Notes from my attic #4

I was a huge fan of the Hulk. This was mainly because of the TV series, The Incredible Hulk, which ran from 1978 to 1982. I was old enough to be able to understand what was going on, and young enough to still be impressed by a spray-painted bodybuilder wearing a Beatle wig. I used to imitate that typical slow-motion run he always did, upturning all furniture in my way, and to his dying day, my grandfather called me “Hulk”. I must have been a very entertaining kid.

The local ice cream vendor sold ‘Hulk ice’. This dubious, possibly unlicensed product consisted of two colors: not green and purple, as you’d expect, but green and white. It had such a bizarre, unreal taste that, even now, I’m still able to read in the dark without the need of a light. But the association with the Hulk made it cool, so I had to have it each time we passed the vendor. And I mean cool as in dandy.

Then there were the toys. I fondly remember a Corgi Hulk car, which was part of a slightly bigger line:

Apart from the Hulk terrain car, also in my possession were the Spiderbuggy, as it was called, and the Batmobile, which came with Batman and Robin figurines and little plastic missiles. I loved such little details, like the Spidey decal on the bonnet/hood, or the Batmobile’s front razor and plastic exhaust flame.

The “Supervan”, however, could not claim such love from me. It was quickly relegated to my private Hall Of Sorry Toys, where it joined, among other misfires, the Strawberry Shortcake figurine of the Purple Pie Man; the talking toy robot that could only utter German phrases and then swiftly died on me; and a Bespin Security Guard. The Supervan was quietly atrocious. Why would Superman need to drive a van anyway? Spider-Man in a jeep, that was pushing it, but maybe he was stuck in a desert and there weren’t any high buildings around to swing from. Superman in a van, however, that is just a disheartening sight. As if DC’s “Muhammed Ali vs Superman” fight hadn’t been terrible enough.

Superman reminds me of ice. Why, I do not know. Perhaps because of all those crystal cave shots in the 1978 movie? I owned a Superman Atari 2600 game, and the mere mention of it makes me think of thin, watery ice lollies. Possibly strawberry-flavored. Welcome to my world.

The Superman movie was pretty great, and I was sort of a fan. I saw it the other day though and it bored me a bit frankly; I found myself checking my phone way too often, like some guy whose wife’s expecting. Yet it’s lightyears better than Spider-Man’s live action outing of that period. If you’ve ever accidentally been exposed to Spider-Man Strikes Back, you’ll know what I mean. It’s a clueless guy running around on rooftops. It reminds me of those hideous YouTube videos of Spider-Man, Elsa, The Joker, and so forth. What’s up with those videos anyway?

To my eternal regret, I lost that Corgi Hulk figurine. I lost the car too. I lost Spider-Man, the jeep and the green troll–probably buried them at a beach somewhere, because I was raised by wild dogs and always buried my toys when I had the chance. I lost Batman, Robin, and the Batmobile. But I still have that Supervan. In collector’s terms, I guess it would be described as being in “near-mint condition”. Simply because I hated it, it’s worth money now. Hate with an interest rate. There you go.

I’m supposed to add a video from my YouTube channel Tales from Weirdland in every post, so I guess I’m going with Escape from the Planet of the Robot Zombies, which is a nod to old Atari 2600 games. In a later entry, I’ll provide background information on that video.

Notes from my attic #2

Let’s look at some more childhood drawings I found, I know you love those.

That’s of the very first comics I made, if not the first. Ambitiously presented in a deluxe edition here, it’s Little Captain and Sailor, the imaginatively named comic about a little captain and his bud, a sailor. Any similarity to Asterix & Obelix or Popeye is completely coincidental. This is what the inside of the booklet looks like:

I love how the last picture of the last panel dryly states, “It all ended well.” That’s how the big boys do that. End of story. No lollygagging.

