Looks fabulous! Great colours and design! And if I know Foley at all, the story from here could go anywhere…

Oooh cool! This is off to an amazing start, guys! Can’t wait for the next part! :D

Fiona sez:

“…if I know Foley at all, the story from here could go anywhere…”

The smart money’s on “straight down the tubes”, but only time will tell.

Foley

This is pretty FANTASTIC art — reminds me a bit of Gabriel Ba (possibly because of the tones).

“…you’ll like this if you’ve ever…”

…ever celebrated Christmas at Walmart?

^Looking back I realize that the second part of my post makes no sense. Chock it up to too much O’Mega Mart brand “Holiday Nog”.

The Holiday Men is even better than I was expecting it to be. Not many webcomics can pull off comedy, plot movement, and action simultaneously, but this one does.

Are all of the updates going to be two pages, or are they going to vary based on usefulness to the plot?

Jeff

Glad to hear it’s meeting the hype, Jeff. Every week will see a two page update with the two pages being combined to create one long readable mega page. Thanks for the comments everyone.

And I must admit that Gabriel Ba is indeed an influence.

Hey nice work there! I wan’t me’s some potoato chips!

“One long readable mega page” might actually be the ideal format for webcomics! This is easier to read than I thought it would be.

Fiona sez:

“One long readable mega page” might actually be the ideal format for webcomics! This is easier to read than I thought it would be.

We put a lot of thought into how best to present the webcomic version of the story. We wanted to make sure each installment is a sufficiently entertaining reading experience that people would want to come back on a weekly basis–that’s why we’re at the equivalent of 2+comic pages per installment.

We also wanted to make sure each “scroll” would work when viewed on a monitor. So you won’t find any full page panels, or long vertical panels in (the webcomic version of) THE HOLIDAY MEN–we’ve tried to design the layouts so every panel or tier can be viewed in its entirety without the reader having to scroll.

I did toy with a daily or thrice-weekly strip format, which could work if the H-Men were straight comedy, but splitting the story up that way would interfere with the frenetic energy that Nick brings to the strip.

(For those who can’t get enough of this kind of Creative Process Crap, watch this Comment Thread next Tuesday.)

Great stuff! I’m not usually crazy about comics with one color but this works and really pops off the page. Maybe it’s the pink. What that says about “me” may not bear thinking about…

New over at The Chemistry Set:

The Holiday Men
http://www.chemsetcomics.com/2008/01/08/the-holiday-men-it-begins

I like the Easter Bunny dude the best so far!

^Holy crap — I’m so DUMB today and keep posting the wrong things in the wrong boxes!

A: Hello to all our loyal Holiday Men readers (both of you…) Glad you could join us for the “Extra-Special Added Value DVD-style Commentary Track” for the first installment of THE HOLIDAY MEN’s first episode, “The Massacre Memorial Day Sale Massacre”. Chiming in this time around are me (Andrew Foley, the H-Men’s writer) and…

N: Me (Nick Johnson, artist and “colourist”.)

A: Letterer /Designer Tiina Andreakos is currently busy lettering the next three installments of Episode One, and she’s not big on the talk/typing thing anyway, but I hope to get her involved in one of these at some point. Unfortunately, H-Men editor Ward Foyle refuses to have any contact with me until I pay him back the five dollars I owe him. C’est la vie.

N: I also owe him $5. I think he may be a loan shark on the side. He’s threatened my kneecaps.

A: He really is a ghastly human being (probably one of the reasons he’s such a great editor.) Anyway, on to the comments. What I’m hoping to do here is shed a little light on how a Holiday Men episode comes together. Well, what I’m really hoping to do is artificially drive the ChemSet’s hit count up by getting people to look at the previous week’s installment, but there’s no reason those people can’t get something useful or semi-interesting out of it.

N: I KNEW you had an angle!

A: Ward claims every angle I have is obtuse. He’s into the big words.

N: Seriously though, I love hearing about the creative process and here’s hoping I’m not the only one who feels that way.

A: You aren’t, or I wouldn’t be doing this myself–I’m a sucker for this sort of thing (even when other creators do it!)
OK, so, panel one. In the business, this is what is commonly referred to as “an establishing shot”, which is to say, it’s a panel that establishes the location of the action to follow. Generally speaking, an exterior establishing shot of a large structure like an O’Mega-Mart would make for a fairly large panel, but Nick elected to go with a smaller panel. Is that because you hate doing perspective, or…?

