Queen of the Jungle

Described only as "Krogar's Wife" over at Pulp Figures, I dub thee. . . "Jean Porter." 
 

Young Shorty Smith

"Gee whillikers!" yelped young Shorty Smith as the 12,000-pound blockbuster dropped gracefully from the Lancaster's open belly. "I sure wish I was up in that airplane instead of down here on the roof of the German munitions factory! What a pickle we're in now, Spy Smasher!" 

"Yes, I suppose we should have checked with the RAF before smashing the spy ring we found here," mused Spy Smasher philosophically. "But at least that ring will be double smashed, along with tens of thousands of rounds of Ratzi ammo." 

"Golly, Spy Smasher, if a plucky kid from Oklahoma has to die, well, dying for democracy has got to be the best way!" 

"Chin up, Shorty--we're not dead yet. I just happened to bring my jet pack, and you're light enough to carry along." 

"A jet pack! Wow! Wait--what's a jet pack?" 

"It's like a little V2 you strap onto your back--like this--and we're the payload! Up, up, and away!" 

"KABOOM!" yelled the blockbuster just as the plucky Allied troopers soared off into the clouds. 

"ARGH!" cried the munitions plant as it was blown into smithereens. 
 

Dopey the Robot

 

Revolver

Another circuit around the sun. 
 

Perched Owl

 

I'm Down with Turtles All the Way Down

 

Ocelot

 

Jinx Johnson's Harlem Jazz Quartet

 

Blood Shed

In a parallel universe, a different version of me is enjoying a successful, if notorious, career as a filmmaker. The latest hit from his Paranoid Productions studio is Blood Shed, currently garnering attention not because of its story, but its unconventional style. In Blood Shed, Paranoid-me grafts modern explicit violence effects to an otherwise mid-20th century aesthetic, creating an uncanny effect disturbing audiences all over Earth-E (for Excessive Violence). 

Blood Shed is a Technicolor western set in a lonely corner of 1870s New Mexico Territory. Horst Horseman is carving farmland from desert scrub, and against all odds, he is on the verge of success. The harvest to come is poised to be his most successful yet, and he is eager to share the bounty with other settlers and their Navajo neighbours. 

But just as his crops ripen, Horst is set upon by a roving band of banjo-strumming bandits who call themselves the Banjo Bandit Band. Horst offers the bandits fresh fruits, vegetables, and water from his hard-won well, but the bandits aren't here for charity--they're here for plunder. After first taunting Horst with a truly dreadful banjo performance, they beat him senseless and toss him into the woodshed, staining it all over with blood--hence the film's title. 

Anytime from the dawn of cinema through the 1950s would generally treat this violence tastefully, either cutting away from the action to let the audience imagine it for themselves or bloodlessly pantomiming the action. In Blood Shed, however, we see every punch, kick, and banjo-clobbering in rapturous slow motion, with every spray of ichor, goose egg, blackened eye, and broken bone captured with intense realism. 

The Banjo Bandit Band leaves Horst for dead in a slowly spreading pool of his own blood as they steal his crops and burn his humble homestead to the ground. Miraculously, the fire does not spread to the titular Blood Shed, and Horst's broken body is discovered by his horrified neighbors. 

Moved by Horst's plight, several of Horst's fellow settlers team up with sympathetic Navajo warriors to chase down the Banjo Bandit Band. As it turns out, they're easy to track, because they won't stop playing their banjos. The rest of the film details the running battle between the bandits and Horst's posse--really just an excuse to create graphically realistic arrow, bullet, and knife wounds in the context of a B-list midcentury western steeped in the production values of the time: some location shooting, canned music, generous use of rear projection, stilted dialogue, continuity errors, and acting ranging from merely terrible to workmanlike. In the end, Horst is avenged and his friends help him rebuild the farm. 

Alternate-Woods would later use the same technique to create similarly dissonant films noir (Teeth On a Midnight Sidewalk, Blood-Soaked Tide*), musicals (The Iced Capades, Xanadoom), comedy (The Three Stooges Go to the Hospital, The Three Stooges in Blunt Trauma), horror (There Is No Anesthesiologist in This Hospital, Castle of Stone Stairs, Brutal Fists of Frankenstein), science fiction (Magnificent Devastation, Attack of the Needlessly Sadistic Saucer Men), absurdism (Who Filled the Washing Machine with Dynamite?), and even the Oscar-winning drama Senseless Violence. 