The reason I post these, is basically because nothing has changed in my life. For my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland, I still make stuff like this. The Lord He Knoweth why artists do what they do. When I was a kid, I made comics nobody read but me, yet I kept making them; now, as an adult, I make animated videos that hardly anyone sees but me. There’s a light that never goes out.

So, Little Captain and Sailor had a satisfying ending. “It all ended well.” This was a rarity, as I often prematurely abandoned whatever I worked on. I have crates and crates of unfinished comics–once wildly ambitious undertakings, masterpieces-to-be, until real life events interfered or I simply lost interest. At one point, I wanted to create a comprehensive comic about the American Civil War. It’s likely I was inspired by a popular TV mini-series at the time, North and South (1985). But as usual, I started to bore myself, and the comic more or less sank under the weight of its own insanely informative text balloons.

Let’s take a look at some more aborted projects. Indiana Jones–of course I attempted an Indiana Jones comic at one point:

Or how about an Agatha Christie-like murder mystery:

And action-packed thing starring one Spike Jumpstone:

I think the red robot’s design was, eh, inspired by ED-209, the Robocop villain. Well, I don’t just think it, I’m actually pretty certain. The hero’s name, Spike Jumpstone, was a pun on Bruce Springsteen (“Spring” is Dutch for “Jump”, and “Steen” is Dutch for “Stone”). His look was inspired by the impossibly muscled Schwarzenegger figure in the old Amiga game, Total Recall. That design was so over the top, it had my interest. I noticed little things like that and mentally filed them away. (By the way, my brother and a friend cameo as soldiers in this panel. The friend of course had to die a gruesome death. We got a good laugh out of that one.)

Where did I find the strength to start yet another new comic after so many failed attempts? Amazing resilience, it can’t be anything else. Actually, that’s me still. Rigorous self-discipline, a religious sort of patience. I survive on willpower; and also, a kind of natural asceticism that prevents me from craving material things, success, popularity, wealth. There’s nothing wrong with the marginal, the unseen. We live in a world where the most famous celebrities are the ones that nobody has heard of. A world where there’s such a thing as “reality television”, that people watch believing it’s all unmediated truth, whereas it’s manipulation, trickery, freak show tactics. Our world sometimes seems like one global L.A., where every waitress dreams of stardom. Fame, though, is a monster, and most people who want to be famous, and then become famous, end up unhappy. Fame distorts your reality until it looks like a Van Gogh painting. The few people uninterested in that kind of life though–well, surely, you must be a hipster, too cool for this planet. I’ve always hated the term “hipster”. It’s really just shorthand for people that can’t be readily classified, that go their own way, and there’s something sinister to the term, isn’t there, a certain kind of anti-intellectualism, which seems to have made a comeback recently. “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I unlock my Browning.”

We live in dark times. But:

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

That aside.

Surely the most ambitious comic I ever attempted was one about a little ninja rodent called Rodney Rat. Any similarity to Rodney Rat and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is purely coincidental. I must have been 13. Also note the very obvious Star Wars influences. It doesn’t look that bad actually, now that I see it after all these years. I’ll just leave you with some of its pages, and then everything can be stored away again.

Until next time…

Behind the scenes of the making of: "Star Quest"

This post contains background information on the Star Quest video, which can be seen here on my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland:

It’s funny. As a kid, I wasn’t a big sci-fi fan. Or even a little sci-fi fan. There was Star Wars, sure–I loved Star Wars–but outside of that, nothing took my fancy. My brother, a real nerd, complete with jam jar glasses and an oversized digital watch that accurately showed all the moon phases, used to watch all the shows religiously: Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, V, and so forth; but me, I played with dolls and wanted a doll’s house for Christmas (which I got, thank you). My main memory of the 1979 Buck Rogers TV show basically is this hideous villain that appeared in one of the episodes: there was something wrong with him, his skin looked like mutant muesli. Boiled cancer. It made me lose all appetite for like, years.

He’s wearing his mask there–this is to protect you, reader. (I took that image from a blog, John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV.) Google “Varek”, “Buck Rogers”, if you dare.

