I’ve decided to do things a little different this time – instead of posting Jon’s storyboards for the strip (because I’m lazy), I decided to post the entire email conversation between the TTT writers, so you can see how the strip evolved. Enjoy!

JUSTIN WROTE ON 5/12/08: So I know it’s sort of a foregone conclusion that we’ll do a Secret Invasion TTT, but…it’s a foregone conclusion that we’re going to do a Secret Invasion TTT. I was thinking we might as well strike while the iron is hot and do one closer to when the event is going on. So here’s an idea I had for a framework for the strip.

We start with Spidey and Hulk on the couch and Hulk is holding a bizarre object. Spidey asks him what it is and Hulk announces that he
is, in fact, a Skrull, and he’s infiltrated as the Hulk so that he can take over Megoville. Spidey looks at him for a moment, then says, “Klax, what the hell are you doing?” Hulk looks at Spidey and says, “Vlix? I thought you were supposed to be minding the prisoners.” Spidey says, “No, that was Vlax.” “No, Vlax was supposed to be infiltrating the X-Men,” etc. etc.

Long story short, it turns out that the Skrulls have actually replaced every single person in Megoville, and there is no one left in the town who isn’t a Skrull. (The problem, it seems, is that the Skrull who was supposed to be coordinating everything took on the form of Spider-Woman and hasn’t left his apartment since).

At that point, I was thinking that maybe the Skrulls have stashed all the Megos on the Skrull homeworld, and they’ve just been carrying on living their lives there. So maybe the Skrulls have to secretly invade their own planet to get it back (maybe they have better potato chips and public schools so the Megos don’t want to leave?) or maybe the Megos have infiltrated their society with fake green chins and the Skrulls have to suss out Who They Can Trust.

I just like the idea of a team of Skrulls who’ve totally blown their plan and following them as they try to rescue it.

Thoughts? Sounds like something we might wanna do? Should we wait a few more issues so there’s more distance from the Annihilation two-parter?

ROB BRICKEN WROTE ON 5/14: • At some point, a ship should land with all the little used TTT characters; Thor, Mr. T, Iron Chef, Snowball Ice-Man, etc. The Skrulls are ecstatic that they have someone to secretly invade, until those guys also reveal themselves as Skrulls, a second wave of the invasion.

• Maybe the Skrulls invaded way back in ToyFare issue #19, destroying even the precious little continuity used in TTT?

• If you do decide to wait, might it be funny to suddenly have a Mego Spider-Woman show up in TTT, and everyone act like she’s been part of TTT continuity forever? As she acts completely mysterious and/or clearly someone who does not know Earthling ways? It’d be a pretty good set-up to an actual Invasion TTT.

• Might the Skrulls have plugged are the real Megos into a Matrix, where they lead their exact same lives in a perfect replica of Megoville? I like the idea of the strip ending with Spidey waking from his Matrix pods, seeing hundreds of arguing Skrulls, and immediately going back to sleep in the pods, where all TTTs effectively take place from then on.

JUSTIN WROTE ON 5/14: Regarding Rob’s point on continuity – it actually is in TTT continuity that the Skrulls invaded Megoville and took over the entire town waaaaay back in ToyFare #70 (when Redwing attempted to blow up the town to stop the invasion but Cap stomped on him).

I think it would be funny is we establish that every strip since then (and probably even a few before) we’ve been following Skrulls, while the real Spidey has been sitting in a couch on the Skrull homeworld. Man, that would piss people off.

The idea with the ship full of people is really funny too.

TJ DIETSCH WROTE ON 5/14: There’s gotta be some kind of Super Skrull involved. I think the last issue revealed that there are actually Super Skrulls for every team, so we should have the lamest one of all, whether it be Great Lakes Avengers, Power Pack, The Defenders, X-Treme X-Men, something along those lines.

ALEX KROPINAK WROTE ON 5/14: Skrull Officer: “Okay, Fr’rt, you’re assigned to be our Illuminati Super-Skrull.”

Fr’rt: Sweet!

