I put my thumb up Under the Red Hood

A couple of days ago, I was a special guest host at a press screening of the new Batman direct to DVD movie “Under the Red Hood”.

I didn’t actually work on this movie, but I’ve done enough other things with the Batman animated franchise to allow me to perform a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down my pants, for the press, and to play cheerleader for this film.  I also had to watch it a couple of times as part of the gig.

Well, I’d be playing cheerleader for this film whether they asked me or not.  It’s easily the best DC animated film since Return of the Joker, and in my top ten super-hero films of any kind.  It’s smart, beautifully directed by Brandon Vietti, with a quick pace and great emotional heart.  The action sequences are exciting, while at the same time, clear (I wish you could say the same for most big budget blockbusters).   There’s no fat in the plot, it’s all tasty, tasty meat in every scene.  There’s solid voice talent in the new cast,  including John (Bender) DiMaggio as Joker, Jensen (Supernatural) Ackles as Red Hood, Neil Patrick Harris (Dr. Horrible) as Nightwing, Bruce (Chris Pike of Star Trek) Greenwood as Batman, and Bruce Timm (WTF?) as the Riddler!  Wade Williams (from Prison Break) steals every scene he’s in, as the Black Mask.  So does NPH as Nightwing.

Neil Patrick Harris looks damn good in the Nightwing suit. I think he's been working his delts and pectorals.

This Batman fan was in hog heaven.   Go HERE if you want to see the trailer online.

The source material.

A couple of caveats: If you’re familiar with the Batman comics written by Judd Winnick (specifically his 2005 Red Hood stories) then you’ll know most of the twists and turns of the story, as the script (by Winnick himself) is faithful as hell to his original material (with bits and pieces from his new Red Hood series, and Starlin’s “Death in the Family” thrown into the mix).  But rather than feeling like a re-hash of familiar events, the script deftly streamlines many year’s worth of continuity, and packs it all into a neat little 80 minute thriller that’s a far more natural fit for the story.

Caveat Number Two: Don’t put the kiddies in front of the TV with this one.

This is the only pleasant view of Jason Todd's dead body in this movie. TRUST me.

In tone it’s far closer to the Chris Nolan Batman films than previous DC Direct titles.  The opening scene features a crowbar, some bones and some blood, and although it’s an animated sequence, it’s tough to watch.  This stuff isn’t added gratuitously (the first scene is integral to the plot), I’m just warning that animated don’t mean ALL AGES.

And to think I used to disapprove of the whole Red Hood story in the first place...

Now, where can I get a PROPER copy of the DVD (instead of my press screener)?  Apparently, it’s got DVD extras like crazy!  A bunch of BATMAN ADVENTURES episodes, tons of “making of” features, and an all new Jonah Hex animated adventure.  I WANT MY PROPER COPY!  I WANT MY PROPER COPY!

Ty the Guy OUT!

PS: I complained about the whole RED HOOD comic book storyline in an earlier post.  Go here to read it.    Clearly the movie makes it all better.

ANOTHER PS: Apparently, I wasn’t the only one at the screening who liked the film:  Here’s some positive reviews from  nerdgirlpinups, and here’s another at thisweekingeek.net, both seemed to enjoy this DVD and were nice enough to liberally quote me and my leaping enthusiasm.  Plus, I got to be BRIEFLY interviewed by one of the Naked News ladies, who also seemed to love the film.  Fortunately for all concerned, I retained my pants.

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Ty Templeton Ink!

I was talking to someone recently about inking a project for them, and to rummage up some sample inked pages, I did a Google search for the above words “Ty Templeton ink”.  It seemed so much quicker than digging through my own files.  The internet is my friend.

I got what I expected, a bunch of pages from my various inking jobs over the years that people had in their collections and have scanned and put online.  All fine.

But I didn’t expect to find this:

WOAH!

That’s my cover to Gotham Adventures #1…or a version of it…burned into someone’s arm with needles and pain and the oh boy, sweet glavin! The arm belongs to Craig Kandiko, and this and the other images I’m going to show you are taken from his MySpace site which you can find here.

