Amazi-Girl
Fantasy #31 "Amazi-Girl
Fantasy #31" is SOLD
OUT. Signed and numbered by the artist,
limited to 15 pieces, it is printed on 8.5"x11"
cardstock glossy paper. A copy is $25, and you can order
by sending your mailing address to wiigii@hotmail.com.
Check, money order or Paypal,
please!
Book 3, when I get around to assembling it after Book 2 is put to bed, is to be titled "Shortpacked! Is Totally Gay." (Book 3 features the Ethan Realizes He's Gay storyline.) I've started doodling concept sketches for the eventual cover image, and the first one is to the left.
I showed it to Maggie, and her eyes went big. She thinks it's a bit much. It is a little over the top, but that approach tends to be hilarious to me. But does it go over the top in a way that won't scare people away? Can I sell that cover to passer-bys at Comic-Con? Americans can be squeamish about male sexuality. Hmmm.
Here's another concept. Guess the reference! I think it's funny (in an insular Internetty way), but I'm not sure if it suits the title as well as the first one.
In response to both of them, I kinda want a more dynamic character layout, instead of merely staggering layers of characters. Maybe inspiration will hit me. Maybe you'll all beg me to move in the direction of one of these displayed ideas. Who knows!
In the world of diminishing returns, the fund-raiser to afford two thousand books continues! We didn't nearly match the first day's tour de force preordering, but I didn't really expect to, either. Still, we must soldier on! Preorder Book 2, or bid on this original Batman art from me. The latter ends in under a day. Both serve the purpose of providing more books to everyone! Great thanks from me to everyone who's preordered thus far. You are the heroes.
A fan from 4chan sent me a link there this morning, where some dudes are digitally altering Shortpacked!s to "fix" them. What a riot! It's really, really awesome, and I have saved every single one in case I ever need to do an impromptu guest week. (And good timing, as I may be moving soon...)
My fund-raising drive to afford a run of 2,000 copies of Shortpacked! Book 2 continues! Dude, we did half of it in under 24 hours! You guys are amazing! I just know we can do the rest. I feel it in my heart... my shining heart which burns for justice. Preorder a copy and help move the cause forward!
Speaking of merchandise-whoring, check out Real Life's Shirt Ninja figurine/statuette! That thing is shaping up really classy. If you guys ever want a figurine made of a Shortpacked! character, let me know, and I will totally scope things out. I am supremely jealous.
Oh holy mercy, it's a toy review! That's what we're here for, right? Since we're doing all this fundraising, I was tempted to pull an NPR and do the whole "here are your favorite moments in toy reviews" schtick just to seal the motif. But as funny as that'd be to me personally, I just have too big of a queue to drill through.
These here are Cobra Vipers! I wouldn't normally pay them no mind, except I am a huge fan of one of them in particular. Percy the Cobra Viper had a small part in Devil's Due's second crossover with Transformers. Y'know, the time-traveling one that was really awesome and fun. The few moments that Percy earned in that miniseries were comedy gold. He was the red shirt and he knew it, with hilarious results.
The toy itself would be excellent along the lines of pretty much every other figure in the line, what with their ongoing plateau of sameness, but there are some really annoying little bits with the Viper. First of all, I hate that damn goggles accessory. It's not molded into the helmet, and they like to adhere to my fingers when I pick him up more than the helmet they loosely sit upon. I need to get some glue. Second, his left hand doesn't like to wrap securely around his rifle when you attempt to get him to hold it two-handed. His left-hand seems to be sculpted specifically to hold the rifle that way, but it really doesn't want to. Grrr. And lastly, he doesn't seem to have universal-joint heels like several of the other 25th Anniversary figures do. Because of this, he falls over backwards a lot, because his backpack's pretty heavy, and the display stand's peg is towards the back. You gotta bend him forward a little at the hips and hope that a gust of slight wind doesn't come along.
Confused by the TNI strip? Educate yourself. After seeing the poor dude humiliate himself over something so mindbogglingly simple, I couldn't resist. Because I'm a jackass. Apparently "Waspinator," one of the members of our forums, posted the video response! I have never been so proud.
