a disturbing dashboard warning light had appeared, but often there was nothing even wrong with the vehicle - it was just an opportunity to tinker. To fiddle.

I was thinking this earlier today while I was making yet more adjustments to the Amazing15 website. There's nothing inherently wrong with it at the moment - I just feel that it could do with a bit of a tune up. And like all these kinds of jobs, once you start tinkering, it's sometimes hard to stop. Perhaps an innocent looking nut will sheer off an alternator mounting bracket or perhaps something which looks awesome in Safari refuses to work properly in Firefox.

So what is it then, I wonder, this urge to just keep toying with something which, to everyone else seems perfectly finished? A character in my favourite graphic novel by Dave McKean 'Cages' suggests that a painting is never finished, 'it just stops in an interesting place'. And I think that's it - I think we're just forever looking for that interesting place to stop.

Martin

Sucker Punch review in Empire

This month's Empire film magazine has a feature about Zack (Watchmen, 300) Snyder's upcoming 'Sucker Punch'. Sexy chicks with big guns and set in multiple worlds across multiple time-zones the movie seems to be The Crystal Maze as directed by an over-excited fourteen year old boy. Frankly the film looks so utterly mental I can't even begin to guess whether it's gonna work, but excitingly Empire also review the Art of Sucker Punch - the tie-in book designed by yours truly!

Martin