Glow comics part two
I mentioned a few month ago, instead of handing out flyers for our GLOW event, I created a small comics with all of our information on the back! The first one was to introduce the character, but we also did pages to recap the days events!
And don’t forget, new Violent Blue tomorrow!
The Iron Man project part twelve
I’ve got it.
Remember last month how the mid section didn’t work out on my suit? The solution isn’t a long solid piece…no, what we’ll make is a sort of metal cage, using the existing bikini bottoms and abs.
The first thing we do is build up the back side, create something to anchor those new pieces we are creating.
Next we create a set of “ribs”. The cage to go around me. Enough space that it’ll, give a little but never really hit the top piece. Done over a red shirt it’ll all blend in and you won’t see the gaps so much.
Attached to the torso from the back and the briefs, we have our cage. The strips attach under the abs with velcro and are adjustable. Time for a test run.
Perfect. The last piece of the costume is in place! I spent the first few appearances just like this, no mask, just sunglasses and a goatee.
You’ll still see me pull it out for special occasions. I’m proud of it, but it’s horribly awkward to wear, and I have to have a handler when I do because it renders my hands useless!
I wonder what we’ll try next year?
Turkey Day marathon!
It’s happening again! Last year I had this streaming all day and I can’t wait to see the line up this year!
There are three main platforms to view the Turkey Day Marathon:
- At MST3KTurkeyDay.com. We are embedding a YouTube live stream on the page and a Twitter feed with the hashtag #MST3K so you can join in the social conversation
- On the MST3K Official YouTube channel. Our recently launched MST3K YouTube channel, where you can find annotated episodes and MST3K clips will be the streaming platform. You can also join the conversation there. Last year, we had over 32,000 comments, so be prepared for a day full of riffing!
- On Pluto.TV’s MST3K channel, Channel 400. If you haven’t heard of Pluto.TV, it’s fantastic. You can watch hundreds of live streaming channels with music, comedy, sports, news, entertainment, and more. Our friends at Pluto.TV will be streaming the Marathon on a new channel they are spinning up just for this special event.
The Adventures of Mr. Kidzpointe part eleven
Part eleven of The Adventures of Mr. Kidzpointe! This was originally done live…kind of. Mr. Kidzpoints parts were filmed and Mr. Badpointe was on stage reacting. At the end, Mr. Kidzpointe came out and chased him off the stage. We also shot this though, right around the same time so we could possibly bluescreen or split screen it for a DVD release. Here’s our kinda lost episode!
Sibling Rivalry
This another one of those movies I love to look at- full of stars before they were really big, at the start of their careers before their more iconic roles…
It stars Kirsty Alley, Bill Pullman, Carrie FIsher, Sam Elliot, Scott Backula, and Ed Oneil, not to mention being directed by Carl Reiner. It’s funny I really like Backula and O’Neil in most things, but not in their signature roles (Quantum Leap/Enterprise and Married With Children respectively), and I’ve always really love Kirsty Alley. Let’s see what IMDB has to say here:
Marjorie Turner is suffocating. Her younger sister Jeanine has no ambition, and her 8 year marriage to Harry puts her in constant competition with his family (all doctors), whom he is also competing for the affections of. One day, she snaps while food shopping, and beds a mysterious man, who die during the moment of passion. When she forgets her wallet, a vertical-blinds salesman finds it, and things get complicated from there…
It’s a smart farce, but really I wouldn’t expect anything less from Carl Riener who created so many of my favorite comedies. I got it on VHS for a buck but It is available on DVD and occasionally surfaces on Netflix. Definitely one to check out on rental first and very likely one you’ll want to own.
Taylor Swift (the Hive Queen)
Inspired by real events.
So a couple of days ago, a friend of mine posted on Facebook “If anyone is wondering what to get me for Christmas, Taylor Swift tickets would be a great idea.”
I replied “only if you bring a sniper rifle.” That’s just my sense of humor. If you’ve been following us for any of the last five years, you already know that, and she found it funny.
Quite quickly however, she started getting flooded with instant messages about how terrible that was, how evil and you just can’t say things like that. The messages ranged from upset to fairly hateful. It got so bad that pressure from her sycophantic friends led her to delete the entire thread (I would have been happy to just delete the comment, but I didn’t find out until it was all over), and that I find pretty appalling.
Anyone with any common sense knows that I don’t want anyone to put a bullet in Taylor Swift. Just her microphone. I find her music to be overdressed and derivative. “You belong with Me” which I think may be her best song, is clearly influenced heavily by Saving Jane’s “Girl Next Door”.