Poor alternate Sylvia. 

*With product placement of the famous detergent

Feathers and Fangs

This was a decent exercise in attempting to blend colours together more naturally. I'd love to visit the lost world this creature inhabited. 
 

Tonight the Torch, Tomorrow the Pitchfork

This might be one of the cleanest minis I've managed to paint. I think the fire effect comes off all right, the jumpsuit shading is okay, skin tones all right and textures smooth, and the facial details are in place. Burn that castle down! 
 

Serene Penguin

 

Cockatoo

So proud I managed to paint this bird's eyes, which are maybe 0.5 mm each. 
 

Villista Rider

 

Federale Bugler

 

Pulp Figures Mud Men

Here's a small squad of muscular dudes in fearsome masks. Pretty happy with skin tones and texture, their clothing (what there is of it), and the masks. Less happy with the sandy bases. Using glue, even though I'm trying to apply it as thinly as possible, tends to discolour the sand and create clumps. Later experiments show that adding a small amount of sand to wet paint creates better results. 

Doctor Prometheus

I love a mad scientist! 

 

Dum-Dum and Recycling Bin

"Dum-Dum" because I painted him to look like a bullet, "Recycling Bin" because the world needs mobile recycling bins that come to your house and get your plastic bags and cardboard boxes. And also chastise you for leaving the tap water running while you brush your teeth.  
 

Doctor Moreau's Favourite

Pulp Figures created a small collection of human-animal hybrids inspired by H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. In the novel, Moreau is working on a puma woman rather than a tiger woman, but if I'd gone with a puma this model would be virtually all black. Therefore, tiger. Is she not woman? 
 

Tropical Castaway Beachcomber

I had some fun with the basing here, trying to make it look like this castaway is enjoying gentle surf along the beach of his isolated tropical home. 
 

True Blue Navy Through and Through

"Blast," he thought. "I've got shaving soap on my chin. Too late to do anything about it but doff my hat and hope no one notices. At least my wig is secured." 
 

Squinty McPegleg

 

Leaning Cowpoke

The shifting sands
Shoveled softly
Sublimate and subvert
Slim Sanderson
Sinking slowly southward
Sighing softly

Calamity Jean

 

Flash! Oww-wwww!

Just a man
With a man's torn shirt
Nothing but a man
Covered with bruises and blood
No one but this pain-wracked guy
Can save our wo-orld
Oh, Flash
Oh, Flash
 

Rick Barlowe

"Rick, Rick, you still despise me, don't you?" asked Peabody, the little round-faced minion holding the silver snub-nosed revolver currently pointed at my guts. His wheedling was getting on my last nerve, so I snapped at him more unkindly than I could have: 

"I would if I thought about it," I drawled. I pulled a cigarette from my jacket, leaned against my desk, and scraped a match across the bottom of my shoe. I touched the resulting flame to the fag and took a deep puff, contemplating the ceiling fan that whirred above, undisturbed. 

"Stop mocking me!" Peabody spat, brandishing the gun. "I'll shoot you dead if you don't tell me what I want to know!" 

An ironic chuckle slipped free before I could suppress it. "Kid, if you shoot me dead, you're the one that's going to need answering--to the Slender Man." 

"I'm not scared of him!" Peabody yelled, quivering. "He knows I'm loyal!" 

"Oh sure," I said. "So was Dunwich. He was loyal. Quimby was loyal. They were loyal all the way down to the bottom of the bay." 

Peabody burst into tears, cradling his head in his hands. "Oh, if only that witch hadn't interfered! We didn't care about the inheritance! Only the notes! Only the Steinbrunner notes!" 

"Here's a note for you. Get out of my office and tell the Slender Man to come in person next time. I don't talk to flunkies." 

I thought Peabody's eyes would pop free of their sockets, so great was his rage. But after a moment, he left, stomping his size four feet all the way down the hall. 

I turned off the lights so I could stand in the