One of the coolest projects I worked on last year was Sony’s DC Universe Online game. It’s a massive online roleplaying game where you can play as and interact with various DC Comics characters, as well as new characters created for the game. One feature of DC Universe Online is animated cutscenes, shown when you defeat certain characters or complete specific levels of the game. I had the opportunity to work on some of these scenes as a colorist, and now that the game has been released I can share some of the work I did.

The first scene I worked on featured the Joker:

Click for full-size

The main difference from this coloring job and regular comic book work was that in these cutscenes the art is separated into layers for the animators.

Coloring each element of the illustration separately made it tougher to unify the entire image with lighting and color palette, but overall I’m very happy with the way most of the images turned out.

Some more shots from the Joker scene:

Click to embiggen

Batman and the Joker.

To make big, you must click!

Background for the above shot.

Surely you know how this works by now.

Last shot from the scene.

Here’s the final animated cutscene, narrated by the awesome Mark Hamill:

I grew up watching the Batman animated series which featured Mark Hamill as the Joker, so it’s pretty amazing to hear that voice narrating something I had a hand in making. It’s times like this I realize how awesome my job is.

Know what day it is?

The might of THOR cannot be contained by your foolish blog layout!

It’s Thursday. You do the math.

And speaking of days of the week, Legion of Super-heroes alphabet series returns Monday!

Oh, hey, what have we here? Could it be? Could it possibly be? The first entry in a new blog series?!

Oh, just another one of those silly Legionnaires--AAAUUGHHH SWEET CHRISTMAS MAKE IT GO AWAY

Yes sir, your eyes do not deceive you! It’s the new Legion of Superheroes alphabet series, starting off on a truly unsettling note with Legion reject Arm-Fall-Off Boy! In his own words, “My power will astound you! Observe as I detach my limb– and transform it into a deadly weapon!” I can’t understand why they turned him down for membership in the Legion, honestly. Bludgeoning criminals with your own severed arm is a pretty amazing power. Plus he’d always have the element of surprise in a fight. Unless, you know, they knew his name or something.

While Arm-Fall-Off Boy is pretty far out, this is honestly par for the course with the Legion, (as we’ll see in coming entries packed chock-full of glorious insanity). Stay tuned!

Well folks, we’ve reached the end of the series. Z is for Zorro!

Most historians credit Zorro's signature "Z" marking to be responsible for the rise in graffiti crime in early 19th-century California

It took significantly longer than 26 weeks, but here we are. I’m a little bit more experienced, you’re a little bit more aware of the absurdity of many comic book characters- I’d say we both came out ahead.

I’ll be starting the next series, The Legion of Superheroes: from A to Z in February. Keep your eyes peeled, and have a great weekend!

Creator and leader of the Metal Men, Doc Will Magnus has survived cancellations and disastrous revisions to be one of the most fun, high-concept characters in the DC Universe. Doc and his team  of sentient robots, each named after and having the physical properties of a particular metal, are some of my favorite characters DC has.

Yes, ladies, he IS a real doctor.

I fully intend to do a post featuring the whole team in the near future, so keep an eye out for that!

Full title: Volstagg The Voluminous, the Lion of Asgard!

(I assume the exclamation point is mandatory, but I can’t say for sure.)

Volstagg: Making morbid obesity awesome since 1965!

Volstagg is a character from Marvel’s Thor series, and is a member of the Warriors Three, Thor’s drinking/fighting buddies. He is known for being (a) awesome, (b) fat, and (c) totally rad.

Stay tuned for more updates this week! I’ve got the finished series ready to go, and I’ll be posting an entry each day this week.

I had no idea what I was going to do for N.
The I read Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk’s Marvel Comics miniseries, Agents Of Atlas. Namora is, as it turns out, an awesome character. (Apparently hanging out with a kung fu superspy, a Greek goddess, a talking gorilla, a Uranian spaceman and an indestructible robot rubs off on you after a while.) So yeah, Namora:

I only wish "Jimmy Woo" started with N

This week’s entry features two awesome old-school adventurers.

Lobster Johnson is Mike Mignola’s other brilliant pulp creation: A mythical 1930s New York City vigilante known for branding criminals with his trademark lobster claw symbol, and who eventually showed up in Hellboy stories as an evil-battling ghost.

Lady Blackhawk is DC Comics’ crack WWII flying ace and member of the Blackhawks flying squad. She wears a cheerleader skirt, for reasons unknown.

They're a cute couple.

Next week! Metamorpho and Mr. Miracle!

I was gonna do DC’s JLA member Ice, but then I remembered that she’s really, really boring.

So I looked around a bit. There aren’t very many cool female characters whose name start with “I”. Irma Geddon from Top 10 was the only good choice until I remembered this chick.

Everybody was hm-hmm hmm-hmm! Those cats were hm-hm-hmm-hmm...

That’s right! It’s Wu Ao-Shi, the Iron Fist of 1545 AD! Also known as The Pirate Queen of Pinghai Bay. Thanks, Matt Fraction, for making an awesome character whose title starts with “I”.

Yeah, it’s Wednesday, and this is supposed to be an every-Monday series. But I hope you’ll agree that this one was worth the wait.

The gallant Guardian and the glorious Gladiator ganging up on a grouchy Gorilla Grodd!

Go, guys! Go!

I took my time with this one, since I’m avoiding real work. My twin goals with this series are to become consistently speedy, and improve my anatomy and proportion. These goals are often at odds with each other, though. This time I went with the second goal, and I think it paid off.

Now, who should I do for “H”?