I am Aquaman

Check me out! I recently did a guest voice on my friend’s stop motion animation show

WTF, Star Wars?

I stumbled across this little gem on a comic site. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO OUR STAR WARS?

- Chewbacca looks like a dog. A shaggy dog. An ugly dog with eyes that are spread way too far apart. I’m not exactly sure what Chewbacca was supposed to represent in the films, if he was a bear/man hybrid or a dog/man hybrid or just a dude covered in hair, but he wasn’t supposed to look that much like a dog with huge hands. Oh, and his eyebrows are out of f-ing control and need to be slashed and burned.

- C3P0 looks, well, gay. A lot has been made of how the droids are gay for each other, mostly because of C3P0’s prissy fussing over R2-D2 and his whining when the two of them are separated. I didn’t believe this was the case for years. Droids? Gay? That’s illogical. Prissy? Sure. British? Sure. A tad effeminite? Sure. But gay? Nah, not those droids. But then I watched the movies again, all in a row, and holy shizzit, it leaps off the screen like Andy Dick riding a unicorn, a unicorn that’s wearing a pride shirt. This cover, showing the limp-wristed robot, just hammers another space nail in the space coffin.

- Han Solo doesn’t change his clothes. Ever.

- Luke is wearing…um…a cut-off shirt with buttons. With the collar popped. Nowadays an editor would stomp on that like Godzilla kills Tokyo, but in the 80’s I suspect that more people not involved with leather bars were wearing this and it slipped by. Oh, and his right thigh is twice as big as his left, making him some hobbling freak Jedi with hair that’s scarily like mine.

- What the hell is the one-legged insect thing on the right of the cover? Not in any Star Wars movie I’ve ever seen. Big cartoony eyes wouldn’t have gotten the thumbs up from Lucas, although when you see the cantina patrons in the Star Wars Christmas Special, you realize that a lot of lousy work was done on these films. Gone are the days of scary Darth Vader, the sadistic Emperor, and the intriguing Boba Fett. Say hello to…one-legged insect thing wearing khakis and striped shirt, with goose-neck microphone sticking out of his head and a bad toupee.

-Rabbits? RABBITS? Ha ha, there’s no need for space rabbits mixed into my Star Wars. They’re cute, but they don’t belong. Our heroes go from strangling Jabba the Hutt and slicing off their dad’s hands to herding fucking space rabbits? Why wasn’t this addressed in the prequels? Did everyone just forget about the adorable space rabbits?

-They streamlined R2-D2? Remember all those knobs and buttons on R2-D2? Well, they’re hard to draw, so sometimes artists just eliminate them and make R2 look like a giant white pill on stilts. Sometimes, they even do this on the cover.

- When did Lando Calrissian become the Cesar Romero of space? This is the one that had me scratching my head. What the hell happened, Billy Dee? What writer made you into a cigar-chomping guy in a cravat, airplane collar, and French cuffs that gets held by a wookie? Why are you wearing purple and green with black pants? Why is your hair blue? WHAT HAPPENED TO LANDO?

Luckily, this was the last issue. I can only imagine the horrors that would have followed if these mistakes were allowed to live.

More babies!

Two more pieces came in the mail today, so I’m blogging them!

They’re from Mark Buckingham’s run on Batman: Shadow of the Bat, specifically pages 16 and 18 of issue #78. It’s part of the “No Man’s Land” storyline, where the Mad Hatter goes through the remains of Gotham City to search for his hat collection. The cool part? They’re a series, page 16 and 17. They tell a short story!

New Baby!

I just purchased a nice new piece of comic art with the Mad Hatter for my walls. I do so much Mad Hatter blogging that I should make it a tag, but I don’t want to draw that much attention to the object of my obsession.

Here’s the piece:

It’s page 14 of Batman and the Outsiders #11, by Ryan Benjamin and Saleem Crawford. In order from top, Arkham Asylum, the Mad Hatter, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, and Mr. Zsasz. Some more pieces will be coming shortly.

Nobody’s Hero

Taking a break from Disney love, here is a cap that you can buy for only $10 on the streets of Brooklyn. Spidek-Man might be a big hero where you come from, hat, but around here he ain’t worth $10.

Another comic book anatomy lesson

Captain America, as you may have read, is a shining symbol of American patriotism, liberty, and can-do fighting spirit. Except in the 90’s, when he was a hulking mass of badly-drawn muscles and bright, circus-y colors. I give you, Captain America #431.

Oh, oh, oh, there is so much wrong with this cover, it hurts.