Skrull Officer: “Aaaand Bc’ch…you’re assigned to some of the left-over subjects: Mojo, Doug Ramsey, and Swarm. Try to come up with something by tomorrow, huh?

Bc’ch: “…F–k…”

Skrull Officer: “Yeah, maybe next time you’ll bring more than a pack of ‘Juicy Fruit’ to our office potluck picnic.”

ADAM TRACEY WROTE ON 5/14: Or maybe a Super Skrull with all crappy powers, or at least the crappy parts of powered individuals. For instance, he’s part-Wolverine so he’s short, part-Sasquatch so he’s hairy, part-Deadpool so he’s got cancer, part-Xavier so he’s bald on top (or in a wheelchair?) and part-Doop so he’s…whatever Doop is.

ROB WROTE ON 5/14: I was trying to imagine what a Super Skrull for the Defenders would be, and between their group obnoxiousness, stupidity, lack of talent and egomania, I pretty much came up with Dane Cook.

RACHEL MOLINO WROTE ON 5/14: I love the idea of all the Megos having been stashed on the Skrull homeworld. The question is (as I think you’ve already pointed out) would you rather that mean that: TTT has been taking place with the real Megos on the Skrullworld this whole time; or that TTT has been composed by Skrulls the whole time? I really think the second option is funnier, and maybe I don’t have a good perception on this, but I don’t see why it would piss many people off. It’s a joke poking fun at the concept of retconning, and I think its brilliant. Especially if we ignore the retcon (or retcon the retcon) and call it out a little in a following TTT.

Now, if you were to make a plot of the Skrulls trying to take back their homeworld from the Megos, I think it would inevitably be a 2-parter.

Rob’s ideas are really great alternatives. I love both the ship of little-used TTT characters who turn out to be Skrulls, and the Matrix-style ending. These are probably even integrate-able with each other, but still, it sounds like a 2-parter, no? (not that we’re trying to avoid one)

JUSTIN WROTE ON 5/14: I think that when the Skrulls discover that the “Skrulls” they’ve been hanging out with all this time have really been Megos in disguise (if we go in that direction), they should get really incensed. “But…that means that everything I’ve done for the past four years hasn’t had any meaning!”

As for the end, we could always just have Dr. Strange magically make it so that it never happened and we really HAVE been reading about the Megos this whole time. Or we could have Bendis suggest that Dr. Strange do that. Or we could have Bendis do that.

ROB WROTE ON 5/14: No no no—you have to leave it as is, meaning Skrulls have been in TTT since issue whatever. Yes, that’ll piss some readers off, and yes, that’s totally hilarious. In fact, I like my Matrix ending, because it’s a slap in the face that all future TTs will effectively not be real as well. HAHAHHAHAHA

I’m drunk.

Justin here again now (in the present). So, as you can see, a lot of what ended up in the final script came out of that initial flurry of emails. (The idea that the real Megos who have been living on the Skrull homeworld are hopelessly lame came out of the finalization meeting, and was basically so fans would never, EVER ask us to make TTT be about the real Megos.) And in the end, it turns out that Rachel was right and I was wrong: I figured fans would be pissed off at the ending, but so far all the feedback we’ve gotten is that this strip was one of fans’ favorites of the year. Which is a much better reaction to get. I GUESS.

So, what did you think of the strip and its genesis?

Aunt May. Goliath. Man-Thing. Sue Storm. Wolverine. Red Skull.

In two days, one of these Megos will be revealed to be a SKRULL!

That’s because November 12 sees the release in comic shops of ToyFare #137 and “Invasion of the Mego Snatchers,” when Secret Invasion reaches the Twisted ToyFare Theatre Universe.

We are totally not jerking you around. One of these major Mego characters will be revealed to have been a Skrull since the beginning of the strip. And NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!

Come back each day for the next week (except on the weekends, when we have better things to do) to see three more characters with a Skrull hidden in their midst. Who will be revealed as a Skrull next week? The answers may shock and annoy you!

