Robots Cartoonimated "Robots Cartoonimated" is signed and numbered by the cartoonist and printed on 8.5"x11"
cardstock glossy paper. A copy is just $20, and you can order
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No toys today! Let's take the day off for behind-the-scenes drudgery.
To the right is the page of sketches where I hammered down what Robin's little sister would look like. She would look similar, of course, but I wanted to make sure that if Robin ever got a haircut or whatever, she and Roz would still be distinct. So her face had to be different in some small ways.
First of all, she's got dots for eyes, rather than full eyeballs. Secondly, glasses! That should do it. I made sure they weren't Amber's glasses, but the mere addition of glasses made Roz steer a little too close to Billie from Roomies!. So I had to tinker with the hair more. Added more loops to the bangs, made the back bushier.
(I've probably mentioned this before, but coming up with new character designs is sometimes a very harrowing and humbling thing for me. It's hard to work in the established "style" or "parts list" or whatever and not have your new character start looking too close to an existing one. I get reminded how limited my art style can be, at least in the attractive-female-arena. Guys you can add at least crazy schnozzes to.)
Anyway, I decided to go with the inked design on the right. I have made the hair a little bushier in the back, but that's the basic feel I'm going for. It looks the most quasi-Robinesque while also looking like her own woman.
Some of you may remember the first mention of Robin's sister from Robin's "introduction" to Shortpacked! Book 2. At least, some of you better have!
I've also started experimenting with texturing in backgrounds. I'm happy with the bristly texturing on the trees and whatnot, but I still need to decide what, if anything, I'm gonna do with buildings. Or if I'm going to bother with this sorta stuff when they're inside. It's awfully time-consumptive. Oh well. Leave thoughts if you wanna [2009/07/01 11:02 pm] Shortpacked!:There is another.
Way long, long ago, back when I was but a lad, BotCon was run by some other folks. But the 2005 convention was not to be, and the license was taken away from those folks and given to the current folks. But because of that and other things, we didn't get a very awesome exclusive. Defensor! Robots in Disguise Optimus Prime was to be redecoed as an homage to G1 Defensor, with its smaller robot as Hot Spot. Defensor woulda gotten a new head, even. And he was to be from a universe where he was the last surviving Autobot, at the mercy of Megazarak and his genocidal armies. It would have been awesome. But, as I said, the convention changed ownership. We got Megazarak, but never his intended arch-nemesis.
So I was happy when the relatively-small Titanium SeriesRobots in Disguise Optimus Prime toy was recently redecoed as Hot Spot. It's not really the same deco at all - the BotCon toy was decoed as Defensor, while this one is decoed as Hot Spot. And, wow, the BotCon toy would have had a buttload of paint. And Hasbro doesn't have Hot Spot's name, so he's "Hot Zone." But dammit, it's close enough.
I'd never bought this mold before, so it was a new toy to me. It involves a lot of turning itself inside out. The legs, for example, just peel open like a banana and reverse. The torso and arms are a lot more straight-forward. Like all Titaniums, he's partly die-cast metal, too. The feet are, thankfully, (which really helps him stand up, I'd imagine), and the chest. It's probably one of the least-bad Titaniums. Titaniums were never good toys. But this mold's definitely on the good side of mediocre.
Since Hot Zone's packaging bio paints him as nothing more than your normal, everyday Hot Spot, and not the alternate-universe Last Autobot guy, I wrote my own bio for him. I asked the Transformers Fan Club guys if they wanted one, but 2004 Universe stuff isn't really their focus at the moment. So I'll print it here! I've included as much as I remember from the original concept, hoping to stay true to the original purpose. Megazarak, for example, was going to join the side of good against Unicron in the Universe conflict, despite being history's greatest monster. That seemed like a terrible thing for Hot Spot, so I played with that a bit. Hope you enjoy!
Hot Spot's life has been a neverending nightmare. It began when Megatron returned from the dead, reanimated as the merciless Megazarak, and his armies scoured the surface of Cybertron, wiping out Autobot and Decepticon alike. Not even Optimus Prime was spared from the slaughter. Hot Spot was able to wrestle the Matrix from Megazarak's hands as Optimus was left a dry husk on the shores of the Rust Sea, but even then Hot Spot never imagined it would fall to him to wield it. With Ultra Trion dead, leaving him the sole remaining Autobot left on Cybertron, he had little choice. Even though Cybertron was littered with the corpses of millions of slain Transformers, many of them friends, Hot Spot refused to give up.
