Topics

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Discuss Blog Entries / State of the Comic - Feb. 2018

« on: February 04, 2018, 03:15:29 AM »

Jessica’s been having health issues that’ve gotten worse over the past year. Nothing life threatening or anything, but she ended up having a bad reaction to some medication that was supposed to help her, so she’s been in total Bummerville these past few months.

That’s why things have been so quiet around here. She’s trying a different medication now, and we’re hopeful that she’ll soon be able to ninja flip her way back to Healthyland. Then she’ll resume kicking ass on the comic.

But for now, she’s going to focus on feeling better.

Now to end on some rad news: Comicon.com selected Satan Ninja 198X as one of the eight best webcomics of 2017! We’ve also booked a table at the Anime Midwest convention in Chicago, so if you’re in the area the weekend of July 6th, you should totally visit us.

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Page 7 - September MacLeod

« on: December 29, 2017, 09:15:50 PM »

“Storm … Storm ... Stormkitties. Gooooo!”

Hmm, doesn’t quite have the same ring to it...

Anyway, you can see we’re not doing the whole secret identity thing in this comic. We also decided not to have the body of the demon conveniently disappear or turn into ash upon death. We think it’s just more fun to have it linger around and be studied by scientists and reported about on the evening news.

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Page 6 - Satan Ninja Hero

« on: December 07, 2017, 11:57:34 PM »

Satan Ninja's 100th page! (If you don't count the cover images.)

Jessica told me she particularly enjoyed the dialogue on this page. Speaking of dialogue,
Francis finally gets promoted from being a background character to having a speaking role. Also my original script for this page didn’t have Joe saying anything (he just looked on in shock), but Jessica pointed out to me that since none of these people have seen Eddie in his Satan Ninja form before, someone should probably at least question if that’s really Eddie.

So it seems that not only is English the universal language (as we learned in Issue 2), but Earth-time is also utilized around the galaxy. How convenient!

That reminds me of an ‘80s sci-fi movie we watched called The Hidden. There’s a scene where two alien beings who’ve come to Earth are talking to each other (in English, of course), and one of them mentions an event that occured “on Altair” (I’m guessing he meant on a planet in the Altair system, since I doubt the event took place on a star). Which makes me think: Wow, how amazing that Earth’s ancient astronomers correctly guessed the name of Altair!

Sorry about the wait for this page. Our intent was to put out a page a week once we came off our hiatus in October, but Jessica’s been having trouble meeting that rate. So we’re back to posting pages as they’re done, though we’ll continue to strive for weekly page releases.

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Page 5 - Wolf Demon Battle

« on: November 17, 2017, 07:55:22 PM »

This battle could’ve easily eaten up five or six pages, but we decided to keep it short and sweet. Like I said in my previous page commentary, there’s lots of ground to cover this issue.

There are a few reasons we wanted to have Eddie’s first demon battle take place in the school’s gym:

1. Don’t have to worry about space.
2. Get to showcase some rad ‘80s gym outfits.
3. Teenwolf.

As I’m sure I’ve said before, Teenwolf (1985) was a huge influence on our comic. In fact, you could almost sum up SN8X by saying it’s like Teenwolf, except the main dude becomes a badass ninja with satanic powers instead of a werewolf that’s awesome at basketball.

Of course, there’s a lot more to SN8X than that, but it gets the general gist across. Jessica and I aren’t even huge fans of Teenwolf, but we love the general concept. It’s just so fucking absurd and it hits on a lot of the ‘80s teen movie tropes.

So as a little tribute to Teenwolf, Eddie’s first real battle is against a werewolf-like demon in the high school gym.

By the way, the black dude in the final panel is Francis, and the guy with the dark hair (who was doing pushups on the previous page) is Heather’s boyfriend, Ryan. We’ve seen them both previously at Kyle Connor’s pool party.

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Page 4 - Gym Demon

« on: November 06, 2017, 07:48:18 PM »

Fuck yeah! Demon vs. ninja action!

This is another one of the comic’s milestone moments that Jessica and I have been anticipating for years. Eddie using his ninja powers to battle various hell-spawned demons has been one of the core story concepts from the start, back in 2008.

In my detailed synopsis of the SN8X story, Eddie’s first class on his first day to school as a Satan Ninja was one of the more basic ones, like Math or English. The teacher would’ve asked Eddie to removed his silly attire, and when Ed awkwardly refused, he would’ve been sent to the vice-principal's office. Then, as Eddie is trying to explain his bizarre situation to the vice-principal, the werewolf demon would’ve suddenly busted through a window/wall of the office. Eddie and the werewolf demon would’ve then battled their way through the school and into the gymnasium, interrupting gym class.

But when I began to write the actual script for this issue, it became clear that we had way too much content we wanted to squeeze into it. So one of the things I changed to speed up the pace was have gym be Eddie’s first class, and have the werewolf bust out and attack right then and there.

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Discuss Blog Entries / Radicast 198X # 12 - Halloween Special

« on: November 01, 2017, 02:35:07 PM »

Check it out here!

Comment below!

Happy Halloween!

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Discuss Blog Entries / Radicast 198X #11 - Predator, Adventures in Babysitting (Bob guest)

« on: October 31, 2017, 12:29:52 AM »

Listen here!

Comment below!

