Hatman & Indigo

Hatman & Indigo is an internet based Audio Comic web-series created by Jason Kuder, Andy Kuder, and Steve Surine. Hatman & Indigo is the longest running entertainment production of 3twins.net. It has been in production since 2005 and published solely on 3twins.net from 2006-2010 and on 3twins.net's blip.tv page and 3twins.netfrom 2011-present. The Audio Comic format used for Hatman & Indigo is unique to Hatman & Indigo and it's only current spin-off Ion Bunny. The Audio Comic format was created by Jason Kuder in an attempt to bring about a new media format that bridged traditional comic books with audio and animation. This is acheived by displaying full comic pages with no text bubbles in the comic panels but audio performances for the narration and characters. This technique was later refined by adding a highlighted box around the panel that corresponds to the audio.

Premise

The first issue was published on 3twins.net on May 4th 2006. Issue #1 titled: Origin dealt with the creation of the character, Hatman. Henry Hattington, a man in his mid-twenties is hit in the head with a cigar box while walking down the streets of the ficticious Twin City. The cigar box is intriguing to him because it is locked shut with chains and padlocks. After many comical attempts, Henry manages to open the cigar box and discovers a leprechaun inside. The leprechaun explains that according to magical creature rules he owes Henry two wishes as payment for his freedom from the box. The leprechaun warns Henry that every wish has negative reprocussions, so after much thought Henry wishes for a hat that he can pull whatever he wants out of, and that he can use the hat as much as he wants to for all sorts of different things. When the wish is granted, Henry discovers that the bad side is that his head has become the hat of his wish. Henry does not see this "bad side" as much of a negative because he has been transformed into the superhero, Hatman, a man with a top hat for a head. His house has also transformed into a top hat-shaped house decorated with all sorts of hat themed furnature and fixtures.

Hatman eventually creates Indigo, an indigo colored anthropomorphic animal made up of the parts of several different animals including: duck, gorilla, rabbit, turtle, dragonfly, kangaroo, and tiger. Hatman and Indigo team up to fight evil-doers in Twin City. Many of the evil-doers come into being by accidents from Hatman's wishes or the use of the Hat power.

Production

Hatman & Indigo was the first published production for 3twins.net. The characters of Hatman and Indigo were created by Jason Kuder and Andy Kuder in their youth.

History

Back in 2003 while working on scripting for the series Star Fetched, Jason Kuder decided that the characters of Hatman and Indigo would make an interesting superhero/adventure story and might prove fitting for testing animations in an effort to bring Star Fetched to reality in a more effective way. Later in 2004 Jason and Andy sat down to brainstorm some of the characters for Hatman & Indigo as well as the origin of the characters and their powers.

The original idea was that Hatman would acheive his powers through wishes from a Genie, but Jason and Andy decided against that because that seemed to be overdone. After brainstorming other magical creatures, they settled on the idea of a leprechaun who granted wishes.

One of the earliest villains discussed was The Evil Zapman, who had previously been thought up as a villain for the currently unproduced 3twins.net superhero story Lectrajack. Originally Zapman was to be Hatman's first villain, however, when Jason sat down to write the Origin script, he thought up Glomo as Hatman's first would-be sidekick instead of Indigo.

Andy originally wrote part 2 of Origin where Indigo was created, but Jason made several edits soon afterward. The idea that Hatman & Indigo would be an animated cartoon was quickly scrapped in favor of the new medium; Audio Comic, Jason had invented and the first 3twins cartoon would be Midieville. The artist who drew the first version of Hatman & Indigo: Origin was Chris Secondi and when the first two parts were initially completed, Jason was disatisfied with the ending, which originally happened soon after the creation of Indigo. Jason went back to the script and added a return of the Glomo character and the subsequent fight sequence for a more satisfying finish to Hatman and Indigo's first outing. The original comic was devoid of backgrounds for the most part and many of the art was re-used to help tell the story as best as possible. Later on, Jason Kuder made some additional edits to the script and the entire Origin story was re-drawn by Steve Surine and all the audio re-recorded. The originally produced Hatman & Indigo: Origin story is no longer available for viewing on 3twins.net.

Hatman & Indigo is a parody based superhero Audio Comic, taking much of its inspiration from the 1960's Batman television series and the animated series Darkwing Duck among other pop culture and comic book references. Several of the digital covers for the issues of the comics are direct parodies of real-life comic book covers, movie posters, Home Video movie and television series box covers, video game box covers and other pop culture promotional materials or famous works of art.

Present

The humor of Hatman & Indigo is an eclectic blend of fourth wall jokes, sarcasm, current and outdated pop culture references, sight gags, sound gags, and wordplay. Some of the humor works well in script form but is lost in the drawings or audio recording.

Currently an effort is being made by Jason to re-work the scripts for many of the already published issues. The goal is to improve the flow and humor in addition to the audio quality by doing complete re-recordings. In some cases the comics will be completely re-drawn similarly to the Origin story. The current comic in production is being referred to as Zapman Reimagined, which will retell the origin of Zapman and replace the current Zapman story. Part 1 is nearing the final stages of completion as all the art (drawn by S. LaDon Ware) is completed and most of the audio has been recorded. Jason Kuder is currently in the process of coloring the pages of Zapman Reimagined and publishing will most likley take place in late 2012 or early 2013.

Future

After audio and script remastering is completed on the first 49 issues of Hatman and Indigo, the story will take a different turn. The creators are very tight lipped about where the story will go, but Jason Kuder has referred to the first 50 issues as "Volume One." His blog posts have hinted that from issue 50 onward the tone of Hatman & Indigo will shift a bit and the scope of the Hatman Universe will broaden. Jason, Andy, and Steve mapped out the next major story arc for Hatman & Indigo in the summer of 2009 and have some scipts written as well as a lot of story synopsis material and ideas for many new characters and plot threads.

The production of issues 50 and onward is on hold until remastering of issues 1-49 has completed. It has also been reported that both Jason and Andy are currently enrolled in college and that regular production will not resume until that is completed. Jason is slated for completion of his Masters Degree in the fall of 2015, so it may be as late as 2016 before Hatman & Indigo #50 is published.

In the meantime, the plan is to completely re-draw the origin stories of Zapman and Super Cold Frozen Man as well as part 1 of the Mad Hatter story. The original numbering system of the issues was based on a per-story numbering instead of per-issue. Also, initially, the original Origin parts 1 and 2 were left online and Origin Remastered was numbered as issues 29 and 30. In order to rectify this, Jason and Andy are writing Zapman and Super Cold Frozen Man's origin stories to be 3 issues each instead of their original 2 issue stories. This changes the numbering for all of the issues 28 and prior.

All of the issues of Hatman & Indigo are slowly being re-published on blip.tv as the remastered audio (and art in some cases) is completed.