Superman has to deal with a deranged Batman in World’s Finest Comics #287. I read this one as a kid, and that image of a red-eyed, sweating Batman always stayed with me. I loved the wildness of it all; the way the swirling, exhausting mania is depicted.
How to draw Batman? Here are some model sheets from “Batman: The Animated Series”: head, cape, arms, and hands. With some 1970s “Super Friends” sheets by Alex Toth thrown in for good measure.
Classic Batman & Robin (and Superman and Wonder Woman) by Alex Toth. Model sheets for the 1970s Hanna-Barbera animated series, Super Friends and Challenge of the Super Friends.
“Dark Architect” Anton Furst’s atmospheric, labyrinthine designs for Batman (1989) always make me think of “Imaginary Prisons”, a series of 18th century etchings by Italian artist Piranesi:
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, theStrawberry Shortcakefigurine 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 aSupermanAtari 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 channelTales from Weirdlandin every post, so I guess I’m going withEscape 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.
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:
