A dream of extraordinary magnitude

Hit a thrift store with my friends last weekend. In the stacks of wax filled with lots of polka (remember: I’m in Ohio), soundtracks to 1960’s movies, Herb Alpert albums (temping) and Sesame Street records (also tempting), I found something that I never thought that I’d find in a million years:

Roxanne Shante’s first single? I don’t even have a turntable these days (YET) but there’s no way in hell that I’d pass up something like that. Since I have the luck of a wet turd, I’m guessing it’s a reprint even though the date says 1984.

One of my friends there hadn’t heard of the whole Roxanne thing because she’s too young. It wasn’t until I tried to explain it that I realized how damn insane it all was. Hell, it sounds even more insane after reading more about it and finding out that something between 30 (most likely) and 100 (only rumored) Roxanne-related songs came out. It was so big that even Wikipedia refers to it as the Roxanne Wars. Instead of trying to explain it, I’ll pass the peas to Fat Lace Magazine which has an entire series of posts dedicated to the whole thing.

Categories: Hip-Hop, Music, the Haul by PrimeOp
Tags: Marley Marl, Roxanne Shante

I just got done with the photos that my friends took at Screaming TikiCon and sent me and I’m ready to do a proper convention post now. Unless noted, these photos were taken by a friend of mine who prefers to stay mysterious.

We saw the Batcopter on the way to the Expo Center. I heard they were giving people Batcopter rides at some point. Diabolical!

I ran into my friend Jay (Edgefind on the Joe boards) in there and we got to yap about G.I.JOEs for a bit. I saw him a few other times and caught up with some other cool cats from different Joe boards. I never make it to the fan get-togethers so some people didn’t believe that I really existed since Snopes.com hadn’t really confirmed it yet.

Somebody was dressed up like a Lego Minifigure of a Modal Node Band Member. Why? I don’t know and I really don’t think there needs to be a reason to dress up as a minifig. For a few seconds, he was fighting with a non-minifig Boba Fett.

I went to school with the guy in excellent Penguin outfit. He was in method actor and didn’t break character except for acknowledging that he knew me. Holmes is dedicated like that and played the part to a capital T. WAUGH!

This is artist Ren McKinzie sketching out a very ill remix of Hanna-Barbera’s Captain Caveman:

I got a picture with writer Marc Sumerak who brings solid fun, funk, and characterization to his work. I thanked him doing that thing that he does so well and bought an autographed MA: Spider-Man TPB off him. He’s a cool cat and you can tell that he loves what he does. The man knows how to write a book that both kids and non-kids can enjoy and it’s a $50 bet that the young’uns coming up now will grow up to talk about how they got hooked on comics due to his work.

AW YEAH MAN! Got to meet two more makers of comics that save the world: Art Baltazar and Franco. I know them from Tiny Titans, the book that I use to wash away any horrible recent comic book happenings, but I took this chance to buy some Patrick the Wolf Boy comics because I’ve always wanted to read it. The friends that I rolled to the con with bought some too because they read my Tiny Titans whenever we hit the comic shop. They also had some free comics to give out so a lot of my haul was from them. Best of all, I got to hear them say, “AW YEAH TITANS!” in real life and that’s something beyond any price guide printed. Like Marc Sumerak, you can tell that these guys really love comics in a way that’ll keep the ball rolling for future generations to come.

It’s Catwoman and Me vs. anybody tryin’ to start some. Like the Beatnuts, no one’s ready to deal with us! There were a lot of great cosplayers and the woman dressed up as Catwoman was excellent at getting into character and posing. I think she was part of this larger group that had some insanely authentic outfits. Much respect to this Catwoman and the rest of the group!

And now, my favorite picture of the whole shabang was one that I took:

Knowing that I was lucky to get a second chance to see Yvonne Craig, I spent all of last Friday working on the Batgirl artwork. My day job and the cold that I have was wearing me out and I didn’t think I could do it, but I fought to get it done. I gave her a copy of it and she was gracious enough to pose with it. The artwork, which you can find on Illmosis and deviantART, is based on a photo that she autographed for me at Mid-Ohio-Comic-Con a few years back for drawing her years earlier. This latest art was an effort to make up for that earlier drawing and she looked really happy with it. I’m not great with likenesses but she liked it and that’s approval enough for me!

There are a bunch of people that I either couldn’t find (Tony Isabella and Ron Frenz) or forgot to come back when their table crowd thinned out (too many to list). I was lucky enough to meet people I just posted pics of along with the ones that I posted links to in the earlier post ‘Nuff respect to all those worked on this convention, all those who were kind enough to be guests and… dammit, I’ll just thank everyone. It still amazes me that we had such a great convention and I’m looking forward to next year. And yes, I’m getting a table next year.

