Since that
piece I did has brought me some attention, or at least upped my numbers whenever you search
my name on google, I've been also searching
"watchmen hostess" and have found other parodies.
My earliest memories of the
Hostess Ads was that when I was a kid, I had an issue of Spider-Man with a
Spider-Man Hostess Ad and it REALLY CONFUSED ME. I thought it was part of the comic book. I was, maybe, in the second or third grade. But the beauty of these ads was the campy way that Hostess products were used to save the world or something.
1)The first, I have no idea who did it.
I like the "voice-over editing". Its a nice homage to Alan Moore's words and timing. But this thing was scanned in low rez and the fruit was just sort of hacked out and pasted on.
2)I think this was in the back of an issue of Deep Fried by Jason Yungbluth, but I'm not sure.
One thing I hate about parodies, not because of the artist, but because of the legal reasons, is that all the names are replaced. I think this artist could've gotten away with naming the character Rorschach.
Giving Twinkies to dogs to distract them actually seems realistic. It might've actually worked in the Watchmen world. And what I loved about the Hostess Ads was that the use of Twinkies as a solution to crime made sense only in a Hostess Comic Book Universe.
But the dialog is pretty funny. The dialog's in the Hostess world.
I didn't like the coloring, too many gradients, wrong color pallet (but that might also be a legal thing), its obviously done in photoshop, it would've looked beautiful if he just used the color halftone filter and made it look like bad printing. The thing I love about a good parody is that for a second, you're not sure if this is the real thing or not. I've worked with Photoshop too much and if he just added that one detail-- it would've made up for the use of fake names.
3)Here's a well-rendered one done by Brian Michael Bendis... I think.
What I love about it is that it pretty much sticks to Dave Gibbons's style. It looks like it was colored with marker, though. But its better than making it all slick and photoshoppy. But the semen joke, its just too adolescent for me. Its an easy joke. Its a desperate joke.
4)Of course I'm biased. I have a high opinion of my work:
The biggest difference about my Watchmen/Hostess Parody is that it takes place in a universe that has Hostess Comics Ad logic. The others take place in a Watchmen world. And I wanted it to be devoid of any real logic. So preventing rape with the use of Hostess Fruit Pies makes no sense in our world or the Watchmen world.
It did cross my mind to have Silk Spectre I be the victim. But then it wouldn't be funny. Sexual violence toward women is really really fucked up. I don't find it funny at all. I was once an animator on a cable show where there was a rape joke involving a female character and a bunch of inmates. If I was the one assigned to animate that scene, I would decline. I have no idea if that was eventually cut by the network execs.
But male rape is funny...
At least to the guy doing the raping.
Also I think the first unsaid rule of being a man is that you don't get raped. A boy can get raped, and that's horrible and he ought to get some help. A girl can get raped and that's a lot more horrible, especially when such a union creates a child. But man on man forced sexual copulation-- its demeaning... but its really funny when its happening to someone who deserves to be demeaned.
(Just to make myself clear, I see nothing homosexual about man rape. Its sexual sport like in Sodom and Gommorah or the State Penn. There are much more hilarious and interesting things about gay culture than man sex. Like when you're in the Castro, you should check out
Little Orphan Andy's you gotta love their mascot)
Plus the line,
"Oh no! The Comedian is raping Richard Nixon!" has a ring to it.
The beauty of Watchmen was that it deconstructed what began as a childish genre and made it adult (or adolescent-- if you look at how it influenced the genre too). So I took adult characters and themes and put them back in a childish world. In other words, another difference between my Hostess Parody and the others is that its a deconstruction of a deconstruction.
I will confess that I "inked" Dave Gibbons's original work. "Inked" in a "Chasing Amy" sense. I wanted it to look like Gibbons pencilled it and maybe someone else inked it. I didn't color it because it wasn't for print or for the public to think of it as print, plus I was lazy.
The back story, or at least the fictitious back story, of this piece was that someone was payed to make this comic as a real ad, but it got rejected for obvious reasons. It eventually resurfaced at an
art exhibit. Besides, I find
original comic book art beautiful. You get to see where the artist made their mistakes, sometimes they used different inks so that some of the linework fades to a purplish color. Its a physical object, something that was handmade-- not like a comic book which is machine made.
I think the best parodies are near forgeries. And I did my best to make this a faithful forgery.
But the only thing in this piece that looses the authenticity is the Hostess packages in the end. Now it doesn't show on the jpeg, but if you saw the real thing, it looks like a computer print out pasted onto the page because it is a computer print out pasted onto the page. I originally wrote in red pencil, "apple" & "cherry", but that didn't sell the joke. It didn't have the right impact at the end (just like the movie). I didn't have time to draw it in, or make a believable print-out, I just found a pic of an original ad, did my photoshop magic, cut, paste, wa-la!
Anyway, I've been thinking too much about this piece all week. Hopefully, getting all this out of my head will help me move on. Hopefully, I could stop jerking myself off with this damned piece and do things that don't require me riding on the coattails of Comic Book Legends.
(But I am thinking of doing other Hostess parodies that also look like artwork that's 20 or 30 years old. Hey, this one sold, I'm going to get laid off again for hiatus at the end of the week. I needs the money.)
And here's
one last thought.
Labels: Alan Moore, blog, comics, my work, Watchmen
