This photo was an idea that came to me last summer. I found the shirt I’m wearing in the pic at Steve And Barry’s in The Midland Mall and fell in love with it. I’m a huge fan of the Rockabilly 50’s-style shirts, and this is as close as I could come to buying one without having to sell a kidney (if you visit Rockabilly Apparel sites, you’ll see such garments are hella pricey). Anyway, the shirt made me think of the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk The Line” and its graphically stunning poster, so I wrapped my artistic sensibilities around it, employed my new digital camera and a healthy dose of Photoshop, and what you see is what you get. That’s my tool of the trade, a Micron Pigma Marker, in my sweaty palms. I truly am a rock and roll cartoonist icon, in my imagination if nowhere else.
So I wrote in haste the other day, not taking into account a bit of artistic info that I’d wanted to share with you cats at the time besides the now defunct Bay City Times sitch. So to remedy that mistake, here goes…
A month back I was on Craigslist.org and found a listing for a magazine cartoonist in, of all places, London, England. So I sent them a message, linked my website and assumed I’d never hear from them. Fortunately, a few weeks later, they proved me wrong.
One of the magazine’s editors wrote and said she liked what she saw on my website. She asked me to come up with some sample comic strips concerning full figured women being happy with themselves in a weight obsessed world, which was the magazine’s core demographic and mission statement. So I whipped up some samples and sent them off. A few more weeks later I got another message saying they liked my samples, would show them to the editor in chief and get back with me.
So that’s where I stand now. If it all works out, I may be seeing my first internationally published work, which would be a whole new plateau for my career. Excited much? Me too. More later when I hear something.
Now I’m going to do something that I promised myself and Web, Funk, Tetris and Jedi Master Foco I’d never do; break trend, throw continuity asunder and, GASP, write about something on my blog that has nothing to do with my artistic career! So here goes….
Many people have heard me sing the praises of Joss Whedon, the creative brain trust behind the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV show and much more importantly, the Firefly TV show and its theatrical follow up movie Serenity. Firefly made me fall in love with television all over again (a mega shout out to my pal and brother-from-another-mother Pat Dooley for introducing it to me. Wash lives on, my comrade).
So when I heard that movie mogul Joel “Die Hard” Silver anointed Whedon with the holy crusade of bringing Wonder Woman, the first lady of female superheroes, to the big screen, I was all kinds of excited. Whedon, in my opinion at least, wrote heroic women very well. And as soon as I began hearing his ideas for the film, my Joss Whedon semi-hetero man-crush grew to unseemly proportions. He said he was going to ditch the whole “stars and stripes” motif to WW’s costume because logically, she was an Amazonian warrior of Mediterranean stock, not a female Captain America born at the base of purple mountain’s majesty or any such smear (my words, not his). He still intended to keep the general look of the character, i.e. headband, wristbands, metallic brazier and lasso, which was iconic and appropriate.
The next bit of excitement was the possibility of casting. Since Whedon was writing and directing the movie, he had that much more clout to determine who WW would be played by. Film footage of him at the San Diego Comic Con in 2005 saw him with his old Firefly/Serenity cast member, Moreena Baccarin, in tow. When asked by an interviewer if she were up for the role of WW, Whedon coyly joked about the possibility. As he was known to re-use his actors for a lot of his projects, the likelihood of Baccarin being cast seemed fated, and I couldn’t have been happier. From then on, she was the only choice to play the superhero in my mind.
Jump ahead two years. No news on the progress of the project, and I’m getting antsy. The longer it takes for something like this to come together, the more likely it would all fall apart. It’s strange that I would be thinking this, with no new info for at least a year, just to have a buttload of info dropped in my lap the day after I thought of it.
News came out that Joel Silver had purchased a “spec script” (i.e. a script written without studio involvement in the hopes of a studio eventually picking it up) written by a pair of unknowns concerning a certain lasso-wielding, head-banded super heroine. Silver went on record as saying he bought the script outright in the event that, if it were later to turn out that there were unintentional similarities with their script and the one Whedon was writing, that there wouldn’t be any legal shenanigans regarding stolen plot ideas and such.
Then, last night, a bit of news broadsided me like a blimp colliding with the invisible jet. Whedon was fired off of Wonder Woman because, ultimately, Silver didn’t like the work he was doing. Silver, it seems, outright lied about the precautionary measures taken with the unknown duo’s spec script. He liked it well enough to give Whedon the axe.
Now, as sad as I am the Whedon is leaving the project, the one silver lining here is that the guys who wrote the spec script are planning to have the story take place during WWII. That was when Wonder Woman came around, and I think she fits that time period. If only they would have set The Fantastic Four in the 1960’s like I wanted. Anyway, I wasn’t entirely sold on everything Whedon was doing anyhow. He wanted to create a whole new villain for the film and disregard WW’s pantheon of villains from the comic. Though her villains by and large sucked, if you’re doing a movie based on the comic, don’t skimp on the villains. The Cheetah may be a lame villain, but at least she’s part of the source material. Beyond that, though, Silver’s gonna have to conjure up one hell of an impressive director and star to win me over on this new Whedon-free Wonder Woman.
So that’s all for now. I have some ideas for my upcoming blogs, so stay tuned kids.
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