Post your theories about who’s a dirty Skrull at the Wizard Universe Message Board!

Thing. Tarantula. Spock.

In five days, one of these Megos will be revealed to be a SKRULL!

That’s because November 12 sees the release in comic shops of ToyFare #137 and “Invasion of the Mego Snatchers,” when Secret Invasion reaches the Twisted ToyFare Theatre Universe.

We are totally not jerking you around. One of these major Mego characters will be revealed to have been a Skrull since the beginning of the strip. And NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!

Come back each day for the next week (except on the weekends, when we have better things to do) to see three more characters with a Skrull hidden in their midst. Who will be revealed as a Skrull next week? The answers may shock and annoy you!

Post your theories about who’s a dirty Skrull at the Wizard Universe Message Board!

Captain America. Alan Moore. Loki.

In six days, one of these Megos will be revealed to be a SKRULL!

That’s because November 12 sees the release in comic shops of ToyFare #137 and “Invasion of the Mego Snatchers,” when Secret Invasion reaches the Twisted ToyFare Theatre Universe.

We are totally not jerking you around. One of these major Mego characters will be revealed to have been a Skrull since the beginning of the strip. And NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!

Come back each day for the next week (except on the weekends, when we have better things to do) to see three more characters with a Skrull hidden in their midst. Who will be revealed as a Skrull next week? The answers may shock and annoy you!

Post your theories about who’s a dirty Skrull at the Wizard Universe Message Board!

And one heck of a finale it is as the Manly Men of Action face off against the evil Segal with the help of surviving old school MMA. I can’t help but hope that somehow this gets made into a real movie. My personal favorite joke in the strip came from Justin and it’s how the MMA call on their predecessors (originally it was going to be just Chuck Norris and they would summon him like Captain Planet). Good stuff. Okay, here are Jon’s storyboards:

Justin here now. I just wanted to post a little additional comment on the joke that TJ mentioned about the original Manly Men, because it was one of the few times I’ve been able to use something I learned in college in my professional life (aside from grammar and punctuation rules, of course).

In my screenwriting class they taught us about Chekhov’s gun. “Wait a minute,” you’re saying, “Didn’t Chekhov have a phaser, not a gun?” Wrong Chekhov. Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright who famously said that if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act 1, it had better go off by the end of Act 3.

So when we were sitting around trying to figure out the end of Act 3 of our own “play” here, I thought back to our Act 1, which I wasn’t as involved in planning. If you recall the first chapter of “The Rambo Connection,” we spend about four panels introducing previous incarnations of the Manly Men of Action, but there was never any intention to do anything with them. But then I started thinking, that’s a lot of guns hanging on the wall…literally! If we spent that much time setting them up earlier in the story, it had better pay off at the end.

So there you go…I’ve now explained TJ’s favorite joke to death so it’s no longer funny. You’re welcome, TJ!

Zach Oat did the storyboarding honors here, and the first thing you’ll notice is that he had to leave notes in the storyboards telling our designer, Jairo Leon, which things in the strip needed color, like the blue Smurf blood and the gold Smurfs.

This was a tricky strip in any number of ways. It originally started life as Smurf Heroes (Smurf the Cheerleader, Smurf the world), but too many of the writers hadn’t seen Heroes at that point to make it work, and I forget whose brilliant decision it was to do Sin City instead. But there was much hand-wringing in the early stages that the strip would basically end up being exactly like Sin City, just with “Smurf” dropped in every third word.

To avoid that comedy pitfall, we decided to adapt the story so it uniquely fit the Smurfs’ world, including having Smurfs that turn into gold (Gargamel’s actual original intention for capturing the Smurfs, which ends up making a ton of sense when you consider that a Smurf named Goldie Smurf would HAVE to be made of gold), and having the mastermind be a red-hatted authority figure. Of course, in our version, the ACTUAL mastermind is Jokey, which doesn’t make too much sense if you think about it too hard. But the point is that we TRIED to put a bit of thought into it.

