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.
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