Tales from DS106

Jim wrote a bit about sharing comic books with his kids and talked about making an animated GIF out of one of the covers

I want to have the dude who is buried alive slamming on the coffin, need to talk to MBS about the best way to do this.

So I thought I’d give it a try. Making the arms pound didn’t seem like it would be too difficult – it’s just a matter of lassoing them and copying and pasting into a different layer. The one in the foreground I did in two parts, forearm and upper arm, and the other arm I did as a third layer. I used the move and rotate functions to shift the arm positions a little, and made my two animations frames – one as is and one with the arms moved. I decided his head should move as well, so I did a copy-paste-rotate job on that too. I copied some of the coffin behind his head and used it to cover up the background layer, so you wouldn’t see both when it moves. This is the hard thing about animating comic book covers – fixing the background bits. I didn’t do it with the hands because I was hoping the double image would contribute to the illusion of rapid beating. I was wrong though, so I had to work on it some more. Then I decided to follow John Johnston’s suggestion about the three hosts in the circles. After doing that, I couldn’t leave “Crypt” in the title. The problem there was finding the right typeface. I’ve seen one with wedge-shaped characters that I might be able to modify, but I don’t have it on my laptop. So instead I looked for a Tales from the Crypt font online and used what I found. It’s not even close, but it doesn’t really have to match anything so it sort of works.