Ignoring the elephant in the room of anatomy for a second, I turn your attention to the coloring. A red, white, and blue character on top of a red, white, and blue background. You could have used different intensities to show contrast but no, both the Free Spirit and the flag come out looking like they’ve gone one too many rounds in the washing machine. Additionally, there is a ncie color error (right on the cover!) next to Free Spirit’s right boot. Yup, the sky is blue, but just for that one sliver.

The US flag doesn’t have enough stars on it. Look it again. Now look at an actual US flag:

How many stars does it have going up the left side? Yup. Someone just threw some stars on a flag without caring. To make matters worse, it doesn’t even have the right number of stripes (5 below the blue field as opposed to the correct number, 6). As we can see by the right side of the flag, there are only 9 stripes. We’re missing some stars and bars here.

Then we get to the meat n’ potatoes of the cover, Free Spirit herself.

Take a look at the part of her hair.

Real hair doesn’t part like that, mainly because most people’s scalps flatten off at the top of the skull, rather than extending up and to the right. If the back of her head was being blown off with a bullet or something, that might explain the weird rising on the back of her head, but I don’t think that’s the case. Hair doesn’t work that way.

For that matter, neither do breasts. Without the aid of a bra, those gentlemen should not be positioned the way that they are. One seems to be ascending, the other descending. Neither looks natural for a woman standing still on a chimney.

“Standing,” being the operative word there. There really is very little of this oddly-shaped woman actually touching the chimney. She’s on there by a tip of a toe and (presumably) some fingers. You have to wonder what the hell happened to her spine? because she seems to have an extra-flexible vertebra that allows her to actual bend 90 degrees apart from her hips. For her to be in this position, she would have to have a completely hourglass figure, and I mean a waist as skinny as the middle of an hourglass with shoulders and hips as wide as the ends of an hourglass. You can imagine it once you see her butt. Her hips are just too tall to be human hips. Whereas normal human beings have hips in a general oblong, rectangular shape, Free Spirit has hers in sort of a square.

Now the legs. NO NO NO. BAD. NO. DO NOT TOUCH. Each leg is an alphabet of woe. Her right leg (on our left), extends from the groin (the lower groin, without getting into female anatomy parts), and not from the hip socket. In fact, the hip socket is a good three inches above where the leg extends from. Her left leg (on our right), WTF? This girl is shown head-on and we suddenly get a leg in full profile. What this means is: SOMEONE BROKE HER LEG OFF AT THE HIP AND IT’S JUST HANGING THERE, A VICTIM OF GRAVITY. It even looks like the foot is turning inwards, which means that this superheroine is 100% pigeon-toed.

On second look, Free Spirit seems to have an extra joint in her hips. Bear with me now. In humans, the hips begin to get wider because there is a ball joint protruding from the pelvis. In illustration:

The femur in the cover does seem to have that ball joint, and you can see the beginning of the slope forming where the lower scarf-thing begins. Then the femur is rudely broken a few inches down at an almost 90 degree angle. To add insult to injury, the left calf is longer than the femur. BAD. NO. FAIL.

And this was the COVER to the issue! This is the thing that would have gone through the most quality control since this was what was being used to sell the book! Printing errors, anatomical errors, and a flag that is obviously not of our country…was editorial having a sick day when this went through? Sadly, yes, I could do a whole series of these anatomy lessons with the output of the later Captain America series.

Is this the next sentinel of liberty? God, I hope not. (She wasn’t)

Mad Spanish

I was doing an eBay search today for, what else, The Mad Hatter, and I came across this gem from South of the Border:

Now, I already have two copies of this issue, so I don’t think I’ll buy the third, but what caught my eye was that it was in Spanish. And that “The Mad Hatter” in Spanish is simply, “El Sombrerero Loco.” That’s…pretty much what I would have come up with on my own if you had told me, “YOU! Using your limited knowledge of Spanish, gleaned from one semester of Spanish 1 in high school, Speedy Gonzales cartoons, and Spanish ads on the subway, WHAT IS THE MAD HATTER’S NAME IN SPANISH!?!”

El Sombrerero Loco. It still has a little flavor to it, but just doesn’t do it for me.

Another anatomy lesson

I wish I could draw. Seriously, I wish I could put pen to paper and come up with an amazing figure drawing right off the top of my head. That way I could whip out my sketchpad, run through a couple of sketches, and then throw them up on eBay (and yes, I mean “throw up” in many different ways) for cash.

See, I collect original comic art, whether it be original pages or artist sketches, and eBay is a pretty good place to see what’s available. But for every great page from Action Comics, there’s going to be numerous sketch cards of big breasted women drawn by someone who just like drawing big breasted women. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, they wear a costume, so it then becomes fetishizing a comic character into a comic character who possesses insane anatomy. Just today, in fact, I ran across a couple.

WARNING!