Here's the skinny on Shortpacked! Book 2 preorders so far. I've raised enough money to afford a print run of 1,000 books. That's how much I produced of Book 1, and I gotta tell ya, it's not gonna last much longer. I'm feeling the drain as my remaining Book 1s escape through my fingers, and I haven't been to more than two small conventions, much less a full-fledged Comic-Con. Buttloads were ordered just in the past few weeks, along with preorders to Book 2.
1,000 books of Book 2 would cost me roughly $6500. I've gotten that plus all the money I need for postage to mail the books out to y'all. That is an amazing show of support from you folks, and I am incredibly grateful. However, for another $1000, I can order TWO thousand books. That would mean I'd have these things in stock for quite a while, and peeps won't be disappointed when they come to see me at Cons and I'm all sold out. Now, to get that $1000, I'd have to get preorders for 76 more books. I think that's possible, and I think we can do this in a week.
Call it a Book 2 Drive, if you will. I've even got the prerequisite thermometer fund raiser graphic on the right.
To help put a dent in the numbers, I'm gonna put that Batman/Mortal Kombat original art I showed you at the beginning of the weekend up for auction, and dump whatever I get for it into the Book 2 funds. So even if you've already preordered your book, you can help this process along in another way.
It's weird, having upwards of $7,000 sitting in my Paypal account from preorders, because none of it's actually mine! I don't see any of that money. It all goes right into the book and sent to you. Some day in the future, I may make a profit from this book. Probably (hopefully) at San Diego Comic-Con, after everything's all paid off. But first, I have a duty to you folks. I gotta take care of ya. And in the weird fabric of things, I need help from you to do that.
So if you've hesitated on preordering Book 2, please take some time to do so now. It's heartily appreciated.
EDIT: Shortpacked! Extras are SOLD OUT! I'm leaving a few slots open for those who promised to pay for them through snail mail, but otherwise, they be gone. There's still oodles of the normal ones, though!
Everyone's getting married this weekend. Everyone! If you think you know someone who isn't getting married this weekend, you're just misinformed. This includes yourself.
Gerald and Danihana, familiar folks to the forum, met through reading It's Walky!. They is getting married today. It is major sucks, because Maggie and I were supposed to be there, but something dumb happened and we couldn't. It is no fair, because I made this wedding happen by existing. The bragging rights are all mine!
Joyce and Walky themselves may or may not have gotten married last month in the subscription strips. Not even they know for sure! [2008/05/09 2:51 pm] [2008/05/08 10:59 pm] Shortpacked!:This is why we can't have good things.
Hey, look! That original art has DIALOG on it! How can this be? The answer, after the break, may surprise you.
Maggie had the genius idea to print out dialog balloons on our handy new sticker maker. Then we adhere them to the original art, and when people buy original art, they can have the dialog, too! It'd be sweet!
First, though, I gotta test how durable these stickers are. They're printed on high-quality paper, but the adhesive worries me a little. I'm gonna roll this up, simulating me mailing it in a tube to some lucky reader, and in a few days, I'll see how well it holds up. Then I'll auction this bad boy. See you on Monday. [2008/05/07 9:46 pm] Indiana Jones' horse is awesome.
Yeah, I finally found the deluxe set that has "Raiders of the Lost Ark" Indy and his horse. I found a buttload of them, plus multiples of every other toy. Woo! I only got the horse set, though, despite the way the "grab the idol" mini-playset tugs at me.
The horse is pretty damn articulated. He's got a little bit of motion at the base of the skull and at the bottom of the neck, swivel shoulders and hips, and universal joints at all four elbows elbows and all four... heels? His tail also sways. "Raiders" Indy fits on him pretty well, despite his legs not being splayed very far apart at the hips. His feet fit into the little stirrups, and he's got some reins to hold onto. The only other thing I could ask for is a little lateral head and neck motion, but that woulda been tough.
I got Sallah the other day, so there he is. He comes with a (very rubbery) shovel and that awesome torch. He, sadly, cannot fit on the horse. His, uh, skirt is rubbery but tough, and though he does appear to have hip joints (no knees), he's unable to move his legs much at all, much less fit each leg on either side of the horse. Oh well. So much for buying another horse set to give Indy a riding pal.
As I expected, "Raiders" Indy and "Crystal Skull" Indy share some parts. The only thing that really differs between them are the thighs, crotch, and head. "Raiders" Indy's hat isn't removeable, his hips are slightly wider, and his "purse" is underneath his coat, rather than over it.
