Shadowgirls

Little update here with the hardcover preorders. (Yes, we’re gonna be pimping this thing until February. Get used to it.) If you want to bypass the whole paying with a card option, and you want to pay with a money order or something that wouldn’t be picked up by the secret conspiracy that’s watching your every move (I KNOW you’re watching me, Illuminati!) you can purchase the book via the old fashion method, by sending a money order to:

Th3rd World
290 Powell Circle
Berlin MD 21811

Please make it out for   31.20 (total with shipping) for the regular version or 41.20 for the Artist’s Edition. Also please include a shipping address.

Those of you who’s ordered a book already, you have our gratitude. We really do appreciate it. We really want to get this book made, as it’s been the goal we’ve been reaching for since we began this project. Those of you who hasn’t… Well, hey! It’s Christmas! I hear people like to give gifts on Christmas!

So anyway, this year, we’re participating with the Comics Creators Alliance in their ongoing endeavor to end human trafficking the world over. It’s a very commendable goal, and one that I personally feel strongly about. Last year they raised over $10,000 for Human Trafficking Awareness Day and they’re hoping to do even better. So, If you’re a creator and would like to participate this year, you can visit the website for details. If you are a comic reader, send an email to your favorite creators and ask them to participate.

Everyone involved is donating art and once the final image is assembled, will be available as wallpaper for your computer as thanks for your kind donation for this cause. There’s some damn impressive talent involved with this. (That’s my entry to the left there.)

So, that’s it. Have a happy holidays folks, and we’ll see you in 2011.

-D.Rey

I am seriously killing myself trying to find the poster of this. I know it's out there somewhere...

Now if you’ve paid attention at all over the last few years, you’re well aware that I’m a big fan of Disney movies. Sometime during the latter half of the Disney Renaissance (which is the period of 1989-1999, or ‘The Little Mermaid’ through ‘Tarzan’), Disney tried to shift gears and get away from the stuff they do good, and we were given crap like the very deplorable ‘Brother Bear’. Seriously, I would rather sit through a Uwe Boll film festival than sit through that dreck again. Sometime after that disaster of a film, the Then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner came forward and said that 2D animated movies were dead, and that Disney would push forward with 3D animated films in it’s place. (This has since been rescinded with the appointment of Stanley Iger and John Lasseter into the creative roles at Disney.) This however, was not much better, as movies like ‘Chicken Little’ and ‘Valiant’ showed us that it’s not the medium of the movie, but the content that determined if it was any good. I’m going to be as blunt as I can here: For the large majority of the 2000s, Disney productions that didn’t involved Pixar and Johnny Depp… Sucked. And sucked badly. There are some wonderful exceptions like ‘Lilo and Stitch’ and the ‘Emperor’s New Groove’. But for the most part, it wasn’t really all that good. When Disney announced they were going to do a new 2D movie, a lot of us got really excited, and couldn’t wait to see the movie. We hoped Disney learned from their mistakes and could we be seeing the start of a new second Disney Renaissance.

But when ‘The Princess and the Frog’ came out, while it was nice, it felt… Off. Like it was missing something. I’m sure there are tons of people with theories on why it wasn’t a better, more popular movie, and while some have validity and some do not, I think the answer is simple: The movie wasn’t that great. It was… “Just okay”. I don’t hate it, if it came on TV, I wouldn’t change the channel. But it felt just acceptable, but not exceptional.

It was like... Sooo close. Yet, not.

I felt… Old. Like I was becoming one of those bitter cranky fanboys that hate anything that’s not from when I was a kid. (I seriously have a fear of becoming one of those people.) Seriously, you know the types. The ones that when they make a new movie or cartoon of something they grew up on when they were a kid, they get all bitter and angry about it, because it not the same. I remember a few years back, when they made the new He-Man cartoon that was on Cartoon Network, some friends of mine were literally pissed off angry because they switched the Iron Cross on He-Man’s bandolier to a more stylized original symbol. (Which I didn’t realize until later was a stylized “H”.) Or the fact that they changed the Sorceress’ costume, or Man-At-Arms may not have been Teela’s father… They ignored the fact it was actually a good show, and just obsessed over the changes. If it’s not exactly how it was when they were kids, then they’re pissed. It comes across almost like they’re not just being nostalgic, but trying to find a time machine to make them younger, to relive their youth. And I was starting to worry I was becoming like that too. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the recent ‘Star Trek’ reboot, I actually prefer the Tim Burton ‘Batman’ over ‘The Dark Knight’, and ‘Clone Wars’ has been driving me away with their sheer ham-fisted commentary about politics, as opposed to showing clones and wars in my CLONE WARS. (Seriously though, I DO like the Dark Knight very much. I just liked Batman more. That‘s all.) Yet, at the same time, when people are ranting and raving over new stuff coming up like the new Tron movie, or ‘Megamind’ or even ‘Sym-Bionic Titan’, I just sat there going… Meh. I was getting worried I was becoming that cynical bitter man-child that hates anything fun.

