When Mark Wheatley and Mike Oeming’s Hammer of the Gods: Mortal Enemy trade paperback is published by Image in September, it will include a few value-added extras – color, for one, as well as a celebrity introduction and afterword. Newsarama caught up with Wheatley and Oeming to find out how the conversion of a black and white book into color is going, and whom they landed to write the intro and afterword.
First off, while coloring a black and white book may sound, at the outset, like a simple job for the Crayola 64 box (with the built-in sharpener), technology and market demands don’t allow for such a simplistic approach.
“We were innocent enough to think the change to color would be easy,” Wheatley told Newsarama. “And it might have been if we had just allowed John Staton [who originally did the miniseries graytones] to go his own way as we had on the Hammer of the Gods Color Saga. The results on that were beautiful, but Mike and I had decided that we wanted a different look to the color for Mortal Enemy. We wanted color that would evoke stone and earth and burnished metal and well-worn leather, and John's natural bent is to high-tech plastic, chrome and synthetic fabrics. So we were really asking a great deal of John to change his approach.
“The result is that I've stepped in to do the style guides for the book, along with about a third of the actual color. Once John saw what I was doing on the pages, he got the idea and is now doing a tremendous job of matching my approach. We're both working full team ahead and between us we're turning out about 30 pages a week.”
The mechanics of turning a gray tone book into a color one are…well, unless you happen to be a colorist, sort of magical. “I'm starting from John's original gray tone files,” Wheatley said. “I approach it like painting and I give a solid base color to the entire page to establish a unifying "under painting". Then I use my WACOM tablet and stylus to ‘paint’ the color in to the figures and background. It helps that I've done a few thousand paintings with real paint, but I'm finding it to be fairly easy to create a convincing painted look for Mortal Enemy. In fact I'm getting so comfortable with the digital paintbrush that I'm now wondering if I will ever go back to old-fashioned paint and canvas. There is nothing quite so useful as an ‘un-do’ key.”
Wheatley said that he and Oeming are on week four of what’s projected to be six weeks worth of work to color the book. In addition to the coloring, Wheatley is re-letting the pages taking advantage of several new benefits. “This is the first series that I've lettered on the computer and I was not entirely up to speed on the first few issues,” Wheatley said. “So I'm improving the look of the fonts and the word balloons with some help from my assistant, Timothy Wallace. I'm making some minor changes to the script, and I am correcting a few typos that escaped me the first time around. What can I say? Artists never know when to walk away from a work!”
Two completely new additions to the trade collection of the series will be an introduction by Peter David, and an afterword by the WWE’s Raven. For Oeming, it was quite a shock to find out that the wrestler was a fan of he and Wheatley’s work.
“I met Raven at a show in New York when he - along with security, ten fans waving photos and a guy to carry his pen - came up to the table and introduced himself,” Oeming said. “He's a really nice guy, he loves Powers and is well versed in the issues, saying what his favorite issue was and offered me and my friends tickets to that nights wrestling match. How cool is that? So I gave him Hammer, he gave me his phone number and we talked about it last week. Another WWE wrestler, Hurricane Helmes will be helping out with some quotes for the next Hammer mini ready to hit in January[Hammer Hits China]. Our book has a lot in common with wrestling, I guess!”
As for landing David to write the introduction, Oeming credits the same New York show. “He was sitting next to me at the show, but didn’t talk during the show, as we were both very busy, but on his way out, he saw Hammer and said ‘Hey I love that book!,’” Oeming said. “I gave him and his daughter another run and we talked a bit. Mark and I asked him to write the intro and bang, he said yes. Very cool, energetic guy.”
Along with the coloring, the lettering, and the mini-essays, Wheatley said the trade would also have a number of smaller tweaks. “That's the nice thing about a collection - we actually are fixing those small details that have bugged us since the original comic books came out! This will be a great looking and reading volume for folks who picked it up the first time, and newcomers alike.”