Now that the Big Two are deep into their mandatory summer crossovers – as opposed to their mandatory winter crossovers, their mandatory spring crossovers, and their mandatory fall crossovers – I can’t tell the players without a scorecard.
At the core of both series is the same plot: all or most of the sundry parallel universes are going to collide into one, if, indeed, that many. This does not envelop either series in an aura of originality, particularly when Marv Wolfman and George Pérez did this 29 years ago. You may not think they did it better way back in the early days of the Gilded Age of Comics (and you’d be wrong about that), but at the very least you could understand that story. Original Sin and Future’s End… not so much.
At least Marvel’s Original Sin is built around a clever plot point: somebody offed The Watcher and stole one or both of his eyes… and then, one eye exploded implanting various deep dark secrets held by various characters into the brainpans of those who were within the blast radius of the eyeball.
No, I don’t know how big the blast radius of a Watcher eyeball is. And I’m a bit pissed off at offing the big bald guy anyway, but it’s comic books, where death has no meaning whatsoever. If they ever kill Aunt May off, she’ll be back in a few months with a bionic bustle.
DC’s Future’s End simply makes no sense. Batman Beyond is sent back in time to prevent the end of the world as we know it, but he misses his mark and arrives later than he was supposed to. Well, fine. That’s it. The hero blew it and it’s over, right?
No such luck. All the characters wander around slapping their foreheads and mumbling woe is me a lot. It doesn’t help that this series features the New 52 version of the DC Universe, which really hasn’t been very well-defined or thought out, but has been compromised after-the-fact by bureaucrats who wouldn’t know a good comics story if they bothered to read one.
It was time to retire the mega-event crossover before we started worrying about Y2K. But these puppies make money, so the Big Two are going to keep on hitting the event button like a crack whore with new kneepads.
It’s easy to understand why comics fans like the Marvel movies. They exist in a comparatively small universe with clear roadmaps. DC doesn’t have that goodwill going for them, and Man Of Steel offered little hope.
But we continue to hope. These are great characters. We love them, and we hope that someday the powers at Warners and Disney start to trust those characters as much as we do, before the core audience is all on catheters and people start to view Superman and Wolverine the way we view The Lone Ranger and Buck Rogers.
Actress Roxanne Mckee (“Claire”) feels her new role on the SyFy series DOMINION is a little slice of heaven, and she shares the enthusiasm about all things angels and devils, plus Peabody Award winning TV genius, Angela Santomero, has given us children’s classics like BLUES CLUES, DANIEL THE TIGER and now a new show just in time for summer binge watching on Amazon.
Skottie Young has always had a unique style, but I particularly love his little chibi versions of comic book characters. When I first saw his Deadpool “Screw U” chibi art on the badges for Baltimore Comic Con a couple of years ago (and then on the Deadpool #001 Variant Cover it immediately went on my mental favorites list. Young has also done very cute chibi covers of other characters, like Wolverine and Spider-Man. So this past weekend when my fella (who’s a huge Spider-Man fan) and I decided to do some clay crafting, Young’s grumpy but adorable little Deadpool and his adorable upside-down Spider-Man were excellent tiny sculpture project choices for us.
I’m fairly pleased with how my Tiny Grumpy Mercenary turned out, and, I gotta be honest, having him slouching irritably on a shelf with my family of Deadpools makes me happy in my nerdy little soul. So in case you are craving a happy nerd soul too and are in the mood to give crafting a try, I thought I’d share a tutorial on how I made by newest little buddy.
Step One: Suggested Tools and Supplies
Fimo, Sculpey, or other colored sculpting clay, in red, black, brown, white, blue, and purple
wax paper (to work on – I usually tape it down to the table) and a bright desk or work light
aluminum foil, and an old cutting board and sharp knife or other handy cutting tool
basic sculpting tool set (this is the set I have). You can also use toothpicks or other household items if you don’t have official tools.
wire and wire cutters
Step Two: Photo References
It’s always good to get a reference for whatever you are going to make from all angles possible. Of course, if it’s just one image, that’s all you’ll have to work with. But if you search and and save a good-sized version of the image, you can also at least zoom in as needed to look at the details. In this case, of course, your reference is this image.