N: I figured that, given the limited amount of space (thanks to an overabundance of chitter chatter and direct orders not to break the three tier layout) I had to choose between giving the establishing shot lots of space or the introductory action shot. Because the latter was their first blood soaked appearance, and featured all four main characters, I opted to give it the space it needed…
What the hell is perspective?

A: Something we, being comic creators, have very little of.
The way you decided to handle Panels 2 and 3 interested and infuriated me. You could’ve drawn what the script called for, which was a full-on shot of the “Staff Only” sign, followed by a pulled-out shot of the door, which had just been kicked off its hinges by our eponymous heroes in their traditional, iconic forms. Well, as traditional and iconic as those forms can be when they’re spattered with blood, anyway.
So, what inspired you to not do what the hell I told you and instead create the vastly more visually dynamic side view of the scene?

N: I actually pay an assistant of mine to sift through your scripts as I don’t have the time or attention span to do so. He gives me the essential story points and I draw them out based on his vague descriptions. So really, he’s at fault for any breakdown in communication.

A: Part of the reason this became an issue for me is that, looking at the panels as you’d arranged them, I knew there was going to be some trouble fitting the “infofeed” text into Panel 2. Actually, 2 and 3 both, but especially 2, as there was going to be some panel overlap even after Tiina shrank the panels to make at least a LITTLE room for lettering.

N: Yeah, it wasn’t until after I’d finished drawing the scene (after hours and hours of over thinking it) that I went “Oh shit. Where are the words gonna go?” I’m really trying hard to leave lettering space now. Poor Tiina…

A: Speaking of which, I love how the lettering on these two panels worked out in the end, with the arrow and the circle around the characters. In fact, I love all the lettering on this page, the way the pink tone (which you suggested) ties in with the pink highlights in the non-flashback stuff of the main story.

N: Flashback to me in my bedroom thinking “Hell, if I look this good in pink underwear, it oughtta look great in a comic!”

A: In order to prevent this from degenerating into me screaming even less coherently than usual, I’m going to repress my memory of your last statement and blunder on as though you never typed it.
The sheer energy of the door flying towards the right side of the panel in panel 3–I can almost forgive Ward for letting you not follow the script…

N: Ward encourages me to do whatever I want. In fact, he likes to refer to the Holiday Men as the Nick Show. That man is a visionary.

A: When he does that he’s talking about Nick Klaus, leader of the Holiday Men. You knew that, right?

N: But really, when it comes to action, I always try to maintain the flow of the page, drawing the reader’s eye from top to bottom, left to right. As for the lettering, I remember finally seeing the pages all lettered and thinking “How did she do that? How did she make it work AND look so good at the same time?” That’s when I got really excited about this whole thing. And really relieved that I didn’t have to do the lettering after all.

A: Yeah, your relief when I got Tiina to agree to join us was palpable, even over e-mail…
Panel 4 is where I started to take a little heat from an early reader, an editor friend of mine I’ve worked with for a few years. Actually, he had issues with 2 and 3, but he really seemed confused by the text in panel 4. “What does this affair have to do with what’s happening in the panel?” he asked.
I’ve given this a lot of thought, and what I eventually came up with as an answer is, “Nothing much.” So why did I include this extraneous piece of information? The easy answer is “because I thought it was funny.”

N: I also thought it was funny.

A: But why should we settle for the easy answer? Here’s the in-depth version:

N: NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

A: OK, OK, I’ll save the in-depth version for a SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT! an Andrew Foley Writes Things blog post. That’s ANDREW FOLEY WRITES THINGS. And posts them publicly before thinking them through fully…

N: One of my major complaints with web comics is that, no matter how good they may be, some of them just don’t offer enough story on their once a week schedule. They give just the tiniest morsel to hold me off till the next week, which may build anticipation, but still leaves me feeling unsatisfied. There’s enough going on in a standard Holiday Men installment to prevent that…I hope.

A: You and me both–and I agree completely about giving a reader sufficient “bang for the buck” on a weekly schedule.
Panels 4 and 5 I don’t really have much to say about, other than as soon as I saw them I knew I’d made the right choice begging you to draw my wretched little fight comic. I laughed out loud for half an hour at the shot of Santa punching someone through the head. I know I wrote it, but when I did that, I figured it’d be from an angle like the classic Brian Bolland “Gaze into the fist of Dredd!” panel. You made it even more ridiculous by having the punch go ear to ear.