But even that wasn't the end! Both Hot Spot and Megazarak were pulled into a multiversal conflict between Unicron, his minions, and the so-called Children of Primus. When Hot Spot finally emerged from the Cauldron, warped by the Pit into a scorched, twisted midnight vision of himself, and tainted by Unicron's dark energies, he made a shocking discovery. Megazarak had joined the forces of good! The brutal tyrant had singlehandedly turned the tide of victory away from Unicron's minions, becoming a cruel beacon of hope. In a final twist of irony, Hot Spot was forced to fight at the side of the very being who had slaughtered the entire population of his home universe. This turn of events is not lost on Megazarak himself.
For now, Hot Spot bides his time. With the help of Rhinox and Ratchet, he has shed the Unicron contamination from his body, becoming Hot Zone. Though the visual scars were removed, dark schemes plague his mind. He quietly entertains thoughts of assassinating Megazarak, avenging his Cybertron, but robbing the war of its greatest hero.
Oh, and Hot Zone is a Target-exclusive, along with an Optimus Prime and a Thrust. Go check out their endcaps if you're interested. Meanwhile, all those links above remind me that there are a lot of stubs from that fiction-era needing badly to be filled. [2009/06/30 10:44 pm] Shortpacked!:Gotcha journalism.
God damn, I didn't need to be remembered how much of a bitch it is to photograph Ironhide so that you can actually see him and not a big black silhouette.
Toys "R" Us had a pretty good sale ($5 off!) on Revenge of the Fallen stuff, so I finally got around to getting the new retooled Voyager Ironhide. He comes with a new head and new arm cannons. Both are much more "movie-accurate," though since the cannons are now much bigger and irregular in shape, they combine and plug into a mount on the back of the truck bed in vehicle mode, rather than tuck underneath the running boards.
I only wanted the head and guns.
See, Premium Ironhide (from the end of the first movie's toyline) has a gloss-black finish that's really sharp. And painfully movie-accurate. I say "painfully" because, man, it is ROUGH trying to tell what stuff to paint or what stuff to leave bare, because he's so shiny and glossy, what appears silver on him changes from shot to shot. So I went with a minimal approach.
(The old head was glued together, not screwed, so you'll have to remove the screws underneath the neck panel to swap the heads.)
Silver paint on the new head really brings it to life. I wasn't 100% sold on it until I got the details in there. Now it's immistakably Ironhide, down to his sculpted eye-squint. You can sort of see the difference between the two heads in the photo on the right. The old one's been sloppily painted and the new one hadn't yet been, so it's not exactly a 1:1 comparison.
I wish they'd given Ratchet the same treatment in the new line. His toy's just a straight redeco with no new head or anything. He needs one! His sculpt is based on non-final concept art. When I painted him up, I had to fudge all sorts of details that weren't there or vice versa between the toy and CGI model. D'oh well. Dem's the breaks.
I went back and got that Robot Heroes set that I'd passed on before! See, though the packaging claims the helicopter guy is Blackout, it lies. It is lying packaging. The character is clearly Grindor, who appears unnamed in Revenge of the Fallen.
(Blackout is dead, after all. The first movie very importantly killed him!)
Hasbro was kind enough to pack BlackoutGrindor with a double-sworded Optimus Prime. And by "kind," I mean "brutal." Poor Grindor. All you ever wanted to do was exterminate the human race! What did you ever do to deserve this kind of treatment?
Anyway, what this means is that I now have my Revenge of the Fallen forest battle all assembled and ready to go. I can put the "Forest Battle" track from theROTF score into my Frenzy CD player and let the imagination fly.
So I figger I'll get a Jolt, but he'll be stuck in the back where I can't see him most of the time.
Bumblebee, if you look closely, has been painted up a bit since you last saw him. I detailed up his arms, torso, and legs. I'm probably not 100% finished, but I was throwing this new ROTF display together, and he's presentable.
I suppose Jetfire's hitting shelves out there, so he's an omission, and I'm not planning to get the Deluxe Arcee bikes. They're just too big! It'd ruin the sense of scale I've built up. I will get the upcoming Legend Arcee, since she's tiny, but I doubt they'll make any beyond the red one. I'll have to make do without the purple and blue Arcees.
Man, this has been the most exciting blog post ever, hasn't it? Maybe I'm keeping a low profile. The world's celebrities are dropping like flies, and I don't need any of that kind of cosmic attention!
Seeing two Fallens interacting reminds me about all that Multiversal Singularity stuff. Hasbro fiction guru Forest Lee said at BotCon a month ago that all The Fallens were the same individual, just hopping from universe to universe. This was intended to be his deal for a few years now, but this whole live-action movie thing complicates matters. Why?
