Triangle Man: The Long Lost Book
Posted in The Fairy Tale by CujoSeptember 30th, 2005 - 2:30 PM
Here he is, the only hero in the battle of good vs. evil, that’s right ladies and gentlemen it’s the one and only Triangle Man! Before I begin in the picture above left to right featured are Triangle Man, Tri-Wiz in the midst of casting a spell and two evil henchmen Torch and Ten. The picture is a quick put together of some of the characters and that scene doesn’t happen at all.
The story of Triangle Man has a long history in my head I guess you can say. Way back around 97-99 I’m not quite sure I had the idea of creating a video game for one of my highschool classes and the characters started being born — I never did create the game and made some slot machine game instead. This leads us to 2003 and my “Children’s Illustrated Books” class at Algoma Univeristy. For our final project we were able to either write an essay or a fairy tale, I clearly took the fairy tale as I thought it’d be a lot of fun and Triangle Man was still floating in my head as I usually doodled him on the side of pages in class.
After being a slacker for the month leading up to the due date I decided to work on the project in one weekend writing the story and coming up with character designs etc. My Adobe Photoshop skills at this time sucked (as looking at these pictures now I can see ways to improve them greatly) but I thought I’d be able to get the illustrations out in no time at all — I was wrong and stayed up for two straight nights creatinng the characters based off of old sketches that I found in a sketch book. Before digitizing the characters however I thought of a story and it went together quickly (probably too quickly but hey I was on a time constraint) then I created each individual character and made backgrounds to place them on, I used repetition in the images quite a bit as it made things simpler. Similar in sorts to how the older cartoons had the same repeating background when characters would walk past.
All of this work led to the birth of “Triangle Man in the Tragic Kingdom” which became a big success with my fellow classmates and the professor as well who suggested some changes and said I could try to publish it if I really wanted. This is where I stopped. I always liked the idea of publishing it just 
to get it out there to see what the reaction would like but me being me I put it to the side and moved onto other things, but now I’d like to resurrect “the Man”, redo the drawings and rework the story then see where that will lead me. All I need is time, which I don’t have at the moment, I need to focus on getting the web stuff off the ground and running before I jump onto other projects.
This post is to let people know the Triangle Man is still alive and still ready to fight, I promise. The scene here is from the story featuring Torch and Ten trying to capture Tri-Wiz (it has been resized to better fit the blog).
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September 30th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
Wow, Triangle Man bears an uncanny resemblance to my ex-husband! He (the ex) was much more lover than fighter, though he did have a fine sense of justice.
September 30th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
I was just rattling round the house, and realized that I may have sounded a bit rude in my last. If I did, I didn’t mean to. Sorry. I AM a bit-a-lot punchy…I’ve been up since 4:30. (Dropped Jim at the airport…he should be at his LAN party now).
I like your characters — the clear shapes and vivid colours are appealing. Triangle Man DOES remind me of my ex, in an inkblot-test kinda way. He was a very nice fellow (the ex), and also very tall (6′ 8″). That must be it.
I like the names Torch and Ten. Is Torch the one-eyed fellow? He looks familiar, also…
October 1st, 2005 at 12:20 am
You didn’t sound rude at all, it was your first reaction and that’s good. And hey, if your ex reminds you of a triangle with eyes then so be it.
The simple characters/shapes was basically because I’m not that great of an artist and the triangles and circles are easy to make and anyone can do it, this way anyone can also have fun creating the characters etc as they are quite easy to make or resemble I guess. All the “good” characters are triangular in shape (there’s also a King, Princess and 2 Triangle Man buddies - not really triangles though, they both fly, hmm, one is circular and the other has points. All the “bad” characters around circles however, you are correct with Torch being the guy with one eye, he breathes fire… ooooooooo, Ten is the others name basically because he has an antenna. The “main bad guy’s” name is Pillar as he is pretty much a giant catapillar, lots of circles to make one mean dude.
Speaking of all the colours because of them it took over an hour to print the story out on Jes’ printer, the story was only about 20 some pages but each one featured close to a full page colour illustration.
I searched the net for the “familiarity” aspect of Torch and came up with him being close to the character Mike from Monster’s Inc. but I’ve had the drawings for him for awhile
HAHA
October 1st, 2005 at 12:53 am
Curt, you are very talented, and though I’m not all that familiar with the animation/graphic novels/comics end of things, I do know people who are. Visit my friend Liam O’Donnell’s site: http://www.liamodonnell.com/ . He does all kinds of stuff, but visual bits seem to be his first love. You might get some ideas from him. Feel free to contact him — he is friendly, and very helpful!
October 2nd, 2005 at 1:12 am
Thanks for the link Anita, I’ll check it out when I get time… hmm.. maybe in a month or so. Thanks for the compliment as well.
October 3rd, 2005 at 11:10 am
Whatch out for copyright infringements Curt from They Might Be Giants. They released a song called ” Particle Man” and had a character named Triangle Man that was featured in the song.
October 3rd, 2005 at 11:11 am
Good story by the way !!!!
October 3rd, 2005 at 5:36 pm
I wanna read the story. You’ll have to hook me up. I like Triangle Man. Have you showed him to me beofre? He looks familliar. Then again, who knows… I coudl be thinking of Anita’s ex.
October 4th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
Hey Dar, I’m aware of the “Triangle Man” reference in Particle Man by TMBG:
Triangle Man, Triangle Man
Triangle man hates Particle Man
They have a fight, Triangle wins
Triangle Man
I still don’t see much “danger” in it, considering my “Triangle Man” isn’t fighting Particle Man or Person Man and well their’s is a song mine is a drawing etc etc. I’m sure there’s more too it blah blah blah but I don’t think they can claim “copyrite” because they used it in a song.
If some of you want to read the story “as is” now I can see what I can do. Maybe I’ll turn the Word doc into a PDF and pass it around or something. But even me looking at it now, it needs work :S