True story.
A few days ago, here in Finland, a man was laid off. A story familiar to many these days unfortunately. So, down on his luck, he decides to play the lottery. And wouldn’t you know it, he won! It’s a truelife story you hear from time to time, but cliché as it may seem, it DOES happen.
We all come upon hard times now and then, but you just don’t know when Ladyluck will smile on you. In need of sunshine? Try out PartPoker Belgium at http://be.partypoker.com/
-Scott-
Yup. It’s finally official. Heroes, inc. is at an end.
Believe me that no one is more sad to see it go than me. I absolutely LOVED doing this series and had/have some wonderful places and story arcs planned for the series. Building these characters based on the Golden Age heroes has been great. I’ve really come to love these guys and every one of them has a story all planned out. Starting from the Golden Age, up to the present and on into the future. Thinking of it now just makes me want to grab my wacom and get to work on it, but I know that I just CAN’T keep the updates going. At the high point of our webcomic days, doing Heroes,inc. was a full time job. Unfortunately, as with most webcomics, it just didn’t take off to be the commercial success I hoped it to be. Whether that’s because readers are really just satisfied to read it online or that I could never be able to do the leg work of going to a comic con in the States where a majority of the market is… we’ll never know.
Personally I think that it has to do with the fact that, though webcomics are a great medium for getting the word out, true success stories are few because we readers don’t really need to buy those paper comics anymore. I never wanted Heroes, inc. to come to the point where it felt like I was beating a dead horse. I was keeping up that little flame of hope that this would all turn into an actual bread and butter job, beyond the point where it was clear that it would always just be a hobby.
It’s time to face the facts and put the project to sleep.
Who knows. Maybe one day that Heroes,inc. Noir book might look up at you from a shelf at your local comicbook store or pop up on a online store list, but until then… Thanks for sticking with me for so long. Thanks for giving me encouragement that what I was doing was actually quality stuff. Without you loyal readers, I never would have gotten this far.
So thank you and hopefully we meet again in the future.
-Scott-
It’s been one crummy year.
At the beginning of this year my grandmother passed away. My mother and I tried to get things in order for one of us to get there but we didn’t make it on time. Then a few months later my father’s mother dies. We weren’t that close for various reasons, but I felt really bad for my dad. Now Kirsi’s mom passed away yesterday.
So I’m sure you understand that things will be quiet around here for awhile.
Thanks for understaning.
-Scott and Family-
It just dawned on me the other day that I never followed up with what happened to the music video project I was working on. It’s been awhile and I’ve moved on to other things, but it’s up now for viewing.
“What was it…?”, you ask.
Well… the plan was to make a prequel to the Capital of Culture event that takes place Turku in September of 2011. It was put together by CulturaMobila, a local community arts group headed by Julian Garner (who some of you first saw here) Julian directed the kids and also wrote the script, the lyrics and performed the song. Originally it was just guitar with some duplicating of his voice during the chorus, but later additional music was added by Ari Viitanen.
It was storyboarded, filmed and edited by yours truly. I also did the effects, which was biting off a little bit more than I could chew 
As some of you remember we got off to a rocky start and the resulting footage was a nightmare to track. This was my first time doing tracking and it almost drove me insane. I learned a LOT, but unfortunately the hard way. However… I think the end result turned out pretty good.
Especially with zero budget.
Actually, talking with Julian later, we both agreed that there was so much that we would do differently if ever in the same situation again. We had a blast working together and with so many ideas flying around between us, hopefully we’ll do something together again in the future (Maybe without tracking though… 
)
So go check it out and maybe even give us a “like” on Youtube. You can also check out and befriend CulturaMobila on Facebook where there’s some really great photos of their other projects! They’ve got some pretty cool giant puppets and all kinds of fantasy stuff going on.
And all you VFX pros out there… be kind.
-Scott-
Yes, for those of you who are still interested in reading Heroes, inc., I have some good news. ..