Step Three: Making Your New Friend!
This process is going to vary for everyone, but generally, if what I’m making is a creature or a person, I like to start with the head. Having the head done first helps me gauge how big I will want to make the rest of the character; plus, making the part of the character that expresses the most personality first just makes sense to me.
To make a tiny Deadpool head, start with a round red ball and trace out the black eye holes very lightly with a knife tip. Pro tip: rolling the clay in the palms or your hands is a good way to get a good round ball (after kneading the clay .to warm it)
Once you’ve got the eyes traced to your satisfaction, trace them again with a deeper cut, angled inward at a shallow angle. Next, lever the middle area out to make a little hollow where the eye will be.
Use your finger or a tool (the ball-tipped tool does well for this) to smooth the edges and insides of the eye sockets and get rid of any clay crumbs.
Then make a ball of black clay of a size to fill the eye socket, shape it slightly to fit the socket’s edges, and press it into the socket.
Use your fingers and the flat-tipped tool to smooth the edges of the black to the red.
Next, repeat for the other black eye, and the white inner eyes. Pro tip: if you are using white clay, ensure you first wash your hands and are careful smoothing the edges so other clay colors don’t transfer onto the white. You can also lightly scrape the top surface of the white clay after you are done to remove any color tint.
Once you have the eyes done, squinch the nose area just a little bit to get a grumpy look. Then roll a tiny red cone, and affix it to the back of the head, using the flat-tipped tool to smooth the edges of the cone onto the head and get rid of the seam where the two meet. Bend and pinch the tail of the Deadpool mask as per the original image, and use the flat-tipped tool to make tiny “wrinkles” in the tail of the mask.
Hey, look! You have a Deadpool head! Hooray! But don’t forget the excellent crowning touch, i.e. the little dart. Roll a piece of brown clay out into a thin snake, and cut to the size of the dart handle. Make another little snake of blue, wrap it around one end of the brown in a circle, cut to size, and use the flat-tipped tool to smooth the blue onto Deadpool’s grumpy little forehead until it looks slanted like a suction cup dart. Pro tip: to stop the dart handle from drooping, put a little extra blue or brown on the underside of the dart to support the handle.
Now, put the head aside and move on to the body. For Deadpool, I chose to make the whole body out of one solid red piece of clay. Pro tip: For larger objects or complex shapes, you can also shape aluminum foil into a relatively smooth core for the object, to save clay and/or make the sculpture stronger. You can then roll out a thin sheet of clay, cut it as needed, and mold it around the foil like a skin, smoothing it with tools and fingers afterwards.
For the body, start with shaping Deadpool’s round tummy, and then shape the legs and feet, and then body and arms. Once you have the basic shape to your liking, roll out a thin sheet of black to use for the markings on his uniform and for his belt. For the uniform, you can cut several shapes with the knife tool and then fit them together and smooth them into one piece on each side of his body. I cut five shapes for each side: the front and back strips that also jut out a little near the top, a strip for around the top of each arm, a small piece to go on each arm where the black goes further down, and a piece for under the arm to connect the front and back strips. You can always cut less shapes if you want to.
After smoothing these into the uniform, roll a thin black snake to go around each wrist, and a thin silver snake for his zipper, and attach these. To make the zipper tab, you can form a tiny ball of silver into a little rectangle using, e.g., the flat of a knife blade and your flat-tipped shaping tool simultaneously on opposite sides of the shape. Once you have a flat little rectangle, attach it to the top of the zipper line, and use the tool that rounds to a point (or a toothpick) to make a little indent for the tab “hole.”
Now you can go back to your black sheet of clay and cut a long thin strip for the belt, smoothing it together in the front where the buckle will be. Finish up with the four brown pouches (made like the zipper tab, and using the flat-tipped tool for the crease of each pouch “flap”) and a little light purple oval for the belt buckle.