Craig is a Batman fan.  A serious Batman fan, and he’s focused the meat and flesh of his fandom on the Gotham Adventures comic title as all of his tattoos are from covers of that series.    This is an ongoing project for Craig, as he’s added to the Batman Animated gallery on his legs and other arms as the years have gone by.  I’ll let you go to his site to see all his tattoos, some based on Bruce Timm, and some by Bob Smith –  but since this is MY blog, I’m showing you the two other tats he has with my artwork on his largest organ!

The Mr. Freeze is from Gotham Adventures #5. The Two Face is from a story I wrote, but it's drawn by Rick Burchett.

Gotham Adventures #5. Brrrrr.

This Penguin pose is from a set of T-Shirts I did with the villains as the subjects.

My Penguin is hiding there on his leg.

This isn’t the first time someone has tattooed my artwork onto their body.  I’ve been sent a couple of images of a Riddler tattoo that a girl put on her lower hip a few years ago, and another one that features a JOKER I drew that ended up on someone’s shoulder….and a friend of mine has a design between her shoulder blades that I designed for her.  These are all small, singular tattoos that take up just a bit of someone’s body, and I’m flattered to see someone wanted my drawing or my character on them for life.  Craig is clearly the biggest Batman Adventures fan on Earth from this level of dedication.

So Craig, I salute you, and feature you on my blog.  I’ll just say this, I often erase and redraw my figures while I’m working on them.  Next time, I’ll realize the importance to your very skin that I get every line right!

Ty the Guy

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Animated Harley and Ivy, sort of…

I know I should wait for Christmas, but I only just saw this today.  My friend Elise Archer (Harley Cosplayer Supreme) tweeted, or posted, or did whatevah one does with animated gifs, so I repost it here…with a thanks.

It’s the cover for a Christmas catalog I drew from about ten years ago.  (The only time I’ve ever actually drawn Harley Quinn for any publication, oddly enough) But it’s been animated much more recently than that.

Fun, what shows up online.

Ty the Guy

(Ty’s memory is shot–all the LDS he did in the 60s-–he’s drawn Harley a couple of times.  But this was the first!–kts)

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TY TEMPLETON’S IRONICALLY SELF-AWARE COMIC BOOK BONDAGE PARADE, part 2.

Bondage?  That’s where we are now?

I do six monthly posts about the rise of postmodernism as a result of new educational opportunities created by the second Industrial Revolution, and no one reads them.  I do an eleven day series about our collective struggle for a cultural soul in light of recent media consolidations and the blog gets thirty-five hits over those eleven days… But hogtie Lois Lane to a speeding truck with her thighs held open and 37,804 internet pervs find a way to my homepage.

But I’m no fool.  I understand the needs of the blog consumer, and I will accommodate with the content you heaving philistines so clearly demand.  Here is part two of…TY TEMPLETON’S IRONICALLY SELF-AWARE COMIC BOOK  BONDAGE PARADE.

I can't believe Marvel let me do this cover!

Both in the comments section, and in my email box, I was flooded with an estimated eight requests for Wonder Woman as my next subject.  Unfortunately, it proved nearly impossible to find images of the Amazon Princess in bondage, in either my comic collection or on the internet– even with the safe search off.  This screengrab from the Seventies WONDER WOMAN TV show was all I could find.

Those chains look uncomfortable. No wonder Nazis were considered rude.

morning

You’ll have to excuse me while I catch my breath after that much concentrated sarcasm.  Who here DIDN’T know that the ORIGINAL Princess Diana (Ms. Magazine’s Mascot) was THE poster girl for restraint fetishism for her entire career?  Her creator, Charles Moulton (aka Dr. William Moulton Marston, Phd in psychology from Harvard, and distinguished co-inventor of the lie-detector) was an outspoken bondage enthusiast who insisted in books and interviews that the world would be

noon

a more peaceful place if we all learned to sheepshank our loved ones.  This was before we knew that sort of thing was “weird” and he was still allowed to be photographed for glossy magazines and shop at local stores all through the forties and fifties. And if peace through mutual rope burns wasn’t enough for

night

Mr. and Mrs. America, the good doctor had two openly poly-amorous wives, each of whom bore him a couple of kids, and the whole sordid commune of anti-establishment love lived happily ever after.

Compared to Dr. Moulton,

she may look upset, but she still hasn't shouted her safe word.

Hugh Hefner was a pussy.

So finding images of Wonder Woman in bondage is about as hard as finding a closeted republican at a gay bar.  If you need to see shots of the chained up Amazon, grab your google and work your search engine, kids.  You’ll end up with enough drawings of Diana cattle-roped to a torpedo to wallpaper your sanctum sanctorum.

But in light of the double-mint twins marital arrangements that Dr. Willie had with the wives, this image (below) of two hot ladies RIDING THE MONSTER KANGAROO  does command attention, , but then, who hasn’t drawn two women riding the Monster Kangaroo?

Penis? What four legged penis?

Heck, riding the monster kangaroo is my regular phone-doodle, only I don’t draw the rollicking beast  with quite so phallic a body shape.

So it’s way too easy to go after the Amazon Princess, or the Phantom Lady, or even Robin and Bucky, the boy hostages.  No matter how much fun it is to draw a nicely restrained pale young boy wearing a domino mask, it’s just not “ART LAND” style to blog about the commonplace and mundane.

BATMAN is another story altogether.

I keep a sketch book.  All artists do.  It’s a place to warm up the  hands as we start our work day, like doing scales on a piano.  Sometimes the drawings are of two  headed nuns playing ice hockey, or equally silly images never meant to be shown to the public.  Sometimes I sketch ideas.  The following was never meant to be anything more than an image of how tough Batman was.  He can scare you pissless while still tied to a chair.

You want to see a tough guy? Find him some nails to eat.

This was just a doodle in a sketch book.  But I had an idea.  Could I do an entire issue where Batman is tied in a chair?  Where he doesn’t get out of the trap at all, and just SCARES the bad guys into giving up…?  That struck me as a fun challenge and I asked the editor if I could try it.  I was told “yes” but I had to include Robin and Batgirl in the story, since they were co-stars of the book at the time.  Well, that diluted the idea somewhat, but I was still happy to give it a chance, and I ended up writing one of my favorite little Batman stories for BATMAN ADVENTURES (vol 2) #6, during my more than ten years working on that title.   It’s only five pages, so I reproduce it below…THIS is bondage in comics done RIGHT.

page 1

pg 2

pg 3

pg 4

pg 5

Don’t ask about the Black Mask/Red Hood storyline.  The less said about that, the better.

There, I hope we’ve exhausted bondage for a while, you sicko pervs.  Tomorrow, the return of all new Ty Templeton Funnies for the weekend.  That post will be about coprophilia.

Ty the Guy

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Batman Adventures McDonalds Promo Art…

…now with prices.  Check ’em out.

Batman Happy Meals, redux

To those who’ve asked…

At the time of the promotion for which Ty drew art, for reasons we’ve never known, McDonald’s Canada (or maybe just Ontario…or heck, maybe Toronto, we never knew) were not using boxes for Happy Meals.  As I said, I don’t know why–but the food was packaged in plain ol’ boring bags.  (Yes, Happy Meals come in bags these days–but in the olden days, they were boxed…then bagged, back to boxed, now back to bags.) Okay, the bags had some promotional art on them–but I think that too came later.  I don’t remember the Batman ones clearly to tell the truth…but they didn’t have Ty’s art on them or he would have fanatically collected them (Batman and McDonald’s…if only Coca Cola and The Beatles had been involved, and you would have had all of his loves from the time period!).

The toys were not based on Ty’s designs and he didn’t get any of them at the time…he’s “inherited” a few since (as in, Kellam left them behind when he moved).  But, we only ever had a couple–the Robin car, the Penguin car…and I have memories of constantly tidying away the Batman figure. And there was a Batmobile which would split into two (so you could shoot the front half at somebody.  In our house, that was usually a younger sibling, and that would not end well), and eventually, Kellam’s wouldn’t go back together.

And, is it just me, or was the Robin scooter kinda lame-assed?  It didn’t do anything! Although, all the Two-Face car did was “transform”–you could turn over the front and back half of the car.  I remember we had more of those cars than any others…but most of them, the twistable parts ended up so loose they would just spin around.

(On a search of Ty’s studio, I also found the Two-Face car; but I’ve never seen the Joker’s or Catwoman’s.  Don’t know if Batgirl had a vehicle?)

Keiren

New Pages are…

found in the index, under Batman Adventures, on the (Ms. Obvious here!) Batman Adventures McDonald’s Promo Art page. Ty asked me to post the pages, but hasn’t decided on prices just yet; I’ll post those later.

Keiren

Batman Happy Meal Box Art Part 3

Responding to constant nagging from the wife (ignoring me wasn’t working), Ty scanned me the rest of the pages for the McDonald’s Happy Meal Box art he did years and years ago. (I’ve actually finally seen a photo of the boxes; hoping to post those soon.)

It’s fun to see some of the old art…especially stuff featuring Catwoman.  Ty used our cats for inspiration: if you spot a Siamese kitty, that was Batman (seriously.  And Ty will swear ’til he’s a very old man that it wasn’t because of Batman, but a cricket-playing friend whose nickname was that).  Near her should be a tiny white kitty, and that was Epiphany Proudheart a/k/a Piffy.

Keiren

Batman Happy Meal Box Art

Just because…

Thinking Outside the Bat-Panel

Since my son recently alerted me to my old animated Batman commercials online, I figured it was a good time to look back on some other non-comic related Batman projects I did during my decades long association with the Batman (there’s still a Brave and Bold comic on the way, so the association ain’t over yet!)  I did T-Shirts, puzzles, Happy Meal Boxes, Colouring Books, DVD covers, magazine spot illustrations… I’d say over half of the Batman art I’ve done over the years was for sources OTHER than comics…

Let’s start with the HOW TO DRAW BATMAN BOOK, from the year 1998.

Copies of this book are still at a bizarrely high $140 dollars on Amazon, for what was a ten dollar book only a decade ago.  I’m as flattered as a drag queen at a Mardi Gras Debutante Ball that these books are at skyrocket prices, but I’m equally annoyed that Walter Foster has kept them out of print for so long.  They’ve repackaged parts of the book at least two different times, but each time cutting half of the original pages away, to add pages by John Delaney and Ron Boyd.  But now even those repackaged versions are out of print and also at sky-high prices.   They sent me a box of thirty copies when it was originally published, and I used to give ‘em away like candies, figuring I could always get more.  HAH!

In general, I’m very proud of the book, and the overall experience, as the final product turned out much how I wanted it to, and I got along with all concerned.  (Subsequent editions of the series caused me a little tsuris, and I famously got into a public internet tongue lashing, which I now greatly regret, and won’t dredge up at this point).  A bunch of the HOW TO DRAW BATMAN pages were drawn at a cabin in the woods, drawing it on my lap, or on the steering wheel of the car, parked under a street light out by the highway, where the light was better (and I may or may not have been nearly attacked by a moose, the family still debates this event…).  That was fun.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’ve planned to write a HOW TO MAKE COMIC BOOKS monograph and publish it.  Sort of a collection of my lectures from art college (that I’ve been giving for years), mixed with some comedy and original stories, exclusive for the edition.  I’ve also been meaning to climb Everest, wrestle a live shark and curse out Perez Hilton to his face, just to see what he’d do.  But there are never enough hours in the day to get this stuff done AND to sit around watching my kid play Mass Effect and eating cheese balls.

I’ve never offered the original art from this HOW TO DRAW book for sale, because the art from happy meals boxes, toy designs, posters, DVD covers and HOW TO DRAW BATMAN doesn’t seem to interest the public at a comic convention.  But I’m happy to dip a toe in the water and see if there’s any interest in these non-comic Batman art pieces online.

Ty the Guy

PS:  Get me drunk, and I’ll tell you the time I was swimming in the Atlantic with a live shark, but didn’t wrestle it at all.