Because there's like 30 different versions of the movie out there, and they're all canon. They're all canon as separate-but-similar universes. There's the movie itself. There's the IDW comic book adaptation. There's the novel. There's the junior novel, the I Can Read! storybooks, probably some coloring books... and they're all valid universes!
So apparently The Fallen, if he's all the same guy, had to live through the movie (or a variant thereof) multiple times, over and over. Kind of like Wile E Coyote, he kept coming back for more, hoping to win it this go-round.
Then again, I'd be itching to try again one universe over if I was thwarted once by a mere toss-into-space. That's just asking for a do-over.
Someone needs to sort this out. Forest, you got some 'splainin' to do! [2009/06/25 11:01 pm] Shortpacked!:Finally, real spoilers?
And there in the strip was my traumatizing moment, for those of you who were wondering. Not cool! Seriously not cool! (Of course, the trauma was augmented by the offending scene being the clip they showed us at BotCon. I was all YYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYMYFAVORITECHARACT--aaaaagghgghghggghnnnoooooooooooooo...)
I... I need time to heal.
Anyway, today I learned that lesbiany art will sell for $150 on eBay. This is either a really good or a really bad lesson to learn, depending. Maybe I should stop drawing this dumb pop culture junk and just start working for Slipshine or something.
Meanwhile, I was totally interviewed for a newspaper! Apparently I am a prominent Transformers-like-person, so the Fayetteville Observer included me in their Revenge of the Fallen article. I of course namedropped Shortpacked! and the Transformers Wiki, and it was a pretty interesting experience. Brian Dukes, the reporter, was a fun guy to talk to. His appetite for Transformers knowledge is strong, and I have been feeding it. (Though Starscream's French-Canadian name probably shouldn't be on the short-list of Transformers trivia to bestow.) There are a few errors in the story, like the Transformers Wiki being official (it's not!), but I notified him of these errors and they are being corrected for the Weekender edition of the paper. [2009/06/24 11:07 pm] Shortpacked!:The comic I drew about seeing the movie before seeing the movie.
So, this movie's getting about a 20% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes! Woof. What do I think about the Transformers sequel? Without being too specific:
I had a stupid grin on my face for nearly the full two-and-a-half hours. There was an incident that caused me great personal traumatization, which I will get into later when I can be more bold with spoilers. I do need to clarify this a little. The natural assumption is that I didn't like one of the several, several crass verbal or visual gags. Those are mostly white noise to me, though they were nearing the threshold of annoyance. Not from content, but from lack of, well, variety. In isolation, most of them were fairly cute, even the one visual gag people bring up as the worst offender. Meh! No, I was traumatized by something else entirely. But again, later. Friday's strip. You've been warned!
GIANT ROBOTS. All else is nitpickery.
In fact, the movie starts out very tightly. Sam's world grounds the film. College is a good setting for it! Too bad it leaves about halfway through. Once it does, stuff starts to unravel. The movie kind of gets away from itself. Removing the seemingly never-ending sequence where Sam has to carry his sock (trust me) from one point to another, or at least shortening it, would have made the whole thing gel more. The movie prolongs its own climax for no super important reason.
But there were lots of good points! Holy God, Starscream is a real character now, and he's awesome. There's a scene between just Decepticons which is one of the most gratifying of the entire film franchise so far, just because these guys get to talk and be people. That was sorely, sorely missing from the first film. And, of course, Sam's parents are awesome as always. Though they do approach caracature, they feel more real than most movie parents.
And, hey, those of you who wanted more robots in the first film? Well, this is your movie! It's 90% robots. Of course, this has the side effect of making it less, well, human. Again, I wish it stayed closer to the college setting in the second half of the film. I think that's where its soul was. I could sell my dad and stepmom, who loved the first film, on the first half of the second film. The last half they'd probably get a little bored. The first film left you wanting more. The second left you wanting a little less!
Oh, and there's this guy. His insides are on fire. He wants revenge. [2009/06/23 10:04 pm] Shortpacked!:This link will work at 11pm EST.
Finally, the night of Revenge of the Fallen is upon us! Will it suck? Will it rock? Will it not matter because there's friggin' robots beatin' the friggin' crap out of each other? The only thing that is certain is that we're seeing it on IMAX tonight at midnight, over in Easton.
