Titanzer

2013-2014

Writing

Grown out of my love for classic giant robot shows like Grendizer and Big O, Titanzer is a comedic story about cowardice screwing up the best of plans/people. The writing took the longest in this project, as I went through a few iterations to figure out the right tone. I landed on a lighthearted (yet foul-mouthed) approach you can read today.

Design

A marriage of my love for animated gifs and the joy I get from reading comics, Titanzer was about using one of digital’s best features: animation. Every page was a single animated panel, creating a sort of storybook attitude that supported the silly, good-natured story. The website was built using Wordpress coupled with a responsive theme built on the skeleton framework. Bold colors, lots of whitespace, and very sharp angles helped to give the whole thing a futuristic feel. If you’re patient you can see the favicon blinks at you in Firefox. God, I love making favicons.

Strategy

Comics, animated gifs, ebooks. My plan was to release the comic slowly online. When I was invited to present at Vancouver’s Comic Show, Vancaf, I had to come up with a plan for how to give people this thoroughly digital comic. After a bit of digging I discovered a company that printed custom graphics on USB drives the size of business cards. Using this, I designed a logo and printed out a handfull of custom USB drives to sell at the show. They were a hit! And after the show, a lot of other comic artists asked me about them.