Let us know what you think about Bob. He really liked doing it and he's interested in making regular call-ins on future episodes. Maybe something like a the Bob Minute. But, you know, with a better title.

Also, our first super spooky Radicast Halloween special should be out tomorrow (I'm going to sit here and edit it all night while I'm working as a security guard at Victoria's Secret).

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Page 3 - River City High School

« on: October 27, 2017, 07:39:48 PM »

Even as a kid in the ‘80s, I thought those damn knee socks with the stripes at the top looked dumb as hell. On the other hand, once I hit high school and girls started to babe out and wear the black knee socks and skirt combo … oh man, that ruled.

Wow, four issues in and we finally get an exterior shot of River City High School. The Red Cocks is the name of the school’s sports teams, and of course the school has a red rooster mascot that  I’m sure we’ll be seeing at some point. The school’s colors are red and white, as you could probably guess from Veronica’s cheerleader outfit.

Even though almost all the comic’s teen characters have driver's licenses, very few of them have their own cars. Eddie and Alex live within walking distance, so they don’t bother taking the bus. And since they’re neighbors, they walk to and from school together every day, which is how they slowly forged a friendship (until the past year or so, it didn’t extend much beyond those walks). Heather doesn’t walk with them because she gets picked up by her boyfriend Ryan.

Oh man … I’m so pumped for the next page ...

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Page 2 - Captain Mordlich

« on: October 20, 2017, 11:19:15 PM »

We toyed with the idea of Mordlich gaining a crew that was completely female, but instead we opted to give him some minions inspired by villains from the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons. Which, like lots of ‘80s cartoons, were glorified toy commercials (with a moral lesson tossed in so they could technically qualify as educational content).

What’s weird about the She-Ra toys is that the dude figures used the same scale as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toys, which totally makes sense, since they’re in the same franchise. But someone made the boneheaded decision to make the toys of She-Ra and the other she-babes in a totally different scale. More like a Barbie doll.

So if you were an ‘80s kid and you wanted to have your She-Ra toy fight her nemesis Hordak, you’d have to deal with the awkwardness of She-Ra towering over the villain. It’s just a mortifying situation for all involved.

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Page 1 - Exploding Space Pirates

« on: October 13, 2017, 10:59:44 PM »

And so our hiatus ends, along with Xoddam’s reign as the self-proclaimed king of the pirates. As many of you know, Xoddam was a thinly veiled cameo of our friend Maddox. It was always our intention that his character would meet a brutal demise at this point, so this isn’t meant to be any sort of slight against him--we love Maddox. In fact, Jessica did several illustrations for his upcoming book, F*ck Whales (which comes out Oct. 17th).

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Discuss Blog Entries / SN8X Hiatus Ends Oct. 13th! Also, New Radicast Up Now!

« on: September 26, 2017, 07:10:30 PM »

Check it out here!

Comment below!

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Discuss Blog Entries / Radicast 198X ep. 9 - Troll, The Golden Child (Caitlin guest)

« on: July 11, 2017, 12:10:25 AM »

Check it out here!

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Discuss Blog Entries / Updated Comic Pages & Radicast Ep. 8: Class of Nuke 'Em High, Crocodile Dundee

« on: June 28, 2017, 04:22:22 PM »

Check it out here!

Comment below!

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 4 - Rad As Hell - Cover

« on: May 29, 2017, 10:43:51 PM »

 
We’re technically still on hiatus, but we wanted to post the cover to Issue 4 so you dudes could see that the comic’s still alive and kicking ass.
 
I’m so fucking pumped for Issue 4, as it’s when the core concept of the comic really kicks in—like a Van Damme style jumping spin-kick to the face. This cover offers a nice taste of what you can expect (as in, within the first few pages of the issue).
 
Each of our previous covers had gotten progressively more and more busy as we kept adding more characters. For this one, we decided to scale it back and focus on just three characters, which would also give the background a chance to shine (Jessica spent an abnormally long time on the background, as she kept re-working it over and over and over—gotta get that Hell landscape just right). This cover also highlights a core element of this issue and the comic overall: Eddie using his rad Satan Ninja powers to fight badass demons (and, of course, there's the ever-present elements of the '80s dressing and busty babes).
 
For any of you who just come to the forums looking for updates, I’ve written up a blog post detailing some of the stuff we’ve been up to during this too-long hiatus.

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Discuss Comic Pages / Issue 3 - Ninja Power! - Page 38 - Aliens

« on: January 11, 2017, 11:07:50 PM »

Plots are converging! Things are falling into place. And that’s where we end Issue 3.

Jessica tried really hard to make sure this page wouldn’t take as long as the last few (and it didn’t), but still took longer than we’d like. We’re determined to get back on a steady page a week schedule. But first, we’ll have to take a brief hiatus.

So here’s our game plan during this hiatus. First, Jessica’s going to take a week off of drawing for the first time in years, which will help her from burning out. Then there’s a bunch of minor things in Issue 3 that she’s going to go back and spruce up. They’re mostly mega minor, so this shouldn’t take longer than a week, and we’ll let you know about the interesting changes in a blog post. Then she’s going to bust out a rad cover for Issue 4.

In the meantime, we’ll resume our weekly podcast, and Jessica will continue to stream on Twitch and fulfill her Patreon rewards.

By the way, the title for Issue 4 is “Rad As Hell” and it’ll totally live up to its namesake.