Thursday 13 August 2009

It is here.




So yes here we are, finally. Tales from the Darkside. I've stayed away from posting on this subject for a while simply because I'm worried by the amount of posts it could end up taking up. Not that I don't want to share it with you- quite the contrary in fact, the problem is that there exists the possibility that I could get carried away and deluge you with too much material...
I'm acutely aware that for a lot of people, reading a blog is a diversion- a tea break filler and I've been very careful to try and limit the waffle for exactly that reason. The problem is I want to post everything at once but then I would have more of a gallery than a blog, and thats not what I'm trying to do here.

What I'm going to do is post no more than one TFTD strip per day, intermingled with various other posts as I have been up to now. To help anyone who wants to sort through the posts or is only interested in the TFTD strips I'm going to go back through all my previous entries and start tagging subjects so it's easier for you to find everything.

Today's strip is the first full TFTD I did.

The idea came to me whilst watching ROTJ a few years back. It occured to me that it would have to be very traumatic, not to mention humiliating for the elite forces of the empire to be defeated by a ramshackle band of three- foot teddybears led by a scoundrel, a girl, a gay robot and his dustbin friend. Then I noticed something that really made me pay attention. Right at the end, during the celebration scene (the proper one, with old Anakin- not the CG abomination that we get force fed these days) you an see an Ewok playing xylophone on a group of trooper helmets.

Am I the only one a little freaked by this?!

Playing music on the battered headgear of your fallen adversaries? Are the heads still in those helmets? What have they done with the rest of the bodies? Is there a group of ewoks just out of frame feasting on the tasty flesh of the empire's finest? For me this painted a grisly scene of postwar carnage that I simply had to explore on paper.

As a sidenote I'd point out that this was the subject of the first TFTD sketch I ever did- the ewok image I posted yesterday. It's a really important picture because it was the first I did using the construction style I've used ever since for the TFTD strips- normally I strive for a generally realistic style of proportion but for TFTD I went a little cartoony.

Anyway, as I recall I have frequently had conversations with other Star Wars fans on the subject of stormtrooper armour, how cool it looks, and which type looks the best (have you seen the new Clonetrooper armour for the Xbox Live avatars? How neat is that?!). That kind of got combined with my ewok musings and the fusion produced the first ever Tales from the Darkside strip. It was pretty much downhill from there...

Above you can see the original art for #1, below is the finished properly lettered piece.

5 comments:

Matt said...

Are man, these strips bring back such amazingly fun memories. Did I ever tell you that some regular from the old store saw printouts of some of these strips and wanted to know how they could get more? One random guy though they were submissions to the (now dead) StarWars Tales anthology :)

One day you'll have to finish off the BountyHunter strips you started...

Unknown said...

More! More I tell you! More!

(PS: have only just joined the 21st century and set up an RSS/Atom reader on my Mac for the first time ever this evening. YOU are the first feed I've added. So feel proud.)

Unknown said...

(PPS: extra bonus points if you actually know who this is from my name there!)

Chris Christison said...

Ha ha, as if I'd have to guess, it's been your email address for what, six years? How long have I known you? Lol, the memory, it fades with age you see...

Chris Christison said...

That, and it displays your name if I mouse over your follower icon. Anonymity fail.