But anyway, the sci-fi genre wasn’t really for me.

And yet, I find that it’s exactly that, those old sci-fi shows and comics, that evoke some of the strongest childhood memories. Possibly because they promised an exciting future, somewhere in the background. Or maybe it’s like the songs you don’t really pay attention to: those get stuck in your head.

(A song gets stuck in your head when your brain is trying to finish it, to resolve it, but it can’t. To counter this, play the song in its entirety.)

That’s me, left, being my autumnal self in the early 1980s. My big brother is lost in a comic and unaware of reality.

Star Quest is an homage to this era of silver spacesuits, capes, medallions, bushy sideburns, tin foil antennas, robots made of gold-painted hard latex, and control panels that were really disguised mixing desks. I’ve always been intrigued by the technology from that period: those robust, bulky designs, built to withstand a bomb explosion apparently. 1970s telephones look like pre-school toys, with big buttons and thick, coated armor. The enemy ship in SQ is like that: it’s plated, heavy, a shark-shaped fortress:

Grand Vizier Rylox, captain of this evil ship, originally looked like the image above. His appearance resembled that of a Noh demon, but as much as I liked the design, it clashed with the 70s theme, so I abandoned it before I got to coloring the face. As I was redesigning the character, I wanted Rylox to look as if his face could be a rubber mask, or as if he was wearing prosthetics maybe. That’s why he has limited mouth movements in the video: it’s not bad lip syncing, it’s simply that the actor can’t move his facial muscles too well.

When Captain Logan is being addressed by Rylox via hologram, he just sternly stands there, listening. As Rylox himself wasn’t much to look at, with his small, black mouth, I had to vary the camera positions occasionally to prevent the video from losing its rhythm. That resulted in this tricky shot. I was very pleased with Captain Logan’s look actually: it’s a blend of Lorne Greene and a non-specific Filmation character (I was thinking of Journey to the Center of the Earth). To get the right 1970s feel for the video, I watched clips of all the relevant shows, but found that once you try to copy that style, you quickly venture towards caricature, parody, like that Starsky & Hutch film with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson: it’s so SEVENTIES you actually forget it’s supposed to take place in the 1970s. A better approach is to just try to come up with a good design first, and then adjust it so that it fits within the fashion perimeters of that era. After all, in the 1970s, nobody looked or dressed like it was the 1970s.

That’s a fancy way of saying I more or less stole the outfits from the 1977 TV show, Space Academy.

The shark ship, before I forget, was originally supposed to be a city ship, a floating metropolis, housing thousands of people. (That’s inevitably in our future.) I thought it was a grand idea, until I discovered that a similar design features in Alien 2. So, exit city ship. The interior of the Starship Olympus was inspired, sort of, by E.T.’s ship.

Because I animate the old-fashioned way, by drawing everything on paper with pencil, I have to be economical when it comes to using paper. Hence these three heads crammed together on one sheet. The “Star Commander”, left, echoes 1970s Marvel comics: he doesn’t feature in the video itself but is simply there to suggest you’re watching a series. Also, he was the first character I started drawing when I set myself the task to go for a 1970s sci-fi theme.

The introductions were fun to do. Admiral Jericho is paired with Sola, in typical 1970s split-screen style. Again, these shots were intended to suggest you’re watching a running series instead of a brief one-off. I always think up small backstories for such glimpses, just for myself. Sola is being briefed by a Galruggian worker–”All cells have been replaced, lieutenant”–Jericho, in his lab, is testing out a new laser, making adjustments, taking notes.

Jim Booker and Captain Matt Logan. Matt, you say? Yes. My brother and I used to play with Lego Space when we were kids, and we had invented this show called Space Police. My main character in it was Jim Booker, my brother’s was Matt Logan, after, I suppose Matt Trakker (M.A.S.K.) and Wolverine. So my video is an homage to that too: that brief, golden flash that is your childhood.

Until next time!