Wonder Bun Toons! YAY! YAY!

I am Bunny.  Hear me ROAR.

As promised last week…I’m back with more to say about something.

It’s really not fair.

Don’t think we didn’t notice Harley was the only good thing in Suicide Squad, and Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman was the only good thing in The Dark Knight Winds Down.

This is a conspiracy, to push male dominated super-hero movies aside in favour of these female friendly movies Hollywood makes every thirty years.

I, for one, am not putting up with it.

After two or three more trips to the theatre to see Wonder Woman a few more times, I’m boycotting the film until it comes out on Blue Ray.

Who’s with me?

Ty the Guy OUT!

Wonder Woman is one of my favourite characters to draw on sketch covers for conventions…here’s a couple of recent ones that turned out somewhat un-awful.

And while I’m comparing Harley, Catwoman, and Constantine’s movies to Wonder Woman’s…

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For last week’s Memorial Day Bun Toon (that might mention Amazon Princesses or not…) click here.

For the horrifically un-updated Bun Toons library,  click here.

Memorial Weekend Bun Toons! YAY!

A moment of reflection, please…

Next weekend, when Diana’s adventure opens, and we find out if hope triumphs over experience, I’ll be in Niagara Falls for a convention, but I’ll try to get out to the movies and report back as soon as I can.

I figure after thirty-eight bombs in a row, Warner Brothers is due for a good one.

Ty the Guy OUT!

I have a TEEENY bit of connection to this new Wonder Woman movie, I did a quick promotional film for the Cineplex chain, here in Canada.  Unfortunate movie goers have been trapped in a theatre with my face fifty feet high, for the last month or so…this is what they were forced to watch.

And now, your BONUS Bun Toon for the week.

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For last week’s comic book themed look at the Trump presidency, click the headline above.

 

Green Lantern in Four Panels Bun Toons. YAY!

In brightest day, in blackest night, I have shades for my windows and I sleep all right.

The Green Lantern movie is finally here.  After months of tepid build-up, and fairly uninspired previews, the ho-hum summer blockbuster has arrived in theaters to fairly poor reviews and little enthusiasm.  Just like Green Lantern deserves!

Oh, the letters I’m going to get for putting down Hal Jordan.  Both of his fans are going to be nasty…(NOTE:  Infinitesimal movie spoilers in the last panel.)

Oh, Warner Brothers feature film department, can you never make a decent DC movie without Batman in it?

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your BONUS Green Lantern/Warner Brothers movie moment:

If you haven’t seen it, the above video is the best Green Lantern film, SO FAR…

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For last week’s bun toons, click the image above!

For every bun toon EVER, click the singing bread roll.

The Warm-Up Sketch

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a fellow cartoonist/illustrator, and we got to asking each other what we did for warm up sketches…those doodles you do on a piece of scrap paper, or in a sketch book, to start off your day of drawing.  You’ll never get a decent drawing first thing in the morning, so illustrators work out the kinks for twenty minutes or so with indulgent exercises to get the brain started.  In my case, about fifty per cent of these are just anatomical studies of some part of the body I was having trouble doing the day before.  The page above followed a day when I felt I wasn’t getting hands just right, so I built a bunch from the ground up the next morning, starting with skeletal forms, and tossing skin and muscles on.

Some days I doodle heads, constructing from scratch to remind myself of the basic maps.

And some days I’ll whip down drawings of the characters I’m doing that day as fast as possible, to reduce their forms and costumes to rote shapes.  These character sketches are never allowed to go for more than two or three minutes, five at the most.

I think I might have penciled this in five minutes, and inked it in five, as I was doing the pages for Spider-Man 657 a couple of weeks back, so it's a long sustained piece as far as sketch-book stuff is concerned.

Here’s one that came out of my hand in under two minutes for a day I was working on a Green Lantern spoof for a Mad Magazine thing (a Fundalini Page thing that never came  out, unfortunately).  I really do time them to be under two minutes as an exercise.

I have about fifteen books just filled with this sort of nonsense.   It’s part of the detritus that accumulates when you doodle for a living.   There’s one or two in the huge pile that are actually worth seeing, and I’ll probably find ’em and scan them for the blog someday.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your BONUS sketch-book page:  I was re-reading a Golden Age Marvel collection and came across this actual-not-making-him-up 40s Timely character about six months ago, and couldn’t help sketching him as my warm up that day…

There's a twelve issue mini-series in this guy...if only I had the time.

Unseen Art by Ty

Sorry for the sparse posting lately…we’ve been busy doing that working-for-a-living thing around here, some Simpsons, some Mad Mag stuff, doing some final corrections on my Harvey Pekar/Marvel comics story, and a little superhero-ing production work, FINALLY sending off the Johnny Canuck comic for the printers (out in a couple of days now!).