Categories: Comics by PrimeOp
Tags: Art Redemption List, aw yeah titans, G.I.JOE, minifig, screaming tikicon

Screaming TikiCon was officially a blast. I’ll have posts with more stuff later. This con wasn’t about buying cool stuff as much as it was about meeting cool people and I did that. Having said that, here’s most of what I got:

Stuff I got

Lethal Showdown sketchbook vol 1 autographed and sketched in by the man known as Ren. Wait until you see what he sketched in there.

A sketchbook from the awesomedelic Cat Staggs

The MA:Spider-Man: Identity Crisis TPB autrographed by Marc Sumerak.

A magic MEGATON of good paper stuffs from Art Baltazar and Franco including a Tiny Titans issue I missed.

Not pictured: some artwork from Terry Huddleston. Check out his deviantART page and put him on your watch list if he’s not on it yet!

Plus: I bought a Marvel Superhero Showdown figure of Thor for two dollars. Two Dollars. TWO DOLLARS. In ya stankin’ face, Action Figure Aftermarket! My Shaolin Skinflint 36-cent Chamber training in patience has served me well yet again!

More as this story develops.

Categories: Comics by PrimeOp
Tags: aw yeah titans, screaming tikicon

The Screaming Tikicon happens in my neck of the woods so I’ll be there Saturday along with some good friends. If you see a guy that looks like this…

…that’s me. Yeah. Self-photo taken in the medicine cabinet mirror. I’ll have my “Folder of Scribblings” with me that has copies of color art seen on Illmosis. If you see me walking and I look like I’m angry, don’t worry because that’s just how I look. Now that I think about it, a lot of my characters look like that too. Just say, “Hey, Prime!” or whatever you know me as wherever you know me from. If you have nothing better to do, I’ll show you pictures of crap you’ve seen on the site and a bit of stuff that isn’t on the site yet.

Yes, I’m still using that old picture because I don’t have anything more fitting to put in the front. Yet.

Categories: Art, Comics, Entertainment by PrimeOp
Tags: screaming tikicon

The Most Beautifullest Things In This World pt. 1: The beatings will now begin.

Those who visited the now-defunct Bad(ass) Movies channel on Mogulus may have seen something that is close to the hearts of many 30-something Kung-Fu flick junkies. That’d be this:

That is the intro to Kung-Fu Theater. When I was a young’un back in the 80’s, this show would start right when the Saturday Morning Cartoons were over and delivered a weekly dose of cinematic assbeatery. Words, especially as clumsily as I use them, cannot express how much I looked forward to seeing that promo. During the original run you could catch anything from a Shaw Brothers classic like Superninjas (“Secret Weapons? YA BASTIDS!!!”) to a movie where, I swear to Grodd, a Kung-Fu master rides a wooden horse and increases his power by drinking urine. No, I’m not making that up and I have the tape somewhere. This show lead to a lot of things.

1.) 2:01 PM: I believe that Kung-Fu Theater started at noon and ended at 2:00 PM. At 2:01 PM, tons of male children in our apartment complex ran outside and began to fake-fu and beat the Wooden Horse Piss out of each other. Imagine the forest fight from Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain redone with kids fighting with broomstick bo staffs, improvised nunchacku (more on that later) and their tiny bare hands. Describing these wars with the word “epic” would be a insult to our life-and-death struggles beneath the Saturday afternoon sun and above the parking lot asphalt. No one really hit each other but you couldn’t tell because years of beat boxing gave us the power to provide all the necessary sound effects of beating each other to death. I think back on it now and, dammit, we were some amazing and psychotic kids.

2.) Improvised Nunchaku: Some kids bring out some kind of stick to use as a bo staff and most of us rolled into the fray barehanded like Golden Arms, leader of the Chi Sah gang. A few of us possessed a power developed by Poison Clan of the Five Deadly Venoms (especially the Lizard). No one was more brave than the few who had the cast iron nerve to take one of their mother’s broomsticks, cut it in half, attach each half to a piece of rope and wade into battle with the almighty Improvised Nunchaku. On the Universal Scale of Weaponry, it still ranks above the Fatal Flying Guillotine and Mike Haggar’s lead pipe but slightly below the Eternian Power Sword and the Crissaegrim. Why was it so fearsome? Imagine the beating you’d get for cutting one of your mother’s broomsticks in half. Yeah. Due to this, the Improvised Nunchaku was the sign of a true B.M.F. of the highest order.

3.) Influence: This show was the reason that I got addicted to the genre and love these movies by the pound. Most Hollywood action flicks are pretty predictable in how people fight. But Kung-Fu movies seem to have an infinite amount of ways to beat someone down with the human hand or foot and that’s before you start bringing in both real and imaginary weapons. I didn’t care if the movies didn’t always make sense or that the voices and mouths didn’t sync properly. So what? Those movies were high-octane awesome and reality need not apply in this kind of escapism. Beyond the violence, I always loved the constant underdog status that many of the movies had. The theme of rebels fighting the Chings or Japanese occupation had a social resonance beyond its own setting. Plus, you can’t beat watching people fight social injustice by kicking the hell out of it.