Then I saw ‘Tangled’.

I saw it on Saturday, and I saw it again on Sunday, and I want to see it a third time. I love it. Oh my God, do I love it. I cannot emphasize how good of a movie I thought it was. There was a young boy in me, just yearning to get home and draw and sketch and create. The same young boy that was there when I saw Sebastian telling Prince Eric to “Kiss Da Girl”, or seeing Tarzan rescue Jane from a horde of vicious baboons. The characters were designed amazingly, the music was charming, the story was good, and as a whole the entire movie was just… Fun. It was probably the best movie I’ve seen all year, and probably the best animated movie I’ve seen in almost twenty years. I went into the movie expecting something along the lines of ‘Enchanted’ or even at best “How to Train your Dragon”. I certainly did not expect to see what is probably now my second favorite animated movie of all time. (Right behind the Little Mermaid.) I mean, is it perfect? No. There’s no such thing as a perfect movie, except Ghostbusters. Like anything, if you go into it, like one of those cynical dicks, purposely looking for flaws, you’ll find them. But if you’re looking for a movie that is all ages, funny, clever and even enchanting… Then you’re not going to find better.

The chameleon is awesome.

I bring this up for one reason. Not just to tell you that Tangled was a great movie and you should go see it. (You should.) But in all creative processes, creators will hit a lull point, and it happens to all of us. You have to work through the problems and figure out the solutions, and there are no magic fixes. You just gotta plow through them. Sometimes, they don’t break out of that lull, and if you’re not careful, you can start to realize that they may have ALWAYS been off their game, and we just accepted it because it was different. (See Frank Miller’s Sin City) It’s like that philosophical debate that you need evil to happen, to help you appreciate the good. If we didn’t have ‘Batman and Robin’, when we would have never gotten ‘Batman Begins’. If Van Halen didn’t give us ‘5150’, we would have never gotten ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’, and if Disney didn’t give us ‘Brother Bear’, then we would have never gotten ‘Tangled’. I used to complain about 3D movies, about how it’s not the same as 2D. I knew 3D could be well done, but I still had that stigma of “it’s cheating!” going through my head. And there was justification for it, because bad 3D is noticeably bad, as Shrek proves. I was so obsessed with them trying to get things back to how it was, when “things were good” that I didn’t even notice the “new good” that was phoenixing in it’s wake. I’m not saying newer is always better, but older doesn’t mean it’s flawless either… Otherwise people wouldn’t have stopped doing it. I don’t know. I do know that the answer isn’t status quo or going back. You got to push forward, but remember how you got there. It’s all a work in progress.

Maybe it’s the holiday season, or maybe it’s just the really good mood a certain someone put me in lately. But right now…

I feel young.

Go vote to get a fullsized wallpaper of this image

As she’s the focus of the current scene in the comic here, I thought it might be interesting to talk about our resident green haired cyborg. Maxine Luisa Marquez has been around for a while.(A couple of years older than Charon. She‘s actually not the oldest character though. Someday I‘ll have to try and introduce you all to Marica.) To explain Max, I have to talk about the 1990’s in comic books. Back then, there was this trend in comics that to be honest, for those of us who were collecting comics then, it kind of embarrasses us to this day still: The Bad Girl Trend. Now I honestly believe that no one goes out of their way to make a bad story. As much as people may dislike certain stories, I don’t believe for a moment that the creators thought “Let’s see how bad I can make this.” unless they’re trying for some artful insight into irony. Without going into a crap load of details and making what should be a simple story, long-winded and complex… (Which as of this version of this text, I‘ve cut over a thousand words already… Damn, D.Rod‘s right that I‘m long winded….) Let’s leave it at that there was a reason the 1990s was called the “Dark Ages”. Eventually this caught up to the industry, and instead of trying to write honest to goodness decent stories… Many resorted to fanservice.

Fanservice has been around for centuries in some way shape or form, going back to Tiziano Vecellio’s ‘poesie’ series and probably before. Some people call it “art” and some people refer to it as ‘masturbatory fantasies”. The problem is all too often, the portrayal of an attractive woman can be quickly slandered by some to fall into that latter category, no matter how she’s dressed or displayed. The determination of what consists as fanservice is somewhat frustrating. And in the world of web, it doesn’t help matters much that the internet is not exactly known for it’s level headed methods of debate. The common argument people make against it is “Why don’t you look at real boobs?” I’m sorry, but in today’s age of photoshopping and digital airbrushing, prosthetic-like make-up,  not to mention body modification, and recent advancements in the uncanny valley with CGI in films like Avatar… What would you define as “real boobs”? At least cartoons are honest in their portrayal. You know it’s just a drawing. It’s not lying to you, trying to pretend that it’s photo cover spread is what that actress really looks like, because our public perception of beauty has gotten to a level where it’s now impossible for a human to attain it. (And people wonder why we have a messed up society.)

Call me a jackass, but I wanna have her dubbed with Sarah Palin's voice, just to screw with people, donchaknow.

