It turns out my list wasn’t quite as long as it should have been so Now I’m off my leash and I’m finishing up the challenge with a few ideas I’ve been thinking about since I started this. Starting with the Royal Flush Gang.
The Royal Flush Gang are pretty much Justice League villains, and mostly considered a joke both in the universe and out. They kind of got a decent reboot in Batman Beyond where they are now a family of criminals. All of a sudden they were a little interesting.
So for this, I’m dropping the stupid costumes. (whether they have costumes I’m still thinking about.) THey’re professional criminals, in the vein of a lot of the heist films I’ve been enjoyinglately. (I haven’t decided whether they’re family yet, beyond King and Queen being an item) Also as the name implies, they are part of the Joker’s network. I don’t think they work directly under him, more something in the vein of the Joker and King go way back and The Joker has them on retainer. Based on this I think they’ll work well in the Batman Rogues Gallery.
I was beginning to lose hope, but the magic Tupperware finally relented and let me draw Catwoman.
One thing I’ve always liked about the lovely Ms. Kyleis she’s probably the best example of the difference between criminal and villain in the entire DC Universe. Where she’s just a thief, the best thief out there but a thief. She doesn’t want to take over the world or anything, she’s there to do the heist, but once the vigilante’s show up she’s out of there.
These days it’s popular for all of the artists to follow Adam Hughes’example and cast Audrey Hepburn in the role as Selina for me I think I’ll go with the unforgettable Eartha Kitt! (The only problem going that way is that having her wear any sort of mask would interfere with Ms. Kitt’s phenomenal eyebrows!)
So in the homestretch of this sketch challenge, I finally got to Nightwing. I can’t say I was looking forward to it. It’s not that I like Dick Grayson, It’s just that I don’t think there’s anything to him.
At first, I had a completely uninspired idea of doing just a generic shot of our boy walking towards the camera looking badass. I managed to spruce it up by having all the Robins cheering on their hero
He is the first of them to ever finish his apprenticeship, after all.
I’m beginning to scrape the bottom of the Magic Tupperware here where I’m just getting the remaining civilians on the list, starting with Harvey Bullock.
When I first came across Harvey in Alan Moore‘s Swamp Thing run where his general lazy and sloppy appearance made him easy to underestimate. I later saw him in other stories as the face of the Gotham Police Department, to make it clear there were other people we knew besides James Gordon. Later he even became a secret agent in DC’s Checkmate title.
It was only with the animated series and doing my own research that I learned he was also originally introduced as a standard corrupt cop.
They’ve been pretty much writing him that way ever since, and conveniently forgot about the checkmate storyline.
This week I decided to have some fun and watch some films I had heard about for some time about Viking adventures. ( I briefly considered calling it Viking Fantasy but while one of the films definitely was, the other one was just vague enough I figured I’d play it safe.)
The first on my list, Valhalla rising, by Nicolas Winding Refn, was one that several of my friends spoke highly of starting Mads Mikkelsen.(Mainly because it was so different from Mikkelsen roles I’d seen.)
Mikkelsen plays an unnamed mute thrall called One-Eye by the boy who looks after him.. He is forced by his masters to fight other thralls to the death. (In fact he such a good fighter one has to wonder how the Vikings caught him in the first place.) He eventually escapes killing all of his captors. Into contact with a band of Christian Vikings. They are on a crusade to reach the holy land and invite One-Eye and the boy, who has accompanied him, to come with them. Rather than reach the holy land, they sail into a mysterious fog bank and find themselves in a mysterious wooded land. (Which eventually is revealed to be North America.) There they have to find their way, while all the time they are being watched.
This is a very beautiful film the explosive violence contrasting marvelously with the long silence and the restrained palette of the look of it.
The next film on my list, the 13th warrior, directed by John McTiernan, named after the book of the same name by Michael Crichton (when it’s not called by its original name, Eaters of the Dead) tells the story of real-life Arab poet Ahmad ibn Fadlan, played by Antonio Banderas, who is sent on a diplomatic mission to contact northern barbarians. He and his companions meet up with a band of Vikings on the Volga river. While he is there, an emissary comes to call the king of the band, Buliwyf to help their lord fight monsters who killing them Ahmad, is is drafted as the 13th warrior of the band, and forced to go and join the Vikings to fight the mysterious and dreaded ‘Wendol’ who are later revealed to be the last remaining Neandertals in the world surviving til the 10th century. Can anybody any of our heroes survive let alone defeat the enemy?.
This was mostly a loyal adaptation of the original book with an excellent performance from Banderas. The rest of the performances were relatively flat. The action was good. The Wendol themselves could have been done a better done. But for it was a fun watch.