At some point, while working on this chapter, I remembered “Oh, wait, I built Lydia in this superhero outfit. And she’s in the other room. Wonder how she’s doing?…”

Sometimes she turns on the light for us!

Superhero Lydia currently lives in our den/family room/let’s-watch-tv-or-play-video-games room, located under the autographed photo of Jerry “The King” Lawler. (He was a few booths down from us at C2E2, a very nice fellow!) I sculpted Lydia as my final project for my grad-level Maquette Design class in college. Earlier in the course, I sculpted Fizzlebit and had some high-quality photos taken of him with the help of my professor. Unfortunately, the photos I had for Superhero Lydia were placed on a flash drive that never seemed to make it to my computer, and has since disappeared.

She’s about 18 inches tall without the bunny ears, and almost 2 feet with them. I probably used a couple of 1-pound boxes-worth of sculpy. Sculpey usually suffers a degree of cracking over time, but it can be patched. I had multiple boxes of sculpey I was juggling. Unknown to me at the time, one of those boxes was a bad batch, and as a result the areas I used it are now a paler color The same box was used to patch up Fizzlebit, and the bad sculpy spots have gradually gotten worse. His feet that I built up after taking the professional photos to be more pudgy have also gained severe cracking, which defeats (feets! Ha!) the purpose I had building them up more at the time. I had intentions of trying to cast Fizzlebit, but now it does not look like it would turn out quite so smoothly.

Patchwork gone pale.

Seriously, she kept growing.

Lydia and Fizzlebit were meant to be in ratio to each other however…Lydia ended up a little taller than she was supposed to compared to Fizzlebit. Actually, looking at them now, she’s way too tall. Both of them had to travel 600+ miles away from Savannah, Georgia after I finished college, so I’m surprised they’re in any sort of good shape.

But wait, where’s Lydia’s cape? Sculpting a cape that big did not work out too well for me. Specifically, I was building Lydia in parts, and the cape was one of them. The sculpy cracked far too much after I baked the cape. So she ended up with an alternate costume with a scarf instead, made from the tied-portion of the cape that I had built onto Lydia’s shoulders separate from the rest of the cape. Comic-wise, she does not have the actual fanny-pack, so it’s a fair trade.

There’s a small playset of Lydia and Fizzlebit I sculpted for a separate assignment that has a lot of contrast to these two large sculpts. Mostly that they were much easier to wrap up in to one small box and move outta town with, although I have yet to check and see if the bad batch of sculpy was used with the playset as well….

Bucket of Birthday Comics!

Do kids still have to sell magazines for school? Does it work out the way it did for Lydia? I always had better luck with the chocolate selling….

A couple of weeks ago, I had a birthday. Like pretty much every birthday since I could read, I asked for a pile of books. Comic books. This year’s haul was super-rad. I finished a collection (Scott Pilgrim), narrowed down another one (Dragonball), and topped off another collection with a special hardback (Blacksad), until I realized there was another volume yet to be released in the U.S.

I was disappointed when I heard Scott Pilgrim vs. the World didn’t do great at the box office. I had never actually read Scott Pilgrim. The trailers got me excited and the movie was hilarious, visually giving me cavities with its super-sweet deliciousness. As soon as we left the theater, my husband James and I zoomed over to the local bookstore and bought the first three volumes, with the logic that “There’s a birthday soon, so we should not buy the rest yet”

Although he is two years younger, Scott Pilgrim helped me win my birthday.

Which meant that volumes 4, 5 and 6 of Scott Pilgrim were the first birthday books I devoured. So much birthday win!

What is taking longer to devour is the ultimate tomes of epic that make up Dragonball volume 3 and 4. They are super fat VizBIG editions, where 3 volumes are sandwiched until they are quite large. The fatness of the books convey both epic and awkward, epic because HOLY CRAP AWESOME AMOUNT OF MANGA, awkward as such a fat paperback is a little weird to hold during the first and last 50-ish pages. There’s also periodic segments in color….I watched a lot of DBZ in middle-high school during the sweet block of action called Toonami on Cartoon Network, but fell out of watching TV  around the time the network had Dragonball. This will be fixed! After I’ve finished these bricks of awesome.

Goku can take those VZZAPs

Crazy dalmations are rad.

Blacksad is a comic I had actually given up on as far as getting any new volumes. The comic is written and drawn by two fellows in Europe, and the company who had translated the first two volumes went bankrupt before the third was translated. Thanks to the Internet, I saw some gorgeous pages in French that I could only sort of make out with what I remembered from AP French class. While Blacksad is visually stunning, one of the main pulls for me is the crime noire storytelling aspect and I knew I would be missing out without being able to understand the words. Hooray for Dark Horse comics for collecting Blacksad volumes 1 -3 in hardback! Blacksad follows a hard-boiled detective who is a cat…but everyone is an animal of some sort in this anthropomorphic universe, so that’s not weird. A dalmation in Volume 3, Red Soul, is the prime example of the expressions you just can’t seem to get with human-based characters.

Seriously, people can't make these faces.

Shortly after finishing said Blacksad story though, I learned that volume 4 had just been released in France. Maybe it will be translated for my next birthday?