Been savin' the toy on the left for just such a special occasion. He's Human AllianceBumblebee, and he comes with a little mini Sam Witwicky. Remember Alternators? Those 1:24 scale licensed-vehicle Transformers from a few years ago? (That I'm starting to get rid of on eBay?) Well, Bumblebee here is practically one of 'em. He's not labeled as such, but he's definitely in that vein. He, too, is about 1:24 and a licensed vehicle. And G1 Bumblebee never got an Alternators toy, what with that whole Volkswagon-hates-Transformers thing, so it's nice to see at least one incarnation of the character get his due.
Normally I'd pass on something like this. I'm tired of Alternators (remember, eBaying them away?) and I've been trying to keep my ROTF purchases to things that are as to scale with each other as possible. And this guy's a big'un! Though he's Alternators-size in car mode, he is quite the tall drink o' water in robot mode. He's staying faaaaaar away from the rest of my ROTF toys.
But I got him because he just looks that friggin' awesome. The idea of getting a human driver along with your Transformer is something I've wanted for forever. I like having toys of the human characters, and Sam's not a bad one to have. (I ended up getting all the Screen Battles sets from the first movie just to get the little human figurines.) And even beyond that simple novelty, the toy is built to interact with the human toy in multiple ways.
The photo shows him standing in Bumblebee's palm. There's a peg there. There's also a peg on the back of his forearm (the seat), which plugs into a peghole in his shoulderblades, and a little firing mechanism flips over Sam's shoulders. There's another set of pegs inside Bumblebee's torso, so that Sam can stand peeking over Bumblebee's shoulders, where there's a little mini-gun that can deploy which Sam can man.
Sam himself is pretty articulated for a toy his size. He's about half the size of a G.I. Joe (Joes are 1:18), yet he has universal shoulders and hips and knees. (The knees are universal, but they're prevented from bending the wrong way at the kneecap.) And his head turns and his ribcage is on a balljoint or something.
Bumblebee himself is a very aesthetically-pleasing sight. There's not much, if all, "fake" kibble on him, and he looks like he's made out of a lot of twisting, folding parts, because he is! His legs are a lot more "made out of real car parts" than the actual movie design, which helps ground him, I think. He looks very solid, very appealing. Bumblebee's design excels at this scale. He's just big enough to get the right amount of complexity out of him.
And he does hit that balance right. Getting him in and out of vehicle and robot modes isn't an ordeal, yet he's as complex as he looks. There's very little of the ol' Alternators fitting-the-car-skin-back-together stuff. Bumblebee's playable! And unlike Alternators, he's got a firing missile launcher and all the aforementioned Sam interactivity. (Though at $30, he is $10 more than they were.) Best of all, his head actually works like in the movie! His forehead slides down over his face, creating his insectile battle mask look. That's something I've wanted a Bumblebee toy to have for a while. (They retooled last movie's "Ultimate Bumblebee" to do this for this movie's toyline, but it reportedly involves opening up his head and doing some voodoo or something. Not organic at all.)
So, yeah, if you want to get something good from the Revenge of the Fallen line, I suggest this one. It's definitely at the top of the list, if I had to narrow it down to just a few. Even my roommate Steve, who isn't so big into the movie aesthetic, thought this Bumblebee looked pretty neat. There's a few other offerings in the Human Alliance line coming out: Sideswipe/Epps, Skids/Arcee/Mikaela, and Barricade/Frenzy, but Bumblebee is the one that caught my eye the most. If you only want one thing from ROTF, I think this is it.
And I also am auctioning a set of four Alternators I don't want anymore - Sideswipe, Mirage, Smokescreen, and Wheeljack. Expect some more of these guys soon. I'm clearancing most of 'em out! I no longer require them. (I am, of course, keeping at least the Ravages.)
It's June 22, and that means the Revenge of the Fallen merchandising promotional push is in its final stage! Today Burger King started its "Transform Your Way" promotion, featuring a horrifying Transformerized King, kid's meal toys, and.... a special Transformers sandwich!
The Stackticon is basically the BK Stacker but with the "stacker sauce" swapped out with a barbecue sauce. It looks disgusting and tastes like Death-At-40! (I would say "Death-at-30" like I used to, but that concept's a lot scarier for me these days.) Offset its nutricional deficiencies by getting some apple fries or something. They're not actually fried! Bummer. I mean, good!
Tomorrow, the various video games come out, plus the soundtrack and score. (Sweet, an actual score! And not released some-odd months later!) And tomorrow night? The movie itself. As of this writing, RottenTomatoes.com says it's 39% fresh! That's still better than, uh, Land of the Lost?
©2009 David Willis 
