Trailer for my YouTube channel, "Tales from Weirdland".

Behind the scenes of the making of: "Silex the Barbarian"

Since I’ve started doing animation, for some reason, I’ve taken a liking to old pulp comics and 1980s fantasy films on old, distorted VHS tapes. Cheap imitations of Tarzan and Conan, kings and queens of the jungle, fur bikinis, dark castles, green skulls, growling dinosaurs, giant spiders, rock tribes, desolate landscapes where the sun never rises. That’s what this video is about. I mixed it a bit with He-Man (it even features a nasty PSA at the end), and a Dutch comic called Storm, and branded it the “swords & steroids” genre. War, gore, glory and more.

I found it hard to came up with a name for my “Conan” figure at first. I liked “Rorak” OK, as it echoed the pulp genre, and I used that name for the work version, but then, as is often the case with me, a seemingly random childhood memory sprang up, like one of those Icelandic geysers. I suddenly had to think of an old ice cream brand from when I was a kid–it had a prehistoric theme and was called “Silex”, and in the ads this Silex, a powerful caveman, always performed some mean feat, wowing the kids with his might and inventive solutions to their problems.

(That’s not my own scan. I nicked it from a blog called “Mangerie”, a source of culinary information hitherto unknown to me.)

“Silex IJs”. Silex was later joined by a green humanoid dinosaur friend called “Hippopola”, who was equally strong and amiable. A kind of sugar-coated Gilgamesh and Enkidu, right. Yes, folks, inspiration can come from the deepest, weirdest depths sometimes. Inspiration is a lanternfish. My other main memory of Silex is a vending machine in the shape of him, which stood near the entrance of the sorriest amusement park my kid eyes had ever witnessed. It was a few years after the ice cream brand had been cancelled, and the machine just stood there, with a big, damaged smile, signifying nothing but the passage of time. What a way to end. I was a melancholic kid who noticed such things. Anyway, with my video I’ve properly restored this sacred name again. Silex, by the way, is also a form of groundstone, and in Latin, it “originally referred to any hard rock, although now it often refers specifically to flint” (Wikipedia). Hard rock: this is why you hear a big distorted guitar chord at the beginning of the video.

The main characters are Captain Eagle Man and Sola again (see the Captain Eagle Man video here: https://youtu.be/D508zthzZzc). I regard the characters that feature in my videos as actors, who can pop up in various roles and guises–they act, and can never die. My YouTube channel is like a Jacobean acting troupe, it’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men for the Internet Age. I’m their patron and director, and a part-time actor. Sola makes another appearance in Star Quest (https://youtu.be/aDNjVO0zYH0), and she’s also the troupe’s face, its mascot, if you will (but also if you won’t). In the very first animated video I attempted, she was an alien ballet dancer who teamed up with Enak the astronaut–Enak, the “first Eskimo in space”.

Not much of a ballet dancer there, is she? It’s still theatre though. Originally, for this video, Sola was going to have a cropped cut, but I changed my mind; her look kept reminding me of this girl in high school that I loathed, and once you make that association, it’s over, you have to think of something else. This pose was a nod to a Red Sonja comic cover, though I changed it so it suited my video. I like the fact that Sola takes centre stage here–she’s not a sidekick. To her, Silex is the sidekick.

This is from the “Cave of Hands” sequence. It’s under the Imperial Palace, which is never seen, but that could change in the future. My main intention for this video was not really to tell a story about Silex and Sola, but to tell of a story, of several stories, as this gave me the chance to do a sort of “showreel” of their past adventures. I’ve never really liked linear narratives much anyway, with a neat wrap-up or a punchline: I like “fractured” narratives, loose images like shards, draped in a themed atmosphere. The viewer is a visitor, a tourist, in a foreign country. You catch glimpses and get a feel of it.

For the aforementioned “showreel” sequence, I wanted to feature a range of different environments and foes, and obviously a hot steaming jungle had to be one of them. Various trope creatures were considered (ape, dinosaur, bird) before I settled on a snake, and then I decided I didn’t just want an ordinary snake, but a kind of Noh theatre snake: a nightmare snake. It lets out a demon scream.