Your final step will be to attach the body to the head. Once you’ve lined up where you want the head and body to join, you can cut a short piece of wire and insert it in the top of the body and bottom of the head. Before attaching the head, knead a small piece of red clay and shape it around the wire in the body; that way when you join the two, they will also be held together by clay. Finally, use more red clay to fill in the cracks between body and head, and smooth those together until the seams disappear. And voila! You have a little Deadpool.
Now, follow the baking instructions (and keep an eye on the light clay colors on your Deadpool to ensure he’s not baking too long – if he is they will begin to turn brown, like a marshmallow would). I recommend baking your clay in a glass dish.
When the bake time is up, take him out very carefully, and let him cool completely before touching him. Pro tip: For some reason white doesn’t always bake as brightly as you might like. If you see that your whites are dull or translucent after baking, you can always use paint on your figure to brighten him up; and also, there are clay glazes available if you ever want to make a shiny critter. And now, your tiny Deadpool is done! And you can sit him up somewhere and enjoy your awesome handiwork every day! Hooray!
Good luck with your tiny creations, and until next time, Servo Lectio!
Disney television animation has slowly but surely been expanding its stable of decidedly “Non-Disneyish” series. From Phineas and Ferb to Gravity Falls, there’s a rising tide of irreverent and wacky series that bring a breath of fresh air to the various Disney cable channels. Their latest show seems much more like a 90s Warner Brothers show, and it comes by that honestly, being executive produced by Tom Ruegger, one of the gifted madmen behind Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.
The 7D is a new take on the Seven Dwarfs, with no Snow White in sight. The band of bitsy brothers reside in Jollywood, a starter-level enchanted kingdom ruled by the daffy Queen Delightful (Leigh-Allyn Baker) with the assistance of her aide de camp, Lord Starchbottom (Freakazoid!‘s Paul Rugg, who’s also writing for the show). When crisis looms, she calls on the 7D, who hie hither hastily from the gem mine to provide assistance in their own madcap fashion.
The voice cast for the show is an all-star list. Folks like Maurice LaMarche, Billy West, Kevin Michael Richadson and Bill Farmer (the current voice of Goofy) voice the dwarfs, with guest stars like Whoopi Goldberg as the Magic Mirror and Jay Leno as the crystal ball. In her first but very successful foray into voice work, Kelly Osbourne plays Hildy Gloom, a beginner baddie whose plan is to take over Jollywood to help pad her fledgling resume.
The names are all that remain from their original appearance – this team of tiny titans are all action, with the adventures and craziness running hot and heavy as they combat Hildy and her new husband Grim (played by Jess “Wakko Warner” Harnell). The show is aimed at the young tween audience, but as was true of Ruegger’s past creations, there’s plenty of comedy to keep the adults happy as well.
The 7D premieres Monday, July 7th at 10AM on Disney XD.
Color palette tutorial time!
This is by no means the Only Way To Pick Colors—it’s just a relatively-simple method I use sometimes. I’ve found it works pretty well, almost regardless of what colors you pick…
“Thus, we must realize that October 21, 2011 will be the final day of this earth’s existence.” – Harold Camping, July 19, 1921 – December 15, 2013. American Christian Radio, Author, and Broadcaster.
Wow. That was dark and nihilistic. Right up my alley.
I’m talking about The Leftovers, which premiered last Sunday. Based on the 2011 book by Tom Perotta, who co-created the television series with Damon Lindelof, The Leftovers is a spin on the evangelical Christian belief in the Rapture, an event in which all those who are true believers in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the Messiah will be taken from Earth to be with Him in Heaven and which will signal the beginning of the final battle between Jesus Christ and Satan, i.e. the Anti-Christ, in the climatic Apocalypse, after which the victorious Jesus will rule over an Eden-esque Earth for a millennium. (Let me know if this nice Jewish girl got it wrong, okay?)
However, unlike the Left Behind series by Tom LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, in which the authors follows the script(ure) of evangelical Christian belief, The Leftovers offers no easy answers as to why this global Rapture-like event has occurred.
