Charles Apple

Oh, Ryan Huddle. You and your peeps at the Victoria Advocate done it again.

You’ve given us a faux Prophet edition to tie in with a Harry Potter movie and you’ve given us a working game board that looks back on the 1980s. You even gave us an online musical for Halloween.

But now your little paper — a 33,549-circulation daily in Victoria, Texas, roughly equidistant from San Antonio, Houston and Corpus Christi — has given us the definitive treatment for the new teenage vampire flick Eclipse. A good five days before the movie even opens.

You wrote last night:

I thought I would give you the first look at our Twilight special M3.

…M3 being your weekly entertainment section, with which you’ve had so much fun in the past. You continued:

We did the section this week because we the movie releases on Wednesday, June 30 and our entertainment tab doesn’t hit the curbs until Friday. And I just hate to be behind on the news.

Plus, if we are handing it out at the movie like we have done in the past, we had to do it a little early.

That sounds like a good plan, Ryan. Interest among the teen bloodsucking set is high. My wife and daughter already have tickets in hand for a midnight showing next Tuesday.

As opposed to the tab pages you usually send me, though, you sent me lavishly photoillustrated, ginormous doubletruck graphics. Here are what you called pages one and eight (with your M3 nameplate there on the right)…

…and here is what you called pages three and six:

Naturally, you can click on either of these for a larger view.

You wrote:

I tried something I have never done before: To combine four broadsheet pages to make a giant poster. When the two pieces are combined, the ribbon acts like a guide to a Who’s Who of vampires.

And, sure enough, dude, it does:

You continued:

Aprill wrote all the stories but one, since the Associated Press was a little slow on moving any stories about Eclipse. She wrote them in her normal brilliant fashion for the issue, so she is a little tired right now.

Ryan, you’re on the right in this picture. Your cute, comics-fanboy-dream-of-a-wife Aprill Brandon is on the left. But you probably knew that.

Here was one more page you sent — this one tied in to HBO’s Real Blood TV series. Again, Ryan, you can click for a larger view:

You continued:

All the normal stuff [calendar items, for example] is in the section, too.

And I just found out the pressroom is going to print it on high bright paper. That should look good.

If you’d like to download readable PDFs of, y’know, your own pages, Ryan, click here. Aprill’s stuff is a scream so it’s definitely worth a look.

You’ve sent me so much cool stuff that I finally had to create a blog category just for you, called Victoria Advocate. You can find it there in that right-side rail. Or you can just click here.

Truly, Ryan, you guys rock. You rock so much, in fact, that you have me writing in the second person. And that’s just weird.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 9:47 am and is filed under Illustration, Innovative ideas, News design, Victoria Advocate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.