Speaking of the “girl next door”, this is perhaps my biggest bone of contention with Swift. I don’t quite understand how she’s managed to sell it to so many people, but this girl next door, this America’s sweetheart persona that she and her producers have so meticulously crafted infuriates me. Swift comes from money. She was born rich and has never know the “girl next door” life. She’s never been homely or ignored. She’s never worked at Bob Evans just so she could pay for her prom dress or driven that beat up chevy to the beach with her friends. I realize an album about rich pretty white girl problems (“out of Pumpkin spice lattes at Starbuck” or “only two guys chasing me instead of three”) probably wouldn’t sell, but at least it would be honest. I could respect that.
One last word to those followers of Taylor Swift that were so appalled I made a joke about her and think that I’m so evil because of it – believe me when I tell you, she’s not nearly concerned about YOUR welfare as you are about hers. There are much better deities far more worthy of your worship.
Thank you Jerry Marien
So who exactly is Jerry Marin? He’s actually one of the few surviving Munchkins for the Wizard of OZ and appears as one of the Lollipop guild.
But I figure he sees OZ stuff every day of his life and I wanted to send him something different – so I got this poster from a BENT film called “Little Cigars” (I mentioned seeing it last year at Cinema Wasteland) which hI hope to get Felix Silla on as well. It’s about a gang of little people- a GANG gan – thieves and con men. So cool to have this poster signed by a legend like Jerry!
Underworld
“Where the sidewalk ends, their story begins….”
Can I just say, DC used to have the absolute BEST house ads? The mid 80’s was a time for a lot of prestige projects, things like Sonic Disrupters, Skreemer, The Shadow, and all of these had great ads in the pages of mainstream books like Superman and they just made me want to read this stuff.
I first encountered Underworld in one of those ads, but never got my hands on a copy until I was an adult. Truth is, it’s a fairly standard cop drama, but that’s not a bad thing. it made it stand out in the really superhero filled era of the Silver or Bronze age.
There’s meant to be a serious undertone here, that this is all symbolic and going on in the author’s head, but the connection is never really developed or thought out well enough, and that’s okay. Cool cop drama works even if it never reaches the serious level of drama hinted at by those spectacular covers (which I imagine were done separately, possibly even before the series was written, like the Deadshot covers), and you spend the entire series rooting for them to grab that Midnight racer guy.
Grab it if you see it. I got mine as a bagged collection, and that worked perfectly. If I’d had to track these down individually I may not have made it….
Akron Comicon 2014
I’m a little beat from this weekend. That’s how I can tell I had a good time…
Akron Comicon is really one of the events the comic world in northeast Ohio revolves around, on the opposite side of the year as Free Comic Book Day. There are other cons out there, but none like Akron (at least not since Wizard World absorbed Mid-Ohio Con). It’s big enough to draw some truly quality guests, but also small enough that I can stand and talk to those guests.
This year saw the return of Gerry Conway, and I had that copy of Tomb of Dracula I grabbed at Monster Bash. Eight year old Maddie has been digging that volume. I mentioned to her that the writer of Tomb of Dracula was going to be there and she replied “Clearly I’m going to need to speak to him!”
I asked him about why he had such a short run on Tomb, and he explained he was a kind of go-to guy at that time for this kind of stuff. He’d get series that they wanted to start off and see how they did then hand them off to someone else. He also reminisced fondly about the Heroes for Hunger book, that it was one of those great moment when every really worked well together.
I was seriously excited to meet Allan Bellman and grabbed a couple of his prints (he’s selling these things 2 for 25. That’s an outright steal for a golden age artist!). Joe Rubinstien was fun to talk to, pointing out as he signed my Heroes for Hunger comic that he was inking over Kubert there – one of only six people to do so.
There was a great Batman panel moderated by Mike W. Barr, featuring Graham Nolan and Joe Staton. Some interesting opinions though not a lot of hard information.
I love the Quaker Station. I always have and was thrilled that it was the venue last year. I’m glad the con stayed (there was talk earlier in the year about moving to the John S. Knight center). To accommodate the crowds, they expanded to two days and I was there both days, with a different daughter in tow each day.
Maddie seems to be more into this stuff than Lydia, and loves the shopping and meeting people. Lydia is a little more shy, and she’s more interested in shopping for other people (bringing home gifts for both her mother and Maddie) and lassoing people with her Wonder Woman rope – something I admit I encourage. Maddie is fascinated by the art, but she doesn’t buy a lot of it – Lydia on the other hand does. Maddie actually got Lydia a cute little Tangled sketch from RAK Graphics. I thought it was the perfect gift.