The series opens on October 14th. No year is given. We are introduced to an unnamed woman in a laundromat, a typically mundane scene. She is washing her clothes and talking on the phone over the incessant crying of her baby – in fact, we only catch snatches of her conversation because of the screaming kid. A few moments later we watch the woman, still yapping on the phone – sheesh, it takes me about two hours or more to do the laundry in my laundromat, how the hell long has this woman been on the phone? – strap the baby’s car seat into the car and then get into the driver’s seat. She turns around once to distractedly attempt to quiet her child. The camera moves to the baby, who might be looking up at heaven, and back to the mom, still on the phone…and suddenly the car is quiet.
The baby is gone.
As Mama freaks out – and finally hangs up the damn phone – we also see a young boy yelling for his father (“Where’d you go, Dad?!”) as an empty shopping cart rolls into a parked car’s fender. In the background and a few blocks away we see a (driverless) car slam into another as it speeds through a red light.
Three years later.
A man is running (for exercise, not escape) down a suburban street. He’s wearing headphones, and in an interesting commentary on television and radio punditry we hear analysts and experts and other so-called “authorities” talking about the event, not just on the runner’s headphones, but from a variety of sources. Two percent, approximately 144 million people, disappeared on that day, and everyone is trying to explain it.
Alien abductions? A God-driven event? Well, that may explain the Pope, but Gary Busey? Jennifer Lopez, Shaquille O’Neal and Anthony Bourdain are also among the celebrities vanished into thin air. (No mention of the Kardashians, though. We couldn’t be that lucky.) And if it’s about good people having been taken, then why a child beater?
And of course there’s a televised Congressional investigation with scientists and religious experts babbling on with their respective theories.
But nobody knows nothing. Except that I’m fairly certain that the cable news channels are having a field day with this. CNN and the Malaysian plane disappearance, anyone?
The man, Kevin Garvey, is the police chief of a small suburban town somewhere in New York. He’s played by Justin Theroux – of whom I knew nothing about except that he’s been stringing Jennifer Aniston along for what seems like a century, thanks to my tabloid reading while waiting on the checkout line at Stop-and-Shop. Now I know that’s he’s incredibly hot and very good at playing morose and confused, and sees visions of stags. Stuffed stags. Live stags. Run-over stags. Being torn to pieces by wild dogs stags.
About 100 people of his town disappeared in the “rapturous” experience. As the hour progressed we watch and learn how it has affected the “leftovers,” and, by extension, the rest of the remaining population of the earth.
Of course there are cults. One, called the Great Remnant, doesn’t talk, encourages cigarette smoking (“Don’t Waste Your Breath” is one of their mottos), and dresses in white, as if they are on the White Team during Color War at my summer camp. (Kevin’s wife, Laurie, whom we assumed had been whisked off to Never-Never land, is a member of the Great Remnant.) Another cult, one that has not yet been given a name, appears to be ensconced in a survivalist camp of the Neo-Nazi / White Power type somewhere in the deserts of America, although this cult is apparently okay with race, since there is a hot, young Asian chick in a bikini lounging around the camp’s pool as if it’s a luxury hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona. I also know this cult isn’t racist because it’s led by a muscularly endowed black man whose name is Wayne and whom is apparently the “know-it-all” religious leader of this cult. We discover that the police chief’s son, Tom, also belongs and has a thing for the hot young Asian chick, as does Big Kahuna Wayne, who has “plans” for her.
Teenagers are still going to school, but it’s a shadowbox routine, as their real life is taken up with smoking weed, drinking alcohol, fucking and pushing life to its limits – including erotic asphyxiation, which the chief’s daughter, Jill (played by Margaret Qualley, who has amazing “Elizabeth Taylor” black eyebrows and blue eyes) partakes in with some loser named Max. (It seems that Max is dead as we see Jill walk out of the bedroom after their, uh, session.)
I know that I’ve been kind of flip in talking about The Leftovers, but in actuality I’m very intrigued. I think that, in just this one premier episode, the creative team has shed a lot of hokey nonsense about a mass disappearance of humanity (I’m sorry, those of you who are Christian evangelicals, but there is nothing called the Rapture in either the Old Testament or the New – it was dreamed up by a British minister, John Nelson Darby, sometime in the 1830s after one of his parishioners claimed to have had a vision of Christ’s return) and instead has captured the crazy ways that humanity would actually deal with it.