The project that’s been taking my time will be out on the 18th (I’ll have a link then) and then, as far as I know, there’s nothing that big on the horizon, so it’s back to cranking out webcomics. I was/am pretty excited about where the story is at the moment, but just couldn’t find time for it. Hopefully you guys N gals are still sticking around and word of our return will get to you.
So see you soon.
-Scott-
I’ve got a small gig working on a music video that’s part of the whole “Cultural Capital of Europe” thing going on in Finland throughout the year. So all of my time has been sucked up lately doing storyboards and going over the project with the creators. I’ll also be shooting it, editing it and doing the VFX in post-production, so my time will be tight the next couple of weeks. We plan on shooting Monday and Tuesday, so after that I hope I’ll have a bit of a breather to catch up on emails and do some updates on the comics before I dive into post-production.
Over the last week I’ve done the equivalent of about 4 standard sized comic books! Mind you, the quality isn’t even close to what I do on Heroes,inc. since storyboards just need to help figure out angles and storylines (especially on this tight of a schedule), but still…
Actually for a small gig, there’s quite a lot of work that needs to be done, but the people are a fun bunch to work with and with all this drawing it’ll be great to have a chance to brush the rust off of my other skills, so I’m not complaining.
-Scott-
I’ve been running in circles doing this, doing that and to make a long story short… late update!
When will it be up? I honestly can’t say. I hope to have it up this week and be back on schedule.
-Scott-
I know most of you have already seen this, but the Captain America Movie is starting to look pretty darn good!
-Scott-
As some of you probably know, submitting to Marvel is an invitation only deal, since they shut down the old “slush pile”. Well, some time ago (last year actually) I got a chance from C.B. Cebulski to submit some samples to them. Needless to say, since I’m still sitting here, I didn’t get picked up. Looking through those Wolverine samples, I can’t say I blame them one bit. I don’t know what went wrong, did I freak out and just lose my skills or what, but they were pretty ugly. Ugly enough that I won’t be showing them here. 
The editor I was in contact with gave me some critique and some pointers and asked that I re-submit later in the year. So at the beginning of March I sent them some more:
The editor I was in contact with has moved up the food chain and no longer does submissions, but said I still need to work on my backgrounds etc. and gave me the contact info for the editor who will be taking care of submissions from now on. So as of now my big Marvel break hasn’t happened, but I’m hoping it’s only a matter of time.
Meanwhile I’ve kept submitting Heroes, inc. to various publishers. Unfortunately no bites yet. In desperation I even submitted to 215ink and believe it or not they had the gall to say that the Heroes,inc. art was so poor that they couldn’t put something like that out! 
I have no problems taking critique from professionals who know what there talking about and if the 215ink guys simply had some minor issues that they weren’t happy with I could understand, but saying that the art wasn’t good enough for them to put out there!
I guess that’s why they aren’t even in the top 20 of publishers. Sheesh!
Anyhoo…
If nothing else Heroes,inc. will be here as a webcomic. I’ll naturally be re-submitting to Marvel again soon and who knows, maybe my luck will come through.
-Scott-
I’ve added a new category up on top to make the Bonus Story access easier.
In an attempt to get people to vote for Heroes,inc. more at TopWebcomics (If all of my readers voted JUST ONCE I’d be in the top 20 every month!! So you understand my frustration…) I’ve come up with a Bonus Story scheme. Each week there’s a extra black and white Golden Age short story going on, but if you want to read it you have to vote. These updates will be up for that week ONLY. The following update replaces them. Eventually the whole thing will be published as Heroes, inc. Golden Age (or something )
Now before people get up in arms just let me point out that I make NO obligation to BUY the Heroes,inc. books and I don’t run Donation Campaigns (believe me I’ve been close) so to keep my site payments and motivation up, I rely on ads on my site. In order to keep those ads worth something I need to keep the traffic going. We’ve noticed that, believe it or not, being on the first page of TopWebcomics actually brings in a fare amount of readers.
I understand that some people might not like the fact that they have to jump in the story half way, so I’ll be keeping a short synopsis of each Bonus Story on this page. That way you can jump on board at any time.
So… Please VOTE and enjoy the Bonus Story!
-Scott-