The living colossus of Molokar was inspired by old Ray Harryhausen stop-motion creatures. Maybe we, in this computer age, aren’t wowed by those latex terrors as much as audiences were then, in the 1940s and 1950s, but they are still impressive, inventive and expertly crafted. As for this scene, it all goes back to David versus Goliath of course: the small, resourceful hero against the all-powerful giant. Silex has lost his sword here, so it’s up to Sola to battle the angry bronze titan. In my mind, the colossus makes peace with our heroes after this fight, and it all turns out to be a misunderstanding. Here is the original concept drawing:

Whenever I start a scene, I prefer to build up the background first, just compile it on the computer, adding bits here and there, moving the perspective. Once I’m satisfied,  I print the background plan, and draw the characters on an overlay sheet on top of it. Trade secrets, you know.

Obviously this is a nod to the ending of Conan the Barbarian, the Schwarzenegger film. “King Conan”. Very, very difficult to draw, it took me hours to get the pose and the mood right. But I desperately wanted this shot in the video. It’s strange: some of the relatively ordinary poses in this video were lifted from comics, but the more difficult ones, like this one or the shot at Cherisha the Valkyrian’s court, were painstakingly constructed from scratch with no source material. Mediocrity presents itself as outright weird in my universe.

A “costume test” for one of the final scenes. The outfit on the left looks a little like Marilyn Monroe’s 1954 wedding dress, which was probably on my mind when I designed this, as I’ve always liked it. It’s very classy, and stylish. That design didn’t make it though. When I took on the drawing on the right, I was thinking: Do I really want this? Do I want to be raunchy? But I thought it was funny, and it’s very true to the original pulp genre. The pose of course is Hamlet (but just the pose). By the way, the outfit that Sola wears throughout this video was inspired by Raquel Welch’s fur cloth in One Million Years B.C. I’ve never seen that film, but I liked the idea that her clothing is seemingly constructed from one skin. (I’m vehemently anti-fur, but this is all fiction and genre tropes.)

The poster art is by Tom Chantrell; you’ve probably seen the poster he designed for Star Wars (back when Star Wars was regarded as pulpy sci-fi fantasy and not a cinematic King James Bible).

For Ras Magulla’s throne room, I originally had planned something like this:

A royally megalomanic stair design: after you’ve climbed these steps, you truly feel you’ve reached heaven and are at the court of a deity. But it was murder to set up, and genocide to convey convincingly. Whatever I tried, it didn’t look right. Usually this is a sign: it means the drawing is resisting you. You’re wasting your time, your muse has something else in mind. So: discard the drawing and try, try again.

That’s it for Silex the Barbarian, for now. Until next time.

Behind the scenes of the making of: "Captain Eagle Man (Rogues Gallery Auditions)"

This post contains background information on the Captain Eagle Man (Rogues Gallery Auditions) video, which can be viewed here:

Superheroes. Superheroes, superheroes. Kids that like to draw, draw superheroes. Whenever I had invented a new one, I thought: “This could be the big one.” I was always eagerly leafing through nature encyclopedias with my little kid fingers, looking for potential totem animals. Bats were already taken. Spiders were taken. How about… Owls? Panda bears?

Panda Man, Owl-Men [sic], and Frogger (huh) are from the 1980s. I must have been seven or eight. Midknight is from 1992, and I crowned the momentous event that was his creation by adding the exact date, thus generously helping out future historians. None of the characters took flight of course, but combine those animal-themed heroes with 1992′s Midknight, and you can see where Captain Eagle Man (right) comes from.

One of my super-creations that had a longer life was Superdog. He was my Mickey Mouse. My main comic character. Dog by day, Superdog by night, he battled crime and solved pitiful spats with his neighbor by knocking him out:

I drew those panels when I was about five. I love that next-to-last image of him sitting at home, staring forlornly at the reader. He seems so down. With great power comes great depression.

Superdog’s nemesis, the neighbor in the comic above, was called Boris Bulldog (my, long time since I wrote down that name). I loved cooking up villains for Superdog: apart from Boris there was The White Sheet, a sort of evil mastermind; Chilli, a green sumo wrestler based on a character from a C64 computer game starring Bruce Lee; Godrepus, Superdog’s evil double (clever), and more. Supervillains make the story; they are the story. For Captain Eagle Man, I couldn’t stick to just one–I wanted a whole roster. I wanted to open up the floodgates. Anything I could think of. The very first villain we see in the video was inspired by the Green Goblin obviously. My main memory of the Green Goblin is Corgi’s “Spiderbuggy” toy, which I received for Christmas 1982: it came with a little plastic Green Goblin, and for a week or so it was my pride and joy. Then I lost it and forgot about it.

