TyrannoMax Trading Card & Sticker Album, Stikks™ Company, Inc.
Selections from Set 1: Fear the Roar!
The Stikks Company was best known for making sports cards, but they branched out in the late 70s by getting the contract to make trading cards for Cocytus Comics' Nightmare Pit and Tomorrownauts titles (a mint Nightmare Pit series 1 Farrah Fyendlyne vs Glodie Redeemer (37) is $300+ on the secondary market, yow!).
This got their foot in the door for the 80s when the Cocytus / Buzby Spurlock Animation merger put the Cocytus characters on TV sets and toy shelves (semi)worldwide. Buzby-Spurlock needed merch liscenees and Stikks got most of the trading cards and sticker albums.
As with most things, Stikks was acquired by Hasbro in the 90s.
EXTENSIVE Process/Tutorial under the fold.
You were warned, listen to some jams while you read.
Vidu has been advancing their image generation options and wanted us in the Creative Partner Program to show it off. (click the link to try it with 100 free credits, etc).
But I'm rarely doing anything just on straight gens so these are heavy edits, so here's the procedural breakdown.
I used the new GPT-2 because it was part of the assignment, using the text-to-image to generate multiple flat white cardboard sheets with dents and creases at the corners, and plain aged cardstock. I set those aside.
Next came generating the card-images. One nice thing about the Vidu system is the references are more or less universal, so I could use my pre-existing TyrannoMax animation models as the base.
I prompted specifically for the characters to be rendered as acrylic paintings in a mid-80s trading-card art style, describing the scene, and then generating. In some cases taking those results and using them as the reference pic for another pass-through to diminish instances where things felt too animation-cel-like.
For things like the DinoHydra, which I didn't have animation models for, I used the same system to make them.
On the toy each head would be a launcher, except the T-rex that bites, and there's a removable battle saddle, obviously.
I'm going to do further development on the final animation/toy DinoHydra, but going with a rough draft for the licensed out stuff is very period accurate, so much like how I have 'high budget' and 'low budget' versions of some of my animation reference for period accuracy, I went with it.
Once I had the basic cards, it was off to Photoshop. First, the normal color correction, number-of-fingers-correction (dinoids have three fingers and a thumb, and while flubbing that is period accurate in animation, it wouldn't be on cards, so had to fix several hands /away/ from human anatomical accuracy).
These were then composited with the image frame I'd designed based on the one used in Dinosaurs/Mars Attacks. I picked the fonts to try and match the look of Topps' 80s output, to help make that fauxtalgia pop.
With edits in place, I then used Upscayl to make the images very large (about 5000x3000ish), because now comes the simulation of printing effects.
I'm going to start with a new image to show off this part of the process, as I didn't think to preserve the step-by-stop of any of the base cards in the first two posts (wasn't planning this detailed a tutorial at the time).
So lets go with Aunt Acid's character card.
Prompt: <reference> in the corroded remains of a suburban home. She extends one hand toward the POV, acid splashing from her open hand. 1985 science-fiction/fantasy acrylic painting, no text or branding, dynamic angle 1985 science-fiction/fantasy acrylic painting, no text or branding, the painting is in a sci-fi/fantasy pulp illustration style
On the left is the raw gen, on the right is after some selective color correction and the upscale to 5000ish px tall
I duplicate the layer in Photoshop, and I apply a 5px color halftone. This simulates /most/ of the printing process. However, real printed material of this type would have had black as a separate layer, and so the darkest areas of black wouldn't have any halftoning. Photoshop's filter does not do this.
So I duplicate the original layer again, and use Threshold to produce a B&W image that picks up the very darkest blacks only, and I set that to multiply Just color halftone on the left, color halftone with simulated spot-black on the right.
Combining that image with the card template I'd built before, and you get the image on the left, adding one of the cardstock images set to multiply, then flattening and doing some color-tweaking, gets the image on the right.
Her getup is a /titch/ anacronistic, since TyrannoMax is a 1985 series and her look is more Peg Bundy from Married With Children, but bouffants and cat-eye glasses have been just-slightly-unfashionable for most of modern history, so I'm cutting myself slack there.
<This is the part of the tutorial where I ramble about the OC for a bit>
Her whole schtick is that she got exposed to Dr. Underfang's primordial ooze (man that sounds dirty) while alive, and she survived the mutations, so she doesn't wind up geneincarnating into a beast-person but does gain super-powers and has her personality exaggerated to villainous levels. She and Cold Shoulder are similar in that regard.
I haven't decided whose Aunt Acid she is yet, because I'm not sure if its funnier if she's Dr. Underfang's, Cold Shoulder's, or Ms. Nice/Ms. Nautilus's. Now, she will refer to basically anyone younger than herself as if they were a beloved niece or nephew she hasn't seen in years, but she's legitimately related to one of the villain mains, and that's the one that threw her in the giant vat of glowing ooze.
Her super-power is pretty self explanatory: she constantly produces and can also shoot an acidic compound that varies between 2.5 ph and cartoonishly ultra-caustic, she also generates tear gas-like fumes that become hallucinogenic with extended exposure. Her powers are constantly active unless temporarily suppressed by exposure to a strong chemical base (or a whole, whole lot of baking soda).
Her motivation is she's having a midlife crisis and when she finds out that her niece/nephew is actually a villain goes "that sounds fun." Essentially, Aunt Acid's getting her groove back via supervillainy and TyrannoMax and pals are the unfortunate staff on her carnage-ful cruise.