It’s also worth noting that the Yellow Bastard was nearly just a yellow Smurf, and then we remembered that there was a yellow Snork. Also, in honor of Jon Gutierrez’s last week as ToyFare Price Guide Editor next week, I have to mention that the Peyo line (which he suggested, although his was worded slightly more rudely) is my favorite thing he’s ever written.
-Justin

JUSTIN: This episode appeared in ToyFare #135, which went on sale last week in comic shops. Rush out and buy it now before you attempt to read any more of the behind the scenes, because it’s not going to make much sense otherwise. This strip went through a lot more changes than your average TTT, including going from a two-parter to our very first three-parter, so the behind-the-scenes write-up is going to be a little longer than normal as well. Let’s start off with the storyboards themselves.

JON: Exactly as you’d expect from our first three-parter, this was a pretty tough one to figure out. Especially since we were writing it with the intention that it be a two parter and that we’d wrap everything up here. Justin came up with the idea to do a third part and stretch out the Seagal fight. In our original version, it was everyone fighting in one place and each would only get one beat for their individual jokes.

This is the first strip that I really started adding in visual jokes in the storyboards, rather than just figuring out how figures would be in each panel. For example, I was trying to figure out what Seagal’s house would be like and combing his ego and Buddhist beliefs, that he’d have a giant gold Buddha in front with his own head on it. It’s really weird to have a random thought like that and later get to see our Dylan Brucie (our photographer) and Jairo Leon (our designer) really make it look amazing.

And if you read our part one post, you may remember that I was beating myself senseless for my crappy looking storyboards. I’m still not an amazing artist, but I’m not as ashamed to show these as the last one. I actually prefer my version of Dolph painting the tiger to the finished strip as, in my mind, the tiger should’ve been really confused. It’s hard to convey that with a toy tiger.

JUSTIN: Here’s how this whole thing went down, and it should prove once and for all that I’m a massive control freak. Like I said, this strip had gone through a number of changes (I could probably write a novel on this, but I’ll try to keep it reasonably brief). It was originally pitched out by TTT contributor Chris Ward this way:

“Somewhere Over the Rambo: Rambo enlists fellow washed up action stars like Ah-nuld, Van Damme and Bruce Willis to go on one last mission together, to try and find out why the Manly Men of Manly Movies just aren’t in demand anymore, and why shrugging, mop-top nerds like Jim from The Office have taken their place. They’ll get to the bottom of this….by using exploding tip arrows and giving each other high fives whenever the best punny one-liner is given. In the end, the answer lies with “The Wizard of Jaws,” who turns out to be the glorious
visage of Patrick Swayze at his peak.”

This idea was in turn inspired by the Manly Movie Mamajamas, massive semi-regular movie nights that the men of Wizard Entertainment past and present hold to watch dumb action movies starring some of these guys (but that’s a post for another day).

In a very long email I actually outlined a whole story based on the assumption that these guys would be trying to figure out why they don’t get movie roles anymore, and where it turns out the villain is the shape-shifting entity known as CGI, and then the writers began tossing ideas back and forth based on that. But, as often happens in TTT meetings, when the main writers actually sat down in the meeting to finalize the outline they ended up walking out with something very different than they walked in with.

This meeting took place during my “sabbatical,” and I wasn’t in the finalization meeting. The outline that they ended up going with was very much like the part one that you read in ToyFare #134, except the identities of the villains weren’t revealed at the end of the first part. The Manly Men spent much of part two trying to figure out who the kidnappers were, which involved a crime computer, a blonde hair belonging to Brigitte Nielsen, and accosting Flavor Flav. When I came back to ToyFare they were about to shoot part one, and when I read the outlines, I really thought it needed to go in a different direction.

Particularly I thought that we needed to beef up the action, especially in part two. This was a strip about four action stars who kidnap four other action stars from four OTHER action stars, and as the outline was written, nobody threw a punch until maybe the second-to-last page of the entire shebang…and even then it wasn’t our main characters doing the fighting.