Aw hell yeah. This was back when I started to make up my own characters and I thought it’d be cool to have a martial arts character. I didn’t know that much about martial arts so I made him a ninja superhero so I put “that weird swirly thing from the beginning of Kung Fu Theater” on Snake-Eyes’ comic book outfit. After years of changes, that character became the man that you see to the side of this text: Twofold. ORIGINAL CHARACTER DON’T STEAL. Sorry, that’s an internet habit. Seriously, if Kung-Fu Theater never existed or even had that intro, I never would’ve made Twofold. Many of the supporting characters like his teacher Master Hsu and Sean Chan were inspired by sitting in front of Grandma Marva’s big floor model TV to watch the adventures in this world that was just as exciting, heroic, violent and bugged-out as the comic books I was already hooked on. These movies also inspired my appreciation of the Beat-Em-Up video game genre of games like Final Fight, Double Dragon and Streets of Rage. That love is on display on a certain fansite that I created that lead to me making a lot of great online friends. I don’t care how corny that sounds, because it’s damned true. So as much as I thank all the filmmakers, directors, actors, teachers and others who made those flicks possible, I also want to thank the gang who put USA’s Kung Fu Theater and especially those who made that intro. I owe that person a lot. Maybe even a pair of Improvised Nunchaku.

Categories: Movies, Twofold by PrimeOp
Tags: addiction, Improvised Nunchaku, kung fu theater, shaw brothers

These were going to be in the blog header but I didn’t like how it looked when everything was put together. Nothing spectacular here but it makes me wonder how much effort most colorists put into rendering beans.

Categories: Art, workbox by PrimeOp

… Pete Rock this one’s for the crew I mean, I finally have a new template for this blog. I have it because I made it with a ton of help from this tutorial. There was a preview of it in the last Illmosis update but it is now in full effect. I was going to wait until I funkified it a bit more but I was tired of this blog’s boring look. You’ll things get tweaked here and there as time goes on and I get better with WordPress-fu. The weird stuff in the background is from a graphic I used for the Illmosis main menu page top image. They’re little symbols of ideas and things that float inside my head and you can even spot Pizza and Root Beer if you look hard enough.

Please drop a line in the comments section if this new template is causing any problems. Like Chuck Barris, I’ll be right back with more stuff.

Categories: Blog business by PrimeOp

Newsarama reports that talentedly ill artist LeSean Thomas has an artbook out now called Midnight Marauders. While I’m too broke to get it right now, it’s on my “I gotta get it, I got-got to get it” list. For one thing, I dig his art and design work (especially on the Boondocks animated series). On top of that, the name of the book and the cover speaks to the Hip-Hop geek in me by giving dap to one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever.

So they finally killed off “that guy” in DC Comics that did… I can’t even type it. You know what he did in Identity Crisis. To be fair, that’s all they could really do with him after that book because that’s all he’s known for now. I haven’t read Identity Crisis yet so I’m not dissing it. I’m just saying that’s pretty much a textbook way to poison a character for all eternity. Oddly enough, I forget about all that when he shows up in Tiny Titans. Tiny Titans is magic. Even Jericho is cool in Tiny Titans and that’s the definition of magic.

Remember that project that I keep hinting at? I’ve begged, er, had some people try it out and it works for most part. After I clean up some stuff, there’ll be a post in a week or two with the demo. Be Afraid. Or not. It’s your call.

Categories: Uncategorized by PrimeOp

More on this startling revelation as the story develops!

Categories: was bored by PrimeOp
Tags: beans vs cornbread, when the war begins again

The Lego Minifigure, one of my favorite things to ever exist on this planet, turned 30 years old today. I owe the minifigure a lot.

When I figured out how to pop off the minifig parts and put them back together in custom ways, I’d recreate my favorite characters. At that time, the very early 80’s, it was the only way I could make an entire Justice League (because Mego never made GL or the Flash) to play with. When I needed another set of characters, I’d swap parts again to make the Marvel Universe, G.I.JOE, Star Wars or anything else that I wanted to do. The most important group of characters that I’d make were my own. M-Wave, the Entity, Twofold, Exponent and a lot of other heroes would be snapped together to fight the bad guys I’d made up. They’d roll around in tank-like vehicles or motorcycles and fight in buildings that would be torn down during the fight. Other characters like Longfellow and the Executioner (whose redesign will pop up on Illmosis next year) came out of those ol’ minifig sessions. As crazy as it sounds, that’s where I developed a lot of their basic character traits.

Go Miniman Go is a website that celebrates the trusty ol’ minifigure’s 30th birthday. I’ll have to set up some of my minifig collection this weekend and snap some pics to celebrate.

Categories: Lego by PrimeOp
Tags: lego minifig