August 3rd, 2015

Editor’s Dispatch: Our Friends in Orlando!

by Countess Tea

Last week, King’s Digital Team went on a trip to Orlando to meet with the OTHER half of our digital team, the tireless and awesome folks at Reed-Brennan Media Associates.  While many of us work here in New York City, RBMA is where a lot of the technical, behind-the-scenes work happens.  We got a cool tour of some of the things that RBMA does for King Features.

Many cartoonists draw digitally or scan their work these days, but for those who prefer to draw on paper and mail their strips for scanning, RBMA does all of that production work. There are stacks of old comic strips organized on the shelves– it was really exciting to see all that original artwork!

While Sunday strips are colored by their respective artists, most daily strips are colored by the coloring team at RBMA.  

 

Every comic has its own palette with the standard colors labeled to preserve consistency of the strip:

 

Whether it’s Popeye’s spinach, Mooch’s pink sock, or the Phantom’s purple suit, this list makes sure that every cartoon captures the right colors!

Cartoonists often help the process along by sending in color charts like this one here, to show the colorists which items should be what color:

 

RBMA also automates layouts for many newspapers around the country.  Here’s a picture of the computer program that pops the right content into the right place in the newspaper:

 

If you order a collectible print, RBMA is where it is printed, cut, matted and framed– all by hand!

 

Here’s where that magic takes place:

  

 Our servers– the very servers that host Comics Kingdom and many of our cartoonists’ sites– are located in Orlando, too, at a web hosting facility.  We went to take a visit to see our servers and give them the thumbs up for all their hard work!

 

 There’s a ton of other work that gets done at RBMA– all of our comic tagging, copy editing, and the entire production of the King Features Weekly Service, on top of all of our technical support and customer service.  RBMA really are the unsung heroes of Comics Kingdom– thanks!!!

Of course, we capped our trip off with an afternoon at Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure, where you can see a whole bunch of our very favorite King Features’ characters on display:

 

 

 

 

 Seeing our comics in larger-than-life form was really excited and a great way to top off an exciting trip!  I even got to go on the Popeye water ride– I got soaking wet!  It was so much fun, I rode it twice!