We went back to the writers and asked for more ideas with only one goal – make it as over-the-top violent as possible. When we actually sat down in the meeting (after part 1 was complete), we realized that we had enough beats that squeezing it all into one part would make it feel very rushed. We decided to make it a three-parter (mirroring the three-act structure of the action movies we were parodying) and save the climactic battle with Seagal for next issue.

So how does that all go down? You’ll have to pick up ToyFare #135 (on sale September 10th in comic shops) to find out!

(Like Jon, I also want to specially call out Dylan and Jairo for their work on this issue. Dylan really went to town on the smelting factory, and the idea for having the arm wrestling match happen over a stream of molten metal was all him. And Jairo’s work on the last splash panel was fairly heroic – I’m hoping to make it available on the blog as a wallpaper soon. Finally, I would like to point out that I’m personally most proud in the final script of Jean Claude Van Damme’s accent, which has never been spoken aloud by any human being.)

JON SAYS: This was one of those TTT’s that really changed a lot from the initial idea. As far as I can remember, it started with a long standing idea to do a Mexican bootleg toy script – mainly because of our love of one bootleg toy we’d found called “Spader-Man”. Originally it was all about Megatron in Mexico and we were going to cut back and see what Starscream was doing when he was gone, but we started thinking Starscream was the better “A” story…it was hard coming up with a real story about the bootlegs. And of course, the whole strike thing came from the Writer’s strike (which I proudly marched in, if I can have a completely pointless digression. Seth Meyers gave me a whistle!).

JUSTIN SAYS: Believe it or not, this Twisted ToyFare (which ran in issue # 130) was the first full-length strip EVER to focus on the Transformers. As long as I’ve been with the magazine, we’ve been trying to figure out a way to tackle a Transformers strip, but it always eluded us. Finally, we realized the secret was to do the same thing we do with our G.I. Joe and most of our Marvel strips: focus on the villains. For some reason in Twisted ToyFare, villains are just usually normal guys who are trying to get by, whereas heroes are insufferable tools. The note in the final script to read all of Soundwave’s dialogue in Soundwave’s voice in order to make it funnier came from the fact that, in our planning meeting, Zach, Jon and I were all doing the voice, and it’s true: none of his lines would really be funny unless you read them like that.

I say unfortunately, because…well, look at them! I’m profoundly embarrased by them now and I have to say I’ve gotten much better at drawing these (and drawing in general) since this strip, even though it was only a couple months back. That’s right, keep reading this blog and you will witness my people slowly look more and more like…um, people. (Although I’m not sure why Arnold suddenly looks like Guile in part 2, but it seemed to work. You’d think I would’ve done Van Damm that way, though.)

This strip really went through more changes than any other TTT I can think of. The original idea was one, six-page strip with the Manly Men of Action recruiting the new action heroes – only to get wimpy actors like David Schwimmer. It went through a bunch of rewrites and reworkings before we got to the Segal conflict. If you look closely at the storyboards, you’ll see a bunch of panels that are darker or off-angle to the rest. We changed the script around so I had to draw some new panels and if I had to move some, I just photocopied them and taped them to the page. (I’m lazy!)

Consequently, we also lost a LOT of jokes along the way. My most missed one was the MMA gathering around after their meeting to watch the new action film they found “There will be blood,” which they found horribly dissapointing.

Well, until next month – please don’t judge me on these drawings!

-Posted by Jon

This was one that we really had trouble coming up with an ending to it. Puppy trees, giant soups – those things came quick and easy, but we couldn’t get the ending right. We knew we wanted Hulk’s ship to explode, but we couldn’t come up with an interesting reason for it to do so. Finally, at the end of the day and very tired, I suggested that maybe Hulk had put a metal can in his microwave and that exploded it. I definitely didn’t think anyone would go for it, it being the silliest thing I could think of…but I’d kinda forgot that, hey, it’s TTT!

Oh, and the Green Intern Corps is one of the greatest things Justin’s ever come up with. We’ll see them again, despite all perishing in this strip. (Note: I have no idea if we will or not, despite what I just typed.)

-Posted by Jon