N: After I had completed this panel, a friend of mine said I should have drawn the dude’s brain flying out and dammit, that would have been awesome!…next time. That panel killed me, man. I worked on it for three hours one day and was still looking at an empty panel. I literally pounded my desk in frustration. This was mostly due to my poor layouts. Another friend later told me the more detailed my layouts are, the easier it’ll be to draw the final page. She was right. Things are better now…aside from the rage.
Oh and I inked that first page with plain old sharpies. And I thought hemophiliacs bled a lot! Never again.

A: Sharpies? Really? Wow, what’s next, scrawling pages on a cave wall with a charred stick? Actually, that gives me an idea…
Beyond that, the only thing to note is that the last balloon here was originally the first balloon on the next panel–I wanted to connect the flashback to the current situation a little more tightly, so the change was made late in the game, during lettering.

N: I’m glad you guys caught that. I was slightly concerned. God, I’m glad I don’t have to do the lettering.

A: Onto the non-prologue portion of Installment #1. I’m a little concerned about how this sequence reads. In retrospect, I should probably have given Jacko some sort of narrative text, rather than having Nick Klaus’ start in a panel that features Jacko. I think I may even have written it so Klaus’ captions were all in his head shot, but that left the shot of Jacko in the van looking a little barren. Hopefully, the narrative caption symbols indicating who’s thinking what landed with the readers. If not, well…whatcha gonna do, I guess?

N: We just learn from our mistakes and keep on trucking.

A: I spent a lot of time debating the whole Sharpe’s Potato Chips thing. Not the gag aspect of having the two Frank Miller-esque dramatic internal monologues followed by an ad for something, but I’m not really a fan of the name Sharpe’s for chips. If I hadn’t come up with “Salt n’ Malt” as the flavour, I’d probably have done the ad for something else.
This gag is one of those ones that started very small and quickly spiraled out of control. At first it was just Bunny thinking, “I’d like some chips.” Then the panel became a Sharpe’s Chips coupon that could be presented for a free bag, and then, in one of my frequent irrationally paranoid moments, I started worrying that someone might actually try and get a free bag of chips by printing the panel out and presenting it somewhere. Which is where the “bag may not contain potato chips” qualifier came from.

N: Ward was right. You ARE unhinged. Truth be told, I can barely look at the first few pages anymore. I’ve torn them all to shreds in my head with all of the things I would change, especially with this being my first attempt at monotone coloring. Ah well…

A: This panel is really the first one where I started to get a sense of how the H-Men could gain another level of humour through the addition of text. I went back and put more stuff into the earlier panels, but this was the first one that had that “meta” quality to it that’s become so important to the character of the strip.

N: I love that coupon panel and I think it’s great that the Holiday Men are sticking it to an evil capitalist corporation like O’Mega-Mart while their very own comic is chock full of ads and in your face marketing. We are consumer whores.

A: You’re half right, in my case. Don’t ask which half.
Also, it took me and Tiina half an hour to come to an agreement over exactly where Bunny’s narrative caption in the last panel should be placed. I still would like it a little more if it was just a shade further away from the lowest foot in the background crowd, but at least it’s not actually cropping anything, which was my big concern. Normally I wouldn’t worry about violating a panel border with a caption, but I didn’t want to interrupt the coupon’s cutting lines too much.

N: And check out that slickly rendered Flower Van. Believe it or not, no reference, baby! Aw yeah.

A: I wrote that just for you. I knew you’d be great at drawing a flower van, what with your pink underwear and all…
Well, that seems to have killed the conversation stone dead, so I’m declaring this the official end of this behind-the-scenes peek at the making of “Who They Are And How They Came To Be Blowing Up Your Local Department Store”. Join us next week for The Making Of “A Message From Our **************** Sponsor”.
Before we go I’d just like to encourage anyone out there reading this to drop us a line, either here in the comments section or with our supervisors at OMegaMart@Gmail.com . We aren’t doing this for money, we’re doing it for LOVE and money (but we’ll take what we can get, attention-starved creatures that we are.)
See you in seven for “The Holiday Manifesto, Part One” and a commentary track on this week’s installment.

Is commentary on the previous week’s pages going to be a regular feature? I think it’s a really cool idea, especially if it continues to be this in depth. That was a really good read.

The plan is to continue doing the commentaries, yes. Only time will tell if things go according to plan…