Well after nearly a week of drawing obscure, to completely unknown, stories the magic Tupperware finally gave me a live one with Little Red Riding hood.
I have to confess this is one I have mixed feelings about this one. As an unrepentant treehugger I can be pretty knee jerk about it being one of the stories indirectly responsible for the near extinction of the gray wolf. On another note while I’ll be happily part of the chorus saying there are no reported attacks by wolves in history, I’ll also wonder why the wolf would go into all of the trouble of the Grandmother disguise when he was alone in the woods with a little girl where there could be another unreported attack. On top of this there’s so many takes on this that have already been done from all the jokes about the wolf having a crossdressing fetish to all of the hypersexualzation of the story with Red Riding Hood in bed with the wolf.
All in all I’m not sure if I’m happy with this one… sure it looks fine but I don’t think this is an original choice and I could probably point out about four separate illustrations I’m cribbing… Also I think I screwed up Red’s feet.
I just recently enjoyed DC comics’ Wacky Raceland a humorous apocalyptic revision to Hanna-Barbara’s sixties cartoon The Wacky Races. This got me waxing nostalgically about Hanna-Barbara’s best villains, Dick Dastardly! Dick is a wonderful parody of every mustache twirling villain from silent films. The kind you find yourself liking far more than the cardboard heroes he would inevitably fail to defeat. This got me thinking about all of the movies that inspired the Wacky Racers as well as Dastardly’s second starring role: Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines.
I started my viewing with Blake Edwards, The Great Race. Loosely based on an actual 1908 auto race from New York to Paris. The Great Race embraces a silent film sensibility featuring Tony Curtis as the dashing hero all in white, The Great Leslie, and his rival, the villainous Professor Fate, played by Jack Lemmon dressed all in black top hat and everything. From there we follow our two rivals as they go from one one spot to another on the map as they jockey their way to be first to the finish line.
While this film was fun I had mixed feelings about it. Due to sabotage all the other racers are eliminated in the first mile so it never has the ensemble quality that I expected. The other problem I had was it was extremely episodic with a lot of the stops they make in the map are stories unto themselves distracting from the film. So nice as western musical number and giant pie fight were, they all seemed like big lipped alligator moments to me.
Fortunately the good parts of the movie trump these completely and that is Jack Lemmon chewing the scenery as he ineptly cheats his way across the globe
What we get is story of the early days of aviation with an international ensemble cast competing in an airplane race across the Channel in an endeavor to promote (British) Aviation.
This film was fun. For all practical purposes the the plot itself is optional. What we are here for is the wonderful over top stereotypes ham it up, my favorite is Gert Fröbe of Goldfinger fame hamming it up as a straight laced Prussian officer who’s learned to fly from following the Prussian Army’s Big Book of Instructions (step one sit down) Even funnier is when their on going rivalry culminates in a duel with blunderbusses in hot air balloons )apparently something like this actually happened.
For day twelve of the challenge the magic tupperware told me to draw the Twelve Brothers. Brothers turning into birds (type number 451 in the Arne-Thompson index) is a fairly common trope, Grimm alone has three examples. When picking which to put in the hat I chose the one with the brothers turning into ravens rather than swans) Ravens are cool.
I’m mostly happy with this one, though I probably rushed the crowd a bit and the two brothers in the foreground miay look a little bit like a stop motion effect of the transformation.
The Duration of Life will probably be the most obscure fairy tale I get this month (this is what we call wishfull thinking) On top of that there really much going on. With nothing much more than a couple of animals standing in line, to petition god.
In hindsight I regret not thinking of doing this as a celestial DMV with all of the animals taking a number. (It probably wouldn’t have fit in the constraints of the format.)
For today’s Sketch we’re back to Hans Christian Andersen with The Great Sea Serpent, one so obscure I hadn’t even heard of it until I started working on my list and I completely missed the point of the story the first time I read it.
Once I did get the point I really liked the concept of all the animals of the sea being unable to comprehend the alien (human) technology, and turn it into something it is not. (it just occurred to me that for someone as spiritual as Andersen usually is in his stories, this could ironically be considered an Atheist parable)
Still I really enjoyed doing this one with the only challenge was to keep the seaweed and algae from looking like fire in this medium.
I seem to be making up for pulling top ten stories like Snow White and Hansel and Gretel on the first week with stories stories so obscure I had to reread them before starting the sketch. Today’s story, The Clever Servant is a several of the Foolish Servant stories within the Grimm Brothers’ collection. (All of them come off as long form variations of the “My blank is so dumb” jokes) Most of the time they’re not quite as fun to do because they all seem to bail down into a single absurdist scene that don’t translate into a single static image as well as you’d think.
I think I centered the servant a little too much on this one in the process not giving the master and the cow as much room as they needed.
Well after nearly a week of drawing obscure, to completely unknown, stories the magic Tupperware finally gave me a live one with Little Red Riding hood.
