Waller to Waller Coverage Bun Toon! Yay!

Pleasant dreams, all you residents of Belle Reve.

I’m hoping you plucky internet adventurers are willing to come along for this ride without me having to plant explosives in your neck.

I’m still going to plant those explosives, but I’m hoping you won’t NEED them.

Believe it or not, the movie is entertaining.  It’s dumb as a bag of rock salt, and rarely funny (though Harley manages one or two moments) but it does grudgingly allow for a bit of fun in between the rain storms and music video montages.  Viola Davis is good as Amanda Waller, even though the script doesn’t get Waller right.  Will Smith Will-Smiths his way through Deadshot with all the Will-Smithiness you’d want from him…and the BIG surprise is how close-to-the-originals the director gets the small time DC characters.  The movie is good for DC fans, if not necessarily the general public, because it’s certainly better than Green Lantern, Man of Steel, Constantine (the movie), Batman v Superman, Dark Knight Rises, Watchmen, Steel, Superman Returns and Jonah Hex.  That’s faint praise, I realise, since those movies were consistently awful.

But Suicide Squad isn’t awful.

Other than Christopher Nolan, we haven’t had a “not awful” DC movie in decades.

So I guess it’s a win?

Ty the Guy OUT!

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I had a brief visit with Amanda Waller some years ago when I was drawing Justice League…

Joker, Killer Croc, and the rest of the Gotham City support stars that show up in Suicide Squad were all a big part of my time as a Batman writer and artist.  Here’s a fun Harley Quinn Snow Globe I designed for DC Direct some time back.  When you shake the globe, the money floats around Harley…

I wanted the globe filled with “puddin”, but was told it would make it hard to see Harley inside.

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For last week’s BUN TOON four panel review of the recent Star Trek movie, click here

For the Bun Toon archives, going back years, click here.

 

 

Nepotism Thursdays!

There’s a great moment, in an old Will Smith film called Six Degrees of Separation, where an art teacher is showing off the water colour paintings of a classroom full of eight year olds.  Somehow, these paintings are magnificent.  Every one of them a bold and wonderful landscape, or haunting portrait or daring abstract, each with brilliant composition and personality.

All of them.

These are the canvases that generations of expressionists have longed to be able to create, all dashed off by eight year olds with casual ease.

“How on earth did you teach your students to paint so beautifully?” the art instructor is asked.

“I taught them nothing,” she answers,  “I just hand them the brushes and watch them paint.  My trick is knowing when to take the paintings away and knowing how to crop ‘em.”

The untrained mind creates some of the most interesting art.  The example above is by my untrained ten year old Sean.  It’s a portrait of his eight year old sister.  And here’s what I like about it  beyond the proud papa, lookie at what muh BOY did aspects…!   I like that he liberally mixes pencil crayon colours in the hair and face, including some BLUE(!) in the facial features.  I never put blue in a flesh tone until college, and even then against my will.  But there it is.  And the blacks in the blonde hair to tone down the way-too-yellow pencil crayon that was supposed to be blonde.  Lovely.

I like the eyes being white, with blue pupils, around gray dots.  That’s my favorite part of the portrait, simply because my mind would never go to that interpretation of reality.  There’s a bit of Modigliani in there, perhaps. The family has large, framed reproductions of his work up in our house, and he’s one of my favorite painters.  To the left is one of the two that hang in his parent’s bedroom, and the elongated face so common to Modigliani’s work is visible in it.

Another painter we have numerous examples of, up around the house, is the deco master (or mistress) Tamara de Lempicka.  Her work also features a glassy eye and an elongated face.  Since I ain’t a zillionaire, we have framed copies of her work darting about our walls, another influence into the ten year old brain, mayhap…?

And finally, I like that Sean has a habit of cutting his artwork out of the paper it’s drawn on after he’s done.  There’s always an element of treating the drawing itself as an object with him…once the art is cut out, it’s then glued to something else, or folded into something, or often just given away in its cut out form.

The trick is knowing when to take it away.

So…take it away Sean Templeton-Smith, this was your first gallery show, and in the company of two modern masters, to boot!

I have four kids in total, each with their own stunning set of talents, so be forewarned, this feature will likely show up again.

Ty the Guy.  Once again, tricking the family into doing his job for him.