There’s going to be girls here with big boobies and I may have to talk frankly about them. It’s a family blog, but I figure I should warn you that I’m going to be talking about something that 50% of the population of the world has, but we’re not supposed to discuss in the US.

Let’s start out with someone simple. Power Girl. She’s a character who’s actually known for having large breasts, and that’s fine. It just takes that little extra effort to show her holding them, naked, while still wearing a cape. It’s what people want to see, the artist assumes. It’s going that extra mile to do a mediocre sketch of it then selling a print of it on eBay that makes it that much sexier.

Supergirl is…well, I’d have to be convinced that this is Supergirl, and not some underwear model that the artist sketched and then put a T-shirt on. You’d need a pretty long PowerPoint slide deck to convince me that the artist thought of Supergirl first, before he saw the underwear model.

White Queen? Really? This is the White Queen from X-Men and not a fantasy blonde from an artist with mommy issues? If you had asked me who this was, just by first look, I guarantee you that “White Queen” would not have been in my first 40 answers. Now that I look closer, she’s got the “X” logo, which I can almost guarantee is an afterthought. And not to be a continuity nerd, but when did White Queen ever look like this? When did she have boobs that you’d need a crane to lift? Oh, this is also a print, so more than 1 of them exist. For $8.50. If I was going to spend money on art, I’d make sure the eyes match up. It’s the little things that make a difference.

Remember that scene where Carrie-Anne Moss walked around topless in the Matrix sequels? You probably don’t, because you only saw those films once, in the theater, because you felt like you had to complete the series, even though you knew they wouldn’t be as good as the first one. I understand, I don’t remember a lot from those films either, since I just saw them that once, all those years ago. But I guarantee you she spent half the movie dressed like this, whichever one it was.

Wait, a quick google search says that I’m lying. This scene never happened.

Oh I get it now, the artists and the purchasers wish they could have sex with imaginary people, but they can’t, so they do these! Duh! I guess “sexy” means different things to different people, and I tend to like my women with correct anatomical proportions. This is supposed to be Mary Jane from the Spider-Man comics. How can you tell? She’s wearing a Spider-Man shirt. Like Mary Jane did so many times in the books. I assume that Kyra Sedgewick wears Kevin Bacon shirts all the time too. What cracks me up is that the seller claims that he has to sell some of his art and ” it breaks my heart to part with this piece.” Dude, any number of high school kids could draw this again for you.

This is supposed to be Jessica Rabbit. You know, from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Strangely, but trying to make her more sexy, he’s succeeded in making her absolutely hideous.

Phantom Lady, in the hands of an expert penciller, has the ability to look amazing. Sadly, that’s not what happened here, with her lopsided chest and strange insect eyes. The buy it now price is $10, but since it’s anonymous bidding, you get to keep a little of your pride.

So please, gentle readers, don’t go down this path and look for the 100’s of Wonder Women and Vampirellas that exist on the wilds of eBay. I did the looking so you didn’t have to. And artists? You wonder why you’re not hired to do more comic books? Just step back and reevaluate a bit. That’s all I’m sayin’.

The best a man can get

Something from a previous DragonCon that a friend stumbled across:

What’s sad about this picture is that I don’t think mankind can create a better Juggernaut costume. We all saw what happened with the X3 Juggernaut, he was soccer star Vinnie Jones in an ill-fitting muscle suit. Not as bad as this:

but bad enough. This has all the proper elements of Juggernaut, color included, which one-ups Vinnie’s costume. I can’t imagine how they would have done a realistic maroon costume for X3, but I assume it would look something like this. Minus the sweatpants.

And trust me, you want to stay out of this guy’s way, once he charges, there’s no escaping his deadly onslaught! Especially if he’s charging towards a table full of cheap comics and Buffy outtake DVDs. I’m (mostly) the Juggernaut, bitch!

Hatter, en Espanol

The Spanish Invasion came to New York! Five comic artists from Spain visited Midtown Comics in Manhattan this weekend and Mad Hatter sketches were procured! Sorry about the photo quality, I’m looking into getting a scanner but New York City seems to be sold out (even Circuit City, surprise).

Here’s Pere Perez’s (Army of Darkness) take on the Hatter.

This is Manuel Garcia’s (Checkmate, Mystique) version.

This is Fernando Dagnino’s (Batman and the Outsiders, Teen Titans) almost Disney-esque take on the Hatter.

Carlos Rodriguez (Batman and the Outsiders, Shadowhawk) takes a shot at the Hatter in a classic pose!

And Bit’s (Batman and the Outsiders, Nightwing) version looks…like him, oddly enough.

My cat, Science, however, did not much care about art and jumped on the Dagnino piece while I was photographing it. She’s not much of an art fan.