Monthly Archives: July 2013

On July 6, 1919 - A British dirigible landed in New York at Roosevelt Field. It completed the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by an airship.

Your challenge this week is to create a dirigible. Maybe it is a classic airship, a steam punk war machine, or a futuristic monolith. Your choice, use your imagination.

You only get one entry so be creative, and above all else, have fun!

All entries must be in JPG or PNG form (BMPs are too big), posted to a publicly accessible website (like the HeroMachine forums,ImageShack, PhotoBucket, or whatever);

• Entries must be made as a comment or comments to this post, containing a link directly to the image and the character name;
• The image must be new and designed specifically for the Pop Quiz;
• Please name your files as [your name]-[character name].[file extension] before you upload it. So DiCicatriz, for instance, would save his “Bayou Belle” character image as DiCicatriz-BayouBelle.png.
• Please make the link go directly to the image (like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this). See this post on how to get the direct link for most sites.

The contest closes at 9:00am eastern on Sunday, July 7.

Three time Academy Award Winner: Restoration, Dangerous Liaisons, The Last Emperor.

The SciFi Connection: Dr. Who

The Superhero Connection: Spiderman, Daredevil, Man of Steel

“Every moment is a moment of research. The more curious you are about everything the more enriching life is and also the more information you have when you try to come to design something. It might be the way the light falls on this spoon, it might be a reflection, it might be something really subtle and sensitive. But the thing is you have to try and stay open to those things.” – James Acheson

COSTUME DESIGN CREDITS

2013 Man of Steel

2010 The Warrior's Way

2007 Spider-Man 3

2004 Spider-Man 2

2003 Daredevil

2002 Spider-Man

2001 The Mists of Avalon (TV movie)

2000 The Little Vampire

1998 The Man in the Iron Mask

1996 The Wind in the Willows

1995 Restoration

1994 Frankenstein

1993 Little Buddha

1992 Wuthering Heights

1990 The Sheltering Sky

1988 Dangerous Liaisons

1987 The Last Emperor

1986 Biggles

1986 Highlander

1985 Brazil

1985 Water (as Jim Acheson)

1983 Bullshot (as Jim Acheson)

1983 The Meaning of Life (as Jim Acheson)

1981 Time Bandits (as Jim Acheson)

1972-1976 Doctor Who (TV series)

Interview Excerpt:

Q: What about the long Doctor Who scarf? Was that your creation? How did it come to fruition?

A: The bloody scarf. It’s amazing how often it comes up. So extraordinary. There are these Doctor Who nutters and it’s the 50th anniversary this year. I’ve even been approached to dig out my old drawings of Doctor Who including, particularly, the drawings of him wearing the scarf. The story is, I thought it would be interesting to give this new Doctor Who a scarf. I don’t know why, it was such a long time ago. I didn’t know anything about knitting but I knew I wanted these colors so I went to this wool shop and bought all this wool in these different colors and I had a friend who had a friend whose mother could knit. Some Doctor Who nut even tracked down this woman, who’s still alive, Begonia Pope. So I went to Begonia and I said, “Look, start knitting. These are the colors, the repeats are here.” I went back a week later and the scarf was 22-feet long.

Q: So you didn’t ask for it to be that long?

A:.No, she just used all the wool up! The actor who was playing Doctor Who was very tall. He sort of wrapped it around him and was like, “Yeah, this is great, we could use this.” The image we used [to create the character] was based on a Toulouse-Lautrec poster so that was why he had the scarf. Tom Baker, the actor, thought he could use it as a prop. So it stuck. I think we shortened it a little bit though.

For this week's big question, I want to discuss ageing in comics books. As we all know certain superheroes have been around in the same continuity since the 50's and 60's (Hal Jordan's Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man etc.) and some since the 30's and 40's (Captain America, The JSA), yet they don't seem to have aged more than 10 years. So, my question this week is: What is the best way to deal with character ageing in comics?

To start off with, lets look at how it is currently done by the big two. Over at Marvel, they seem to have a delayed progression approach (yup, technical term), which means time in their comics progresses slower than it does in the real world. Now, Spider-Man is the best person to look at to figure out their time scale, because he's the only one to have a definitive dated timeline. He got his powers aged 15 in 1962 (according to Spider-Man: Civil War) so that gives us a starting point. When The Amazing Spider-Man reached its 200th issue, it is mentioned that 5 years have passed since Peter got his powers. So that would make him 20, but the 200th issue was released in 1980, 18 years later. So going by that he should now be around about 30. But he's one of the younger heroes, Captain America was in his twenties in the 40's and even with the super-soldier serum, he'd still be in his late 60's and slowing down a bit by now.

Meanwhile, over at DC, things are a lot more complicated in terms of working out ages, because some characters seem to age (Members of the Teen Titans and other sidekicks) whilst some don't (all the main heroes and their supporting casts). Yet DC do have a more realistic approach to what would happen when a hero is too old to continue, even if they never use it for that reason. By having sidekicks age to adulthood, they can replace the hero with someone the reader already knows and likes (see Wally West and Dick Greyson).  But of course, as soon as you're settled in to the new order, DC's screwy continuity comes in and reboots the whole thing, leaving you with the guy they just got rid of, only younger.

It is a really hard one this, because on one hand, you don't want to screw around with a tried and tested formula and end up putting of the fans, but ageing and replacing characters would save having to reintroduce them to a new generation and in some ways would be more interesting, because the hero could grow with the reader. What do you guys think?

(I was originally going to include TV and movie series into this and talk about replacing actors in the Doctor Who way or the James Bond way, but I didn't want to over complicate things too much. If you want you can discuss that as well.)