The Ark Addendum - Auto-Berserk

Just got back to the states last night, and boy are my eyes tired!  Actually, I went to bed at a normal time, 11:00 PM, but that was after being up for 9 extra hours due to the time zone.  (It's kind of a surreal experience to leave Heathrow airport in the afternoon, then fly for 10.5 hours against the rotation of the Earth and have it be daylight the whole time.)  So, now it's 2:00 PM and I'm struggling to stay away.  And what better way to occupy my synapses than with some blogging?

Last week I did the Autobot Bunker from Auto-Berserk, so this week I finish off the episode with the landscapes that I have.  I think it's kinda fun that an episode of Transformers could effortlessly bounce from city to forest to canyons to bunkers and back, all in 22 minutes. 

Auto-Berserk also features a scene that's a pet peeve of mine.  The Autobots go looking for Red Alert and find a Lamborghini fire-chief car... but it's not him.  Really, how likely is that?  (That said, Italy really does have some Lamborghini police cars, but they're mostly for show/recruiting purposes.) 

G.I. Joe podcast

Heads up, faithful readers!  I'm on a Joe podcast this week, G.I. Joe Declassified.  I go into more detail about The Field Manual.  Give it a listen.  The same folks are doing a contest to give away some autographed copies of the book when it comes out, so read about the details here.

And don't forget, Roll Out Roll Call convention this weekend.  Visit me in Southampton and say hi.

The Ark Addendum - Autobot Bunker

Howdy, y'all! Last week I got the first draft of The G.I. Joe Field Manual to IDW Publishing for editing.  That's why, I'm sorry to say, I skipped the Addendum.  Busy with deadline pressure.  This week, though, despite my impending flight, I wanted to bring you a nice one.  I thought the Autobot Bunker from Auto-Berserk rather fit the bill.

I did something I don't always do... I left in all the original notes.  They're pretty tiny, but I actually didn't shrink them at all from my originals.  These models come from Paul Davids, who was Production Coordinator on the Sunbow Transformers cartoon.  He had a big pile of mostly landscapes, 3-5 to a page.  Obviously they were considerably smaller than the original art, which would be at least a full 8.5x11 page, sometimes more.  Usually the notes don't add much, but in this case I thought they gave interesting insight and so I left them in. 

Hope you enjoy! 

In other news, I fly off to jolly old England in less than eight hours, attending the Roll Out Roll Call convention as a guest.  If you can get to Southampton this weekend, I'd love to meet you. (I get back next Tuesday night, so I may have to skip again next week depending on how busy I am and how much internet access I have in the U.K. )

Cybertronian Optical Code, revealed!

Thanks to the tireless Chris McFeely, his Annotated AllSpark Almanac Addendum is now updated!  Boy, that's a lotta alliteration!

http://www.angelfire.com/anime2/digipedia/annotated_addendum.html

The exciting bit for me is that he cracked my C.O.C., a new cipher I made up just for him, more or less.  Didn't figure out that clue, eh?  Cybertronian Optical Code, from the episode Decepticon Air!   I figured I'd make it not too tricky, so it's a simple variation on Morse code, with circles for dots and half-circles for dashes.  To make it slightly harder, I rotated the half-circles around at random, but the orientation is meaningless except to separate upper from lowercase letters.

If anyone is interested, you can download Cybertronian Optical Code here.

The Ark Addendum - Lander's Transform

Welcome back, true believers!  Another edition of The Ark Addendum, extra model sheets not in The Complete Ark, my 416 page tome of Transformers character models.

This week's offering is another transformation sequence from Masterforce.  I give you: Lander!  I find the last picture in the sequence especially nice, what with the clouds and the mountains.  For a pretty simple toy, he they sure make his Transform seem dynamic. 

By the way, Landmine, the American version of  Lander, was my first Pretender.  I remember finding him in a drug store while waiting for my parents to pick me up.  Since the TF cartoon was long off the air and I hadn't yet discovered the comics, I was pretty thrilled to find a brand new Transformer.  I had almost as much excitement from looking at the 1988 catalog as I did from the toy itself.  Had I found Transformers #52 and #53 at this time, I'd probably have been pretty thrilled.  (Instead, I got into the comics with issue #69.  When I tracked down the back issues, I found this underwhelming.  I'd already grown bored with the toy by that point.  What a difference 18 months make.)

While I've got your attention, I did an interview with the folks over at Rusting Carcass, so read that if you'd like the latest on the Joe model book.  Also, the kind folks over at the What's on JOE Mind talk a bit about the upcoming Joe book, so check out their excellent podcast. 

G.I. Joe in Transformers Animated

G.I. Joe sure gets around, don'tcha know!  Of all the work I've done, the stuff that gets the most love is certainly The AllSpark Almanacs, so I thought I'd do a little post showcasing all of the G.I. Joe that found its way into Animated.

First off, we've got a lovely drawing of Shattered Glass Professor Princess.  Yes, in the mirror universe, Penny Princess does use girls toys to enact her agenda, no.  There, Private Princess dresses up in boys toys, namely G.I. Joe.  Oh, and her mount is not My Little Ponies based... it draws from Battle Beasts.  Awesome.  It's drawn up by the main man Derrick Wyatt himself, and it's just barely possible that we'll be hearing more about Private Princess in the pages of the Transformers Collectors' Club Magazine.

Next up, Snake Eyes!  This model featured in Where Is Thy Sting, a third season episode of Animated, and is one of the characters in the Ninja Gladiator game.  It featured in the second AllSpark Almanac book, along with some awesome new pixilated designs from the always hilarious Walky.  One of them was another Joe model, based on the creature that lives under Castle Destro in Sins of our Fathers, though it was identified as an Inhumanoid.  Funny, that.  (Miles Mayhem, from M.A.S.K., also showed up, and I suppose technically he's a Joe villain in that V.E.N.O.M. was retroactively made a part of Cobra, but I won't count him.)

We worked some other Joe references into the book, including putting Cobra Commander on Mount Rushmore.  Mostly just name drops, such as the Mobat as an answer to a crossword question, Brekhov as a drink, the Lunartix as a threat from space, or Shockblast's serial number fit in there.

Finally, a bit of holiday cheer.  In the episode Along Came a Spider, we see many of the children of Animated dressed up for trick-or-treating.  We did a two-page spread of the costumes in the first AllSpark Almanac, including these three familiar ones. 

(Other Joe name drops in the first Almanac include Extensive Enterprises and Cold Slither, and the names of both the power plant and the prison.)

So, there you go, a brief overview of G.I. Joe in Animated.  More than you thought, eh?

The Ark Addendum - Decepticon Headquarters, Cybertron

It's Tuesday, which means I get a guilt-free break from G.I. Joe in order to bring you another Ark Addendum.  This week, I started off looking at doing an Ultimate Doom addendum.  After all, I still have Part 3 from that three parter to finish of.  However, an opportunity to be a bit more focused presented itself, so I took it.  From both Ultimate Doom and its sequel, Countdown to Extinction, I had a number of views of the Decepticon headquarters on Cybertron.  In fact, the nicest of these wound up in The Complete Ark, but I had more.  Hope you enjoy!