You see, the grand problem is there is an indeterminate line between what is considered acceptable and what is considered exploitative. Final Fantasy’s Rikku’s outfit is very revealing really, but I’ve seen many people who don’t even think anything about it, much less when people cosplay as her… Which is a touch disturbing, since she’s supposed to be Becka’s age. Yet the video game character Bayonetta is considered the epitome of fanservice even though she’s wearing a full body suit, is half a century old, and has the appearance of being roughly Charon‘s age. Now the counter argument to this, I’m told would be how the characters act, that Bayonetta is so much more sexually aggressive, as opposed to Rikku’s pure innocence… Seriously, this was the defense given to me. They obviously do not realize how creepy that sounds. But alright, fine… Whatever. Some people say “it’s all in context of the story. If that’s how the character is supposed to act, then nudity and sexuality is okay.” Which brings us back to the creepy Rikku/Bayonetta conundrum. Essentially the problem is that what one person finds harmless, another person might find in questionable taste, and yet another person might find utterly offensive. And for us cartoonists, it’s hair-pullingly annoying.

Why do people draw fanservice? Well, I’m sure there are people who would love to psychoanalyze the reasons to infinity and beyond, but I’m just going be blunt and explain it as best I can. Women are fun to draw. There’s nothing latently sexual about it… They’re just more fun to draw. That’s really it. Now I don’t deny there are some people who are probably subletting their fantasies a bit too much through the pencils… But for a lot of artists, it’s really just that simple. Girls are more fun to draw. (Hey I like drawing robots too, but it doesn’t mean I wanna go make out with Asimo.)

One might ask, in Shadowgirls’ case, why have fanservice at all? It doesn’t advance the story and only serves as an unnecessary distraction. Have you read our comic? It’s about a MILF and her teenage daughter, who turns into creatures to fight fish monsters and dream spiders, a “rich bitch-fish” with a heart of gold, cyborgs (note plural, one’s a crossdresser), mothers back from the dead who shoves glowing rocks into their eye sockets. EoD members who look suspiciously like Cobra Vipers, fish gods possessing teenage girls, and Lindsey trying to take out a Nosferatu vampire with a folding chair, ECW style… Yeah, I guess I can see why Charon in her themed panties would be pushing boundaries.

Now, Max Pneumatic was created in the wake of that Bad Girl/Fanservice Craze in 1990’s comics. At the time, the idea was meant to be a bit more subverted than what the concept turned into. A couple of actual books got made of her, none of them are worth mentioning the events of them. I realized I had written it so vaguely, that nothing in the book was really revealed. She was pretty much an action comic, dedicated to occasional short stories where she beat up a rogue robot, a giant fly monster, and my personal favorite, a villainess named “Terri Byte” who was essentially a genetically modified counter-industrial rock opera dominatrix, who philosophized about the significance of music on a socially evolving underage society, and her plans to fall the RIAA. (This was in the days before Facebook, MP3s, YouTube and even Napster. I think I may had been a bit ahead of my time.)

Yes, I knew the giant arm was silly then, and it's silly now. Bite me.

Max’s stories were never all that fleshed out though. She was supposed to be a parody of the bad girl craze that had been plaguing comics at this time, but honestly, I kinda started to over think some of the ideas and it started to take a life of it’s own, and become the very kind of book I was supposed to be mocking. (Not to mention, I’m not exactly a great writer. So even if I had seen more of it through, would it have really been all that well-written?) Especially after the Bad Girl Craze subsided, I had tried to rework the comic into something more substantial, then a silly parody book. I would actually go back and forth between this book and what was to become Shadowgirls. As time went on, I found myself less and less interested in doing a mindless action comic, and more interested in telling actual drama, with gravitas. For a while there, it really could have gone either way… But then our girl, Becka got created, and Max got placed on the back burner, for what would have been indefinitely. She probably would have been forgotten, except that D.Rod’s concepts for the Night Shift required the need for a high tech female character. It was originally going to be Annaline, but it didn’t quite work out as we thought it was going to. I thought about it and I was like “Hey, I got an idea…” And thus Max was introduced into the Mythmaker Universe, as the wildcard member of the Night Shift. Though a lot less fanservicey than I remember drawing her in the past. (Also a lot better drawn too, but as I hadn’t drawn her in over six years, I would hope I developed more as an artist…

Look, do I draw fanservice? Yeah, I do and I don’t apologize for it. But there is a time and place for it. I actually have gone over previous pages and subdued a lot of the more fanservicey things that stuck out to me that as too gratuitous. (That’s part of that whole ‘development as an artist’ deal. None of the Charon stuff though… That’s all intact.) The only thing I do apologize about is that I really should do more fanservice for the female readers. I do feel bad about it, but it’s hard to get it squeezed in there, when the book’s main cast members are mostly females. There’s been some difficulty working in Sawyer offering to massage Paul’s tight and sore muscles with some coconut oil the appropriate material for it. But I promise you, the first opportunity to draw a shirtless, oiled up man-meat for you, it will be done for you girls.

(And it won’t be Wilson.)