by Scott C. Adams

Well, there it is. Kind of a big deal, huh? What you are looking at is the product of many many hours over the last 4 months, though some of the ideas have been floating in the back of my head for years.

How did all this happen? As with many things in Megoville I blame Joe DeRouen.

Sometime in August or September Joe asked me to do some art for his Megostore website. I had "retired" from the Mego Museum in 2000 and it had been a long time since I'd played with Megos in Photoshop. What fun! Especially since I had learned so much about making art since my early Mego Museum days. So I had the taste.

I had been promising Brian Heiler for at least a year or more that I would help him overhaul the Museum and make it easier for him to update and fix some really glaring flaws, particularly the frames navigation that I had been warned long ago I would regret. The site was hard to update in a consistent fashion because anytime you wanted to add something someone had to paint a "marble" bust or stick some greek columns in or whatever...not practical. Original Museum fonts and files had been lost...it was a mess.till, the site was huge, and to completely overhaul it would be such a Herculean task! So nothing happened, except it ate away at me that the site needed my attention.The Falcon page had been promising NEW ART since it was created in 1997! This stuff had been bugging me for years, but I was busy with the rest of my life.

Anyway, flash forward to this fall and I make Joe's Megostore Banner. Cool. I'm a little inspired. Maaaybe I can do something SIMPLE. Don't overhaul the WHOLE site, just make a new navigation! Keep it simple, don't bite off more than you can chew, this will take a week and a half! But what navigation? How to best present so much information?

Well, you know how the Mego Museum art always tried to make it look KINDA like a real place, sort of successfully, kinda not so much. I had always thought that if there was a building called the Mego Museum it would look like this:

The classic Mego Logo extruded into a giant building with curved gallery walls and lots of glass. Some nice landscaping maybe. I made this Photoshop sketch and thought I was onto something.

So if the Museum looks like that, what do all Museum's have? A map.

Cool! Mego logo map. Now how to organize it? This went through several phases, but didn't start to feel good until I added the small colorful circle Steve did for Mego Scarcity Project and that people use in Mego Buzz.

That gave a sense of FUN, and it was supposed to be fun. I love the old Museum concept, but after a while, all the gray green marble was seriously bumming me out.

So, it was realizing that fun must be the priority that opened this up for me. Suddenly my cool 3D building was a BIG MARBLE LOGO. Cool, but...fun??? Enh. So I was talking with my friend Ben "Imp" Holcomb, (a brilliant graphic designer and Mego genius who gave me tons of valuable advice on this project) and I believe it was he who mentioned that I use a playset.

I can't recall be more excited by an idea in my life. I LOVE Mego vinyl case playsets. Vinyl encased cardboard riveted together with a brass clasp. That's the essence of Mego play to me. Plus, playsets come in boxes and I LOVE Mego boxes. Within an hour I had put this rough together and was off to the races.

The "map" soon became a playset instruction sheet and the colorful circle gave way to repro-art, which I had fallen in love with thanks to the Mego Library.

I can't put it all together, the whole evolution of this project. I wanted to kill the frames and icon dependant galleries, but how to navigate the different lines? Wasn't text boring? Not at all. Ben showed me how to use Cascading Style sheets that make it much easier to do web design and I really got inspired. That lead to the gallery format we have today.

The art was still going to be a problem, though. Did I really want to paint new backgrounds for the dozens and dozens of different Mego figures? That was too much work. I wasn't sure what to do, but necessity is the mother of invention. Brain had come up with this trading card idea and Steve had helped him design it, and it was cool but the problem was the art. The Spiderman picture, in addition to being really tired and ugly (You may like it, and I appreciate that, but I've been looking at it for almost 10 years now!) was way to small to print nicely. Plus, we were doing this whole redesign, the cards should look like they fit with the new website. I asked him to let me take a crack at it--but he had to go to press in a few days. I didn't have time to paint a background.

So I turned to photographic backgrounds and some simple Photoshop tricks (Posterize and Find Edges) and suddenly had an art style that was punchy and fun and very quick for me to do.

It's been a huge project, and I don't think I've worked harder or longer on a personal project in my life. Weekend, nights, and on the bus during the commute I've been trying to figure out this giant art puzzle called the Mego Museum. It's been an enormous amount of fun and extremely satisfying to come back and rebuild something I have never been satisfied with. I believe that the redesign will make it easier for the Museum to grow and thrive as it enters it's tenth year and beyond. I'll be proud to have my name on it. I hope you enjoy it and keep coming back. Brain and I have great things in store.

A few thanks: Brian Heiler for doing such an incredible job keeping the Museum growing and thriving. He's a great person to work with, as are Joe and Anthony and all the regulars at the Museum. This might not have happened and certainly wouldn't look as good without Ben Holcomb's input. Thanks, man, you rock. Lastly, my bride-to-be, Julie, who has been so supportive and encouraging. She isn't crazy about the Mego display cases in her house, but she always lets me be who I am.

And thanks to you!

Best,

Scott