And I do mean crazy.
None of these characters is sane. Nor should they be. Unexplained phenomena is fun to talk about and to base TV shows on – I watch my fair portion of Ancient Aliens and Ghosthunters – but if two percent of the population of the Earth just suddenly disappeared one day, the frenetic behaviors, the fanatical actions, the extreme activities of the “leftovers” would surely rate new chapters in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) of the American Psychiatric Association – that is, if there were any sane shrinks left, much less a professional association.
I think we’re in for a fun – and thought provoking – ride.
Photographer Cambridge Jones has collaborated with The Story Museum for its latest exhibition which celebrates childhood story heroes and sees well-known authors dress up as their favorite literary characters. Neil Gaiman chose the Badger from “The Wind in The Willows.”
We would be very interested to see him as the Badger from Madison, Wisconsin.
Which would you trust more – what a person says or what a person does? Almost anyone with life experience would say they’d trust what a person does more. Mind you, although we know better we often go with what a person says: con men, politicians and advertisers (that may be redundant) count on that.
It’s what we do with story – character is built upon choices, good or bad, which the individual makes. That’s why the writer puts them in difficult and even life-threatening situations. My late wife Kim used to ask me how I might react in a given situation. My response invariably was, “I don’t know. Ask me when I get there.” I know how I’d like to think I would act but the reality is, until faced with the given situation, I don’t really know. Nobody does.
I don’t believe it when someone says “I could never kill someone.” I think Gandhi was capable of killing given certain circumstances. The likelihood of him killing might be small, but he was human and any human is capable of the act. It’s part of our common humanity; a dark side of it, I grant you, but still part of it.
It’s not only big choices that we make that proclaim who we are (or who a character is); it’s the small ones as well. The artist in a graphic narrative, for example, must decide what a given character might wear. What we choose to wear projects how we want to present ourselves.
“Hold on there, Horsestrangler,” some of you might be saying. “I don’t care what I wear. I just throw something – possibly clean – on and go.” (Guys are more likely to say this than gals who, as usual, know better.) My response is doing so is a choice of its own and makes it own statement; it says “I don’t think that sort of thing is important. It’s shallow and trivial and doesn’t represent who I am.”
Except it does. It rejects certain values and/or it says you want to look like everyone else and blend in. Do you dress for a job interview the same way you dress for hanging with your homies? If so, good luck getting the job. If you’re going on a date with someone for the first time, how do you dress? How do you present yourself? If you had to go to a funeral, what would you choose to wear?
Different characters in comics will dress differently. Peter Parker shouldn’t dress like Tony Stark. Clark Kent shouldn’t dress like Bruce Wayne. I remember that in an early episode of The Sopranos, the producers dressed Tony in shorts and flip-flops for a backyard party to suggest more strongly the underlying suburban setting. Advisers to the show said that Tony would never dress like that – and he never did again.
Why do people wear clothing emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo or the name of their favorite sports team and turn themselves into walking billboards for that product? Because it suggests a certain tribal affiliation the same way that inner city gangs wear certain colors. It proclaims us and marks us as part of a greater, possibly stronger, whole. At least, we may think it does.
That’s a choice that people make and it’s something that writer and artists working in the graphic medium have to keep in mind. There are hundreds, thousands, of ways of communicating to the reader who this character is, what the setting is, what’s at stake and what’s going on.
Are there exceptions to this rule? Yep. Sure are. There are situations when you have no choice to make. You can’t choose which shoes to wear when you can’t afford any shoes. Choice exists only if there is more than one thing from which to choose. Otherwise, you have to take what is given.
There is no freedom where there is no freedom of choice.
Now that the Big Two are deep into their mandatory summer crossovers – as opposed to their mandatory winter crossovers, their mandatory spring crossovers, and their mandatory fall crossovers – I can’t tell the players without a scorecard.