There were some great costumes this year, not the least of which was the little girl in the Little Tykes Ecto-1 and the giant Captain Eyeball. Lydia took third place in her division of the costume contest winning some amazing books including a Marvel Adventures autographed by Marc Sumerack.
We also headed over to see Joe Staton. Both of the girls love Scooby Doo and he was nice enough to sign Scooby books to both of them, along with chatting for a few minuets with them. I really do try to encourage them to talk to the artists, it’s an opportunity I’d have loved at their age. Heck, it’s an opportunity I still love.
Mike Barr and Tony Isabella are both regulars at this con, and I’ve always loved their Star Trek stuff for DC. Tony signed not only my vampire tales trade but his Redjack series for DC. I asked about the inspiration there and he explained that Wolf in the Fold was his favorite TOS episode and when DC approached him to write Star Trek, this was what he pitched. He also mentioned that it was originally supposed to be dedicated to Robert Bloch (who wrote that TOS episode). Paramount came in and nixed the idea, for fear they may need to pay him some sort of residuals or royalty from the original idea. It just so happened that Tony had worked with Bloch in the past and knew him personally, so he sent him a couple of copies along with a note about what had happened just in case he was owed a payment!
I had found a few issues of DS9 from Malibu that I hadn’t realized Mike had written. We talked a little about the difference in writing this and writing TOS. He was in on the series VERY early and there wasn’t a lot of DS9-specific history established yet and he remembered more than the usual notices from paramount that this or that needed to be changed. I had one issue that had his name on the cover even though he hadn’t worked on it. I asked him to sign it anyhow because it was a really cool mistake.
Dirk Manning was his normal personable self, I seem to run into him a lot on the con circuit, especially since I just saw him at the Wasteland wedding.
I came home with a bunch of swag, plundering the fifty cent bins and finally getting that Star Sapphire ring for Maddie as well as a Yellow Lantern ring for myself.
I know Wizard World is out there. I know they are coming to Cleveland. I don’t care. I don’t do those shows and quite frankly fifty dollars just to get in the door is unconscionable. Akron is my favorite comic con out there and they just get better every year. I’ve sen some of the guests coming next year and I can’t wait!
That’s it for this year, it’s the last con of the year, and it’s time for us to slow down here as we head into the holidays. There’s new Violent Blue up today and we’ll be back here later this week with a review of Big Hero 6! Stay tuned!
Akron Comicon this weekend!
I’ve been to Akron Comicon every year since it began and it only gets bigger and better every year. This year Gerry Conway is returning and with him comes Allen Bellman, Ron Frenz, Joe Rubenstien, Joe Staton, and Jose Delblo, along with Mike Barr, Tony Isabella, Mike Witherby and Tom Batuick, and a bunch more that I’m not remembering. I have a STACK of comics pulled just waiting to be signed along with costumes ready to go.
Seriously, this is a great show, and unlike so many other comic cons out there, it’s COMPLETLY COMIC FOCUSED! no media guests, just artists and writers and industry professionals.
I’ll be there both Saturday and Sunday with one of my daughters, and we’ll both be in costume. Saturday will be Groot and Wodner Woman, and Sunday will be Voltron and Star Sapphire! Come see us and say hi!
Lydia’s monster book
Lydia of course, knows that I like monsters. Lately she’s been creating books by folding a piece of paper in half and drawing in it. This is a monster book she created for me.
The Iron Man project part eleven
Time to give this chest piece a coat of paint! Things are finally starting to look right….
I added the center piece into the breastplate. I’d love for it to light up, but that may be an addition for a later time. Right now, I just want to get this done. When I tried it on I found the shoulderpads were actually bigger than i had anticipated. They fit, but not underneath the chestpiece. In fact, it ended up being easier to just mount them to the chestplate itself.
Speaking of things that don’t fit….crap.Remember that midsection I created?
It does not slide under the chest plate. It butts up against it. To make matters worse, it’s too tall – after all, I expected the top to over lap it, hide a portion of the top.It’s not going to work. Well, perhaps not all of it. I ripped the ab section out and glued it onto the metal underwear. It will slide under and perhaps I can attach some velcro to the underside to the breastplate.
It’s not the look I wanted, but there is some precedent for the whole “T” shape in Iron Man costuming, but it pushes me a lot further into comic look and further way from the movie look than I wanted to be.
Maybe I can fix it.
Argo City Comics 