Today is (obviously) Halloween, but we got the party started yesterday. In the afternoon, we took the kids to the annual Halloween Carnival at the neighborhood park, and Georgia was able to put on her full costume for the first time. Georgia has wanted to be a cat for Halloween this year since about five minutes after Halloween last year, and Allison has been working on making it for weeks. I think it turned out great, personally.
After the kids were off to bed, the grownups put on our costumes, and got ready for the costume party we were hosting. Sonrisa Trippe had spent all day working on the Tardis door, to go along with her Amy Pond costume, and I think it turned out amazingly well. Dean Trippe was Batman (naturally), and as for me and Allison…?
Allison makes a fetching Princess Leia, don’t you think?
As for me, I kept telling everyone I wasn’t dressed as Captain Kirk, I was dress as Captain Roberson, dammit.
But I wasn’t the only member of Starfleet in attendance. Robert Wilson IV and his wife Tiffany drove down from Dallas to join in the fun, though they’d opted for a more Old Skool look than my New Movie version. Still, we’re all one big happy Starfleet, as Khan said.
All in all, we had a fantastic time. Thanks to everyone who came! And today we’re finishing the decorating of the Halloween cookies, mutilating a pumpkin–erm, making a jack-o-lantern, that is–and going door to door begging for candy. What could be better than that?
Julian West has made a video for my old friend Chris Cannon’s “Night Falls,” a track off his album vine street, which you can download for FREE. Give it a listen, and then go check out the rest of the album.
So I give you, for the first time I think, Hulk the Druid (a celtic primeval force of nature), Captain Amerigo (from the New World), Thor himself, and an unknown mysterious clad-armored gladiator known as Iron Man . Tigether they are The AVENGERS, EARTH’s FIRST HEROES and they fight evils and undead armies. How does that sound?
My pal Jason Chalker, whose work I’ve praised before, has a fantastic Tron-related t-shirt design that’s up for voting over at Threadless. Go vote for it, already, so I can buy it as a shirt!
Over on the Bleeding Cool site, the cover and description of the long-awaited next installment of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century has been posted. Behold the awesome:
CHAPTER TWO takes place almost sixty years later in the psychedelic daze of Swinging London during 1968, a place where Tadukic Acid Diethylamide 26 is the drug of choice, and where different underworlds are starting to overlap dangerously to an accompaniment of sit-ins and sitars. The vicious gangster bosses of London’s East End find themselves brought into contact with a counter-culture underground of mystical and medicated flower-children, or amoral pop-stars on the edge of psychological disintegration and developing a taste for Satanism. Alerted to a threat concerning the same magic order that she and her colleagues were investigating during 1910, a thoroughly modern Mina Murray and her dwindling league of comrades attempt to navigate the perilous rapids of London’s hippy and criminal subculture, as well as the twilight world of its occultists. Starting to buckle from the pressures of the twentieth century and the weight of their own endless lives, Mina and her companions must nevertheless prevent the making of a Moonchild that might well turn out to be the antichrist.
And speaking of Thomas N. Perkins, he’s just released a new art book for the iPad and iPhone that’s available through the iTunes Apps store. There are details on Perkins’ blog, and speaking for myself I can say that I paid full price for it and thought it was worth every penny. Just jam-packed with awesome!
The video for Butch Walker and the Black Widows’ “Synthesizers,” in which Matthew McConaughey reprises his role as David Wooderson from “Dazed and Confused.” I like it.
The backgrounds for Secret Saturdays are fantastic. Here’s Jay Stephens talking about the look they were going for:
I really wanted a lot of solid blacks and gritty texture to stay on the screen, which is fairly abnormal these days, and I sent the crew a bunch of old Roy Crane scans to emphasize the ‘spotted blacks’. I think we’ve achieved a really nice comic-booky, updated Jonny Quest vibe with these.
Some of Jay Stephens’s character designs for Secret Saturdays. One of the most appealing things about the show is the look of it. You can see the Alex Toth in its DNA, but Jay’s unique style is always apparent. (All images from Jay Stephens’s blog.)
In the end, Cartoon Network picked up the show, now called The Secret Saturdays (though for a while there was a bit of a kerfuffle where the network wanted to call the show The Secret Adventures of Zack Saturday, but thankfully saner heads prevailed). Here’s the text of the original press release:
“THE SECRET SATURDAYS: Jay Stephens has created a new comedy/action series, in which Doc, Drew and Zak Saturday are a family of world-saving adventure scientists called The Secret Saturdays. Living in a hidden base, they are part of a network of scientists who protect against all the hidden and terrifying things in this world. To The Saturdays, ordinary folktales aren’t just legends — they are real-life mysteries and adventures. Traveling from the hot Gobi Desert to the icy Marianas Trench, they explore ancient temples and bottomless caves and tangle with twisted villains like the masked madman V.V. Argost and his half-human/half-giant spider.”
The networks weren’t interested in the funny animal version of CRYPTIDS, but they did express an interest in a version of the idea featuring human characters. Here’s Jay Stephens describing the second version of the pitch.
Now, I love a good adventure cartoon as much as the next guy, and I told them I thought I might be able to rework the pitch. I immediately went for a kind of Hanna-Barbera action show look from the mid-‘60’s… like Mighty Mightor, Space Ghost, Galaxy Trio, and especially Jonny Quest and the Herculoids. I absolutely love the work of Doug Wildey and Alex Toth… great monster drawings! So I drew up a bunch of creature sketches, and reconceived the team as human adventurers. The basic story was the same… our stars were Cryptid-friendly heroes who, instead of solving mysteries like Scooby-Doo, wanted to keep them a secret.
