For today’s sketch, the magic Tupperware told me to draw Professor Jonathan Crane The Scarecrow!
My interest in the Scarecrow as a character has evolved over the years. When I first encountered him was in Challenge of the Superfriends where he was just a man dressed as a scarecrow and my reaction was so what? Later when I found him again in the comics as the “master of fear” he became more interesting.
Having said that, I really didn’t have much to add to his concept. I only tweaked his look in an attempt to make him just a little scarier and slightly more realistically dressed (for example do those floppy hats that most people draw scarecrows wearing even exist in real life?)
Anyway, other than rushing a little bit and doing a lousy job on the rats and snakes and somehow having ink accident with a marker, I’m mostly happy with the design.
I just finished reading the first fifteen issues of the New Batman Rebirth title, and while Tom King is certainly an excellent writer, in an effort to make it clear the Batman setting is part of the DC universe, stuck in a lot of fantastic elements that were
so blatant they didn’t even pretend to be science fiction. This drew attention for me the necessity, at least for this sketch challenge, to keep Batman as realistic as possible. But today, for the first time* the magic Tupperware told me to draw one of the more problematic characters, Killer Croc.
Waylon Jones aka Killer Croc has been all over the place from bruiser with a skin condition to a ten-foot tall walking reptile. These days the writers and artists seem to lean towards the superstrong reptile-man. For the purposes, I’m going back to basics, where he’s a legbreaker with Ichthyosis.
Jones kept the moniker “Killer Croc” from his wrestling days partially from his distinct skin condition and partially from his habit of using Gotham City’s extensive sewer system as a bolt hole. While never really a “master criminal” he’s many master criminal’s first choice for a caper’s security, or if a few heads need to be banged together. For the most part, I’m thinking Maurice Oboukhoff from The Killing (though I can’t imagine Croc playing chess in his spare time.)
At the moment I’m seeing him played by Dave Bautista.
*Okay technically it’s the second time but there is no way I could squeeze Man-Bat into my version of the setting.
Harvy Dent, AKA Two Face is one of the Batman villains who is really easy to overthink. Just how does his dissociative personality work. Is he quite as much obsessed with dualism and random chance as he thinks he is. For that matter even if you’re flipping a coin to make a choice, do you have to flip the coin to propose what choices to make in the first place.
Fortunately, for the sake of the visuals, all that matters is the face and the coin.
As for approach in the setting this challenge I think I’ll stick with the approach created in Dark Knight.
For this week’s selection, I watch films about Napoleon Bonaparte.
The first on my list, Sergei Bondarchuk’sWaterloo, was a film that I had heard mixed things about. On one side I definitely heard that lots of people like that thinking of it as an epic and historically accurate production of the Battle of Waterloo. On the other hand, I heard that it flopped in 1970.
Now it was time for me to see for myself.
Waterloo starts with Napoleon(Ron Steiger) exiled to the island of Elba. Nine months later he’s back and pigs control over France again. With the forces of Europe against him, he leads his army to Brussels where the English troops are gathered. know, it’s up to The Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer) to stop him once and for all. But with such a force against him is there a chance?
Count me as one of the people who like this movie. This was an incredible epic spectacle which has which history has forgiven. The scale of this is just breathtaking with the arm both armies played by Soviet soldiers. It was a joke at the time that the director was in control of the six largest army in the world. Looking at it this does not appear to be an exaggeration.
Steiger is fantastic is Napoleon playing him up as a hyperactive larger than life mix of ego and intellect. Plummer as Wellington is the complete opposite, a very proper, but sarcastic, British gentleman with ice running through his veins. Who will do what it takes in order to win? Together the contrast is amazing.
If I have one problem with it, it is that by definition half the film consists of only one fight scene.
The next film on my list, Antoine de Caunes’sMonsieur N, was one I hadn’t even heard of until I was doing my research and the page about Napolean films, I was looking at, claimed it was the best of the lot.
This British-French bilingual tells the story of Napoleon’s imprisonment in St. Helena from the point of view of a British lieutenant (Jay Rodan)who is one of his jailers. It also suggests an interesting little conspiracy theory that instead of dying in St Helen, Napoleon eventually escaped from the island using a body double and lived out the rest of his life in Louisiana with the British none what the wiser.
I mostly enjoy this film, at least the first half Philippe Torreton does a very good job as Napoleon playing him as someone who is living in the past, but at the same time, he is sure of himself at all times preserving the loyalty of his handful of remaining followers who went into exile. The rest of the cast is a wonderful ensemble of character actors I never heard of most notably Richard E. Grant as Major-GeneralSir Hudson Lowe the overzealous governor who sees himself as Napolean’s nemesis but in reality is terribly outclassed. My only real problem with it is it kind of loses its momentum in the second half and the premise of Napoleon’s hypothetical escape feels more than a little far-fetched.
Today’s sketch, Hugo Strange may have been the harder sketches I have in this challenge. First there’s not much to do with Hugo Strange. Since he first appeared in the 1940s, he’s gone back and forth between generic mad scientist and evil psychiatrist.
When I first came across him, in the eighties, the writers were doing him as one of those cartoon knee-jerk psychiatrists who would show up on talk shows saying how criminals, like the Joker, were just victims of the Bat, while in secret obsessing about Batman and doing lots of evil plots, usually involved brainwashing his patients, as weapons for his cause.
Later on, most notably in Matt Wagner’s wonderful Batman and the Monster Men, he’s brought back to being a standard mad scientist and the one responsible for the aforementioned Monster Men.
So for this, I went more for the mad experimentalist, (a psychiatrists office doesn’t really say evil without another context.) Here he’s doing his very own version of the Ludovico Technique.
Incidentally, in case anybody was wondering if I forgot, second this composition was a mess because I was having trouble fitting both Strange and the “patient” he was administering the eyedrops to into the panel.
James Gordon is really one I hadn’t thought about. In a way, at least visually, he’s one of the easiest ones to do. But when you think about it, he’s also one of the hardest.
For the most part, I’m drawn towards Frank Miller’s version from both Dark Knight and Batman: Year One, The one good cop in a dirty and corrupt city.
This works better in comic books then elsewhere… I also watch the Wire.
A big city like Gotham isn’t a one-horse town for a sheriff to straighten out, and will eat the good cops with the bad.
Perhaps this is why Gordon turns a blind eye to a mysterious vigilante.
For today’s sketch, the magic Tupperware told me to draw Professor Jonathan Crane The Scarecrow!
I just finished reading the first fifteen issues of the New Batman Rebirth title, and while Tom King is certainly an excellent writer, in an effort to make it clear the Batman setting is part of the DC universe, stuck in a lot of fantastic elements that were
Today’s sketch, Hugo Strange may have been the harder sketches I have in this challenge. First there’s not much to do with 