That’s the Phantom Cowboy, the second villain to step up. The initial design, left, seemed a little too cartoony, like one of the Daltons from the Lucky Lukeseries, so I redesigned him. On the right is the original pencil drawing of the character as he appears in the video.

That’s one of my favorite shots. I like the big transvestite character; she reminds me of Divine, the late actor/drag queen. She’s called ‘Mama Mu-Mu’ according to my notes, and she was actually inspired by an image of a Singaporean prostitute that I stumbled upon on Google (yes, stumbled upon, shut it). There’s also a hint of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wiz (1978) in there, a film that fascinates me (those dark, needle-like buildings, the empty streets, that strange, filtered evening light: it has the atmosphere of a nuclear fright dream). 

The character had various different hairstyle designs before I settled on the final one:

I stole Sola’s pose by the way. I used it as a guide at first, a template, but it ended up in the video virtually unchanged.

The Pit of Souls is similar to the Cave of Hands from the later “Silex the Barbarian” video, which also features Sola actually. It’s a trope, basically. Similar concepts appear in the 1965 Polanski film Repulsion and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), for example.

I’ve always liked the idea of a living environment, of material objects with souls, and locations that have an instinctive will to protect themselves and that set out traps for unsuspecting trespassers. Jim Henson was a genius at this sort of thing: he could breathe life into rocks, bananas, toasters, frying pans, whole news desks even.

Twin Peaks and The Muppet Show–where those two shows meet, my stuff appears. I was obsessed with Twin Peaks as a teen; I remember biking to school and thinking about it, mulling over it. So when I had to think of a series of colorful villains, creatures and mystery men for this video, it was inevitable that a Twin Peaks character would pop up somewhere. It could have been BOB, it could have been The Giant (”One and the same”), but I felt that the Man From Another Place fitted best. The brief scene as it stands is a homage to a show that greatly influenced me. Salute, David Lynch.

Captain Eagle Man and Sidekick Boy face their archenemy, Doctor Dragoon. At first, Doctor Dragoon looked like an albino lizard in cheap 1970s sci-fi clothing:

But I just didn’t like that design. All the while I kept thinking of the old Hanna-Barbera antagonist Dick Dastardly (as you do): his red and purple aviator outfit, the haughty manner, the waxed moustache. His image kept poking me, as if it wanted to force itself into my video somehow. I knew Dastardly mainly from reruns of Yogi’s Space Race, a dreary show that I watched as a kid before going to school in the morning, but he appeared often in Hanna-Barbera cartoons and even had his own show. Dastardly was a throwback to the typical silent film villain really: the evil banker, the scheming businessman, always threateningly waving mortgage papers in the air and tying the hero’s love interest to a railroad track–a character, actually, that I had nearly included in this scene:

I crossed out the lizard villain and, fine, decided to include Dick Dastardly, though my own version of him, with some Spring-heeled Jack as an added flavor. Once Dastardly entered my video, things took a more comical turn:

On the left is the original pencil drawing of Dragoon’s grand entrance, on the right is the lava splash animation that follows shortly afterwards. It’s basically a water splash of course, except it’s on threes, possibly even fours, not ones, to convey the feeling of a thick, dense substance (animator jargon there). The ripple is fat as honey.

At this point, I thought it’d be funny if Sidekick Boy remarked, “Well, that was the last thing I expected.” Captain Eagle Man would then say: “Nah. A herd of unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster, a yeti, all on the sunken continent of Atlantis, where Elvis is alive and well and king of the lizard people: that’s the last thing you expected.” But it didn’t work, it broke the rhythm of the scene, the natural flow. So I discarded it. The video’s final shot however is a remnant of this alternate ending:

I’m quite fond of Captain Eagle Man. When I picked up animation, I hadn’t really drawn for a long time, so when I got to this video all these characters came out, unleashed like the angelic beings in Raiders of the Lost Ark, finally freed from their cramped surroundings. It’s a very personal video. It takes me right back to those relatively carefree days when I was seven or so and sat at the dinner table, fervently drawing my superheroes:

That’s the end of this post. Until next time.