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Comics Film

Comic-Con

A *lot* of new trailers…

DC

I still haven’t watched BvS, I will one of these days but the more I saw the less interested I was. The Wonder Woman and Justice League trailers have repiqued my interest.

Wonder Woman

So… Wonder Woman is a total badass. Superhero with shield in WW2 brings to mind another comic book property but this looks like the war portion will be more grounded than Cap fighting Red Skull (apart from the part where she’s straight out of Greek mythology and has a magical lasso). Hopefully Zach Snyder’s contribution isn’t much more than those couple of slow-mo shots.

Justice League

It looks fun! The grimdark of the BvS trailers really put me off so it’s great to see a DC trailer with some fun. I’m a big fan of the Flash (thanks Grant Gustin!) and his sequence here made me smile in a similar way to Spidey’s appearance in Civil War. We don’t get to see much of Cyborg, but casting Jason Momoa as Aquaman definitely looks like the best way to make Aquaman not a joke. He looks fucking terrifying.

Doctor Strange

I’m already excited about this, I don’t need much more encouragement. Part of me wishes I hadn’t watched it as I liked that Mads Mikkelson’s character had yet to be revealed, then again, it’s nice to see some more Chiwetel and that brief pinch of Benedict Wong.

King Arthur

I genuinely don’t know what to make of this.

I’m definitely looking forward to it, it looks fun, but it is not what I was expecting at all.

Kong

Apocalypse Kong? Yes please.

Categories
Comics TV

Power Man & Iron Fist

Categories
Animals Words

Shield-Toad

TIL that the Dutch and German words for Tortoise (or Turtle) literally translate as Shield-Toad (schildpad ‎and Schildkröte).

Of course, neither are toads, nor (it turns out) did shells arise as a protective adaptation:

For almost a century, biologists argued about how turtles got their shells—a debate almost as slow and plodding as the creatures themselves. Paleontologists mostly argued that the shells evolved from bony scales called osteoderms, which are also responsible for the armor of crocodiles, armadillos, and many dinosaurs. These scales simply expanded to fuse with the ribs and backbone, creating a solid covering. But developmental biologists disagreed. By studying modern turtle embryos, they deduced that the shell evolved from ribs, which broadened out and eventually united.

Everything changed in 2008, when Chinese researchers discovered a 220-million-year-old turtle with a shell that covered just its belly and not its back. They called it Odontochelys semitestacea—literally, the “toothed turtle in a half-shell.” It was as beautiful an intermediate fossil as they could have hoped for. And strikingly, it had no osteoderms at all. It did, however, have very broad ribs. The developmental biologists were right!

First, the lower ribs became wider and fused with each other to give half a shell—the plastron. Then, the upper ribs followed suit and merged with the spine, creating the carapace. (This means that, contrary to cartoons, you can’t pull a turtle out of its shell.) Eventually, through an intricate bit of evolutionary origami, the ribs started growing over the shoulder blades, rather than sitting below them as in you, me, and most other land-living vertebrates.

That takes care of how the shell evolved. “For me, the next question was: Why?” says Lyson. “And there are two huge reasons why not.”

How the Turtle got its shell.

Categories
Books

A Dead Djinn in Cairo

Fatma el-Sha’arawi, special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, stood gazing through a pair of spectral goggles at the body slumped atop the mammoth divan.

A djinn.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo is a short story set in an alternate early 20th Century Egypt by P.Djeli Clark and well worth your time. (Kevin Hong’s beautiful illustration alone makes it worth a click at least.)

If you like djinn, ghul and dervish by way of swashbuckling fantasy I highly recommend The Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, or if you prefer your genies as part of a real-life Cold War thriller then I would point you towards Declare by Tim Powers. Both great books.

Categories
Comics Design

Cap

cap

Cap for funsies. Mostly playing with outlines on my charges, adding helms and mantles, and crests. Thinking of working this up into a set.

Categories
Design Games

The Southern Sanction

(I’m a sucker for completeness)

southern-kingdoms

We don’t know much about the old Kingdoms of the Southern Sanction. We know the names of their capitals (Saldon, Holgast, Tirrell) but the names of the kingdoms themselves are lost… (or not on the map at least!)

We know that the lich performed the rite of desecration to halt the destruction of the forest so we could try to symbolise how the landscape changed as the kingdoms of men spread.

(And we can always just do something cool for no good reason because why the hell not.)

The First Kingdom

saldon

Starting in the East we have our first kingdom. This one is closest to Titan’s Gate, on the fringes of the forest. I imagine this kingdom would have had the best chance of clearing the most land before the kingdoms fell, it’s also served by three rivers.

The gold and green check represents the verdant pastures (green) and abundant crops (gold). It’s also distinct from the other kingdoms so far, we haven’t use chequy anywhere else.

The Second Kingdom

holgast

Next up we have the kingdom to the South. My initial idea for one of the kingdoms was inspired by something I saw in York Minster a couple of weeks ago:

skirlaw

I loved the idea of arrows or daggers intertwined with tree trunks. It could represent conflict with the forest itself as the people of the kingdom carved out their domain, or their prowess as hunters.

Or maybe there’s an old folk tale of the first king of these lands who blooded three arrows and fired each to mark the bounds of his kingdom, the land feared his reach would be too far and give him dominion over the whole world so a great forest sprung up and trapped his arrows and that’s where the forest first came from.

But, ultimately I decided this was too fiddly a device for one of the main kingdoms. I liked the idea of including a weapon (as none of the human kingdoms do yet) so I figured three swords worked. As the southern kingdom’s capital is near(ish) to the coast the blue field works, and with the marsh to the North and the goliath to the East I figure they would have had plenty of groups to fight.

The Third Kingdom

tirrell

Finally we have the kingdom to the North. These guys are closest to the lich’s island, I reckon they would have had to carve their lands from the thickest, darkest forest. My first thought was an axe but we’ve already got blades for the kingdom to the south and axes evoke some of our dwarven kingdoms so my next thought was fire.

We haven’t used rayonny anywhere else and they’re the only human kingdom using red so they’re still distinct. I went for the flames moving across rather than burning up or down to give them feel that they are crawling across the shield much as the flames of men would’ve burned across the land.

southern-kingdoms