Phew! I'm down to the last group o' folks in this year's BotCon set. That's right, these are the Shattered Glass heroic Predacons, represented as Mini-Con redecoes. According to Razorclaw's bio information, he was once a professor at Tyrest University, and when the Autobots blew it up, he and two students retreated into the mountains to have inappropriate relations become ferocious predators.
More college professors should disappear into the mountains to become lion-dogs.
No explanation is given for their tiny size in the "real" fiction, but I would probably adopt the April Fool's version's "shrink ray" explanation anyway, so the absence of a real story helps soothe that into my personal canon. (Annoyingly, their size in the comic ranges from "same size as everyone else" to "dinky," depending on the panel. Don Figueroa is usually more consistent than that.)
I really wish Divebomb (the bright orange bird-thing) had more paint in robot mode. Other than his head, all his paint is dedicated to his sparsely-detailed wings, which are hidden in robot mode. I think I'd love him a whole lot more if that were the case. I love him anyway, what with my orange fetish. It is, after all, a delicious Sunstorm-like orange.
The other guys are cool, too, though less orange, and are much better in the area of paint layout. They manage to get paint in both modes instead of decoing just one.
Poor heroic Decepticons. These dinky dudes are half of their rebel forces. [2008/05/05 9:47 pm] In yesterday's comic, Daredevil said that Iron Man was the best movie he'd ever seen. That was, of course, a joke. Apparently some people were confused!
(Though I usually question whether Daredevil is really all that blind if he has super-insane echolocation that lets him see the shapes of everything anyway, that probably won't help much at the cinema.)
Shattered Glass Sideswipe, Whisper (Mini-Con), Blurr, and Divebomb (not pictured) formed the BotCon 2008 souvenir set I like to call the "WTF pack." Very little here makes sense.
First of all, Sideswipe was an abandoned store exclusive of a much more interesting character. He was originally going to be a new Generation 2 Drench. But while BotCon did manage to save the toy from Cancellation Hell, they did it by making him a dude from 1984. Though they did add a buttload of more paint detail, which is appreciated, the "DRENCH" decoration on his doors was removed, which disappoints me greatly. Thank heavens that wasn't replaced with "SIDESWIPE," which means that I can at least pretend he's Drench in the privacy of my own home, albeit a Drench without his name tattooed on his sides, no Drenchy "8" racing number, and a big purple Autobot symbol.
With his dark gray, teal, and yellow, he has one of the most interesting color combinations of all the Shattered Glass toys.
And Blurr? Oh man, don't get me started. Apparently they wanted to put Blurr in the set. Well, hey, there's this toy that already has Blurr's head. Okay, well, nobody actually likes the body that the head is on, but he has Blurr's head, so you gotta use it if you want Blurr. So guess what? They didn't like the Blurr head, so they paid cash money to give him a totally new and different Blurr head! Which begs the question why they didn't put the head on a better toy. That head coulda been on ANYTHING. This toy should not exist.
(Also, Blurr came misassembled. His crotch is upside-down. You can pop it out and put it back the way it should, but it wouldn't be BotCon without one of the toys arriving put together the wrong way.)
People say Blurr's pretty, but I don't really see it. I do like the lightning deco in car mode, but I don't find his robot mode very compelling at all, other than the new eye-patch. (The eye-patch is great.) Maybe if there were more color contrast in robot mode, instead of being almost entirely black, dark blue, and dark purple.
Bitchity bitch bitch bitch.
I'm hoping future Transformers club fiction makes these guys interesting, or I'll probably ditch them later. Sideswipe was fairly important in the comic, and I do like my army of Heroic Decepticons for some intangible reason, but Blurr did practically nothing and his bio card did him no favors. Additionally, Sideswipe has his hilarious bio card motto keeping him teetering closer to my "keep" pile: "There is only one rule now: revenge!" I'm not sure that makes sense, as I'm certain "revenge" isn't really a rule, per se, but that it doesn't make sense is amusing to me.
Again, the hints of camp save these guys. Well, they save Sideswipe. Blurr's state is pending.
Edit: Hold the presses. I forgot Blurr's quote is "The smarter I am, the faster you die." Now that's quality camp. [2008/05/05 4:09 pm] I don't know anything about Casey Coller, this new Transformers artist, except that he is my new god.
©2008 David Willis 