Since there won’t be any new top lists for at least another week or so, I thought I’d devote a couple of days to some of my many unseen pages…things for projects that were never published, or thing published in small runs, art for private commissions or projects not really comics related, amusing things you’ve probably not seen, and some of them turned out rather nice.

A sampling:

This was done as a commission a few years ago, back when I was in the middle of drawing batman in the “animated version” like this:

 

(A convention sketch of animated Batman done a couple of months ago, in that old style)

I think I was having such a good time NOT drawing in the animated style for that Bat-Mite piece up above, that I overdid it on the “Bolland-isms” in the inking.  I forget who ended up getting that piece, but I still have a xerox of it, so you get to see it.

Next, a commission I did a few weeks ago (but took forever to actually get out to the fellow who asked for it, sorry Christopher

The world famous BREEON, the Green Lantern!

Christopher Matusiak has this wonderful collection of Green Lantern sketches on all green paper, often drawn by the artist who created that particular Green Lantern.  Well, I happened to have created an obscure Green Lantern from an annual or a Quarterly (I don’t recall which), written by Mark Waid, named Breeon, and Christopher asked me to contribute to the collection.  I hadn’t drawn on coloured paper since I was a kid, and I had so much fun I’m going to do lots more.  There’s some blackboard chalk in there as a highlighter…I had some in my pocket from earlier in the day when I’d been teaching my cartooning class, and figured “why not?”.

This is ancient, one of the first things I ever drew and got paid for:

A commission for a local comic store in Toronto, (The Dragon Lady…and they’re still around after all these years, too!)  for their newsletter, highlighting the “Direct Sales” comics that were taking the world by storm in the mid-eighties.  I started working professionally about a year after this piece, I don’t think I’d even thought of Stig yet.

Coming up in the next while:  Unseen pages from a never-published issue of Legion of Superheroes I drew.  Pages from the yet to be published Batman: Brave and Bold cartoon comic I drew a year or so ago and has been on a shelf, unseen production work for the DC direct figures I designed, rejected covers, and more!

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your unseen and pulped comic book moment of zen:

My cover for the infamous Elseworlds Annual. So offensive, it was only released in Ireland, look it up.

 

THE TOP SEVEN REBOOTS IN SUPER-HEROES

This blog has weighed in on the Wonder Woman costume re-design, and it got me thinking about how often it’s done, and how often it’s done well.   Later I might offer up the list of the worst re-imaginings in the land of Super-Heroes…but today, in a happy mood, I offer up the best costume changes/ret-cons of our little world.

THE TOP SEVEN SUPER-HERO FRANCHISE REBOOTS

Feel free to disagree.

#7  Legion of Super-Heroes:

In 1972, Dave Cockrum and Cary Bates, took the Fifties-style small town teens from the future and made them the sexy teen swingers of the Seventies.  Then Bates along with Mike Grell turned them into THE comic for teenagers with a libido.

PROOF THE REBOOT WORKED:
They went from minor back-up series to pushing Superboy out of his own title within a few months.  See what showing a little more skin can get you, girls?

My favorite “teen” super-hero team ever.  Every now and then, I consider asking the wife to dress up as Seventies Saturn Girl, but that would be wrong.

SATURN GIRL: BEFORE: Wooden and uninteresting. AFTER: Vavoom!

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#6 Avengers

Avengers disassemble, and then reassemble, and then we'll have a vote.

With issue 16 we find out that everyone left from the original team is quitting and they’re handing the mansion, and the name “Avengers”, over to a bunch of B-level bad guys as a sort-of “halfway house” for super-villain reform.  They do leave Captain America behind as their keeper, but to be fair, Cap wasn’t an original Avenger either….

So instead of a team with just the “Marvel Big Shots”, it became a team soap opera about the entire Marvel Universe, where anyone could join… reformed villains, minor league players (with canceled titles), big stars like Thor and Iron Man, as well as members of the FF, X-Men, New Warriors, and Defenders, were welcome.

PROOF THE REBOOT WORKED:
Check your comic collection and the best-selling sales lists every month and get back to me.

And six zillion other titles out this month

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#5 Green Arrow

No matter how much we might retroactively enjoy the Jack Kirby issues of the Golden Age Green Arrow, there’s NOTHING about that character to attract your attention.  He was a cheap ass imitation of Batman–a millionaire crime fighter with an obsessive gimmick and a sidekick- where the writer need only substitute the word “arrow” for “bat” and VIOLA!  You had a Green Arrow story.

Is that the Arrow Signal? Let's hop in the Arrowcar, and leave, trusted boy-assistant!

Arrow-crap, fans.  But then along came Cary Bates and Neal Adams in Brave and Bold #85, fall of #69, and Green Arrow was completely made over.

The start of the "relevant" comics of the Seventies.

He looses his millions.  He becomes a loud-mouthed left wing rant-machine, with a chip on his shoulder for the down and trodden that he’s more or less held onto until this day.  Besides growing a funky beard and silkier threads, the Emerald Archer gained political awareness and was used as a voice for various writers to dig into their liberal or libertarian bent.  It made Green Arrow actually INTERESTING, and he remains that to this day.

Proof the Reboot Worked:

I know people with Green Arrow tattoos, and it’s ALWAYS this version:

What sort of a pussy would tattoo the Golden Age Green Arrow on their body?

#4 Batman

The reboot was a little more than the yellow oval.

For the first thirty years of the Batman franchise, the Caped Crusader  spent MOST of his time fighting giant blenders and oversized pool tables, or aliens with transmutation rays, and time travelers. The Adam West Batman TV show was a faithful reproduction of the Batman comics of the fifties and sixties, not a spoof of them.
But after the big payday provided by that TV show, Bob Kane, the original coordinator of the Batman studios, finally retired and passed the editorial decisions onto DC more directly, and the “New Direction” Batman was born.
At first, the changes were fairly slight, mostly just a yellow oval around the bat-symbol.  But at the start of the Seventies, the team of Denny O’Neil, Frank Robbins, Irv Novick, Dick Giordano and Neal Adams, re-imagined Batman as a scary-as-bat-shit street fighter with a grim attitude about the world.   They dropped Robin off at college, closed up the Batcave, moved downtown into a penthouse apartment, tossed out the Batmobile, and made Joker into a homicidal maniac.  Hmmm…that’s chocolately bat-goodness all the way.

PROOF THE REBOOT WORKED:

Forty years later, which version does the current Batman comic resemble?

#3 SHOWCASE COMICS and the DC SILVER AGE:

Flash/Green Lantern/Atom and the Julie Schwartz revolution.

The rebooting of comics itself for a new generation is often credited to Showcase #4, which introduces the all new FLASH into the modern era with a spiffy new jump suit, and no more goofy helmet.

My wife's favorite Super-hero costume is Green Lantern. Make of that what you will.

It’s quickly followed by Green Lantern’s spiffy new jump suit and no more goofy collar, then the Atom, Hawkman and the Justice League follow quickly behind…all under the watchful eye of editor Julie Schwartz.  As much as I like the quirky old Golden Age versions of all these characters, I doubt I’d be that big a DC fan without the dawn of the Silver Age.

PROOF THE REBOOT WORKED:
Fifty years later, you can’t kill these Silver Age versions.  The fans consider them “definitive”, no matter what.  Long periods of oblivion, retirement or dishonor is nothing to these guys, who can come back after mass murder, marital infidelity, suicide, and crumbling bones.

#2 X-Men (Giant Sized X-Men #1) 1975

Behold, the license to print money.

This issue saved the X-Men franchise—five years dead at that point… having had so few fans, it had once been canceled while Neal Adams was drawing it.  Len Wein and Dave Cockrum (again!) created a new generation of X-Men who quickly took over as the definitive X-Men for everyone currently breathing.

PROOF THE REBOOT WORKED:
Besides the landslides of money, you mean?  Later on, Marvel tried re-launching the original line-up of X-Men under the name “X-Factor” and fans still preferred the new guys two to one.

Whoops. It turns out the problem was us all along.

PROOF #2:
This worked so well, a couple of years later, Marv Wolfman and George Perez lifted the plot almost scene for scene to reboot the tired out Teen Titans franchise with a new generation of characters.

An entirely original idea, we promise.

#1 Watchmen

Quick quiz: Which one of these is popular?

The Charlton Super-Heroes are purchased by DC and rebooted by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons into the best selling graphic novel of all time.  If  Moore and Gibbons hadn’t killed off so many of the just-purchased trademarked characters in their mini-series, they might have been allowed to use their real names.

PROOF THE REBOOT WORKED:
DC tried their own version of Watchmen, by collecting the original incarnations of the Charlton Heroes together in a mini-series called “THE L.A.W.-Living Assault Weapons” ….No one on Earth read it.

See the blue guy with the atom symbol that looks like he might be Doctor Manhattan? Up above the guy that looks like he might be Rorschach? He's not. And neither is the other guy.

There are many reboots/redesigns that didn’t make the list.  Doctor Who, James Bond, the Wally Wood Daredevil costume, even Wonder Woman herself had a lovely re-imagining at the hands of George Perez, but I start with a limit of seven, and these are my top choices.  If you disagree, I’ll happily refute you in the comments section, but I’m fairly sure I’m right, as it’s my blog and I always win.

Ty the Guy OUT!

TOMORROW:  A preview of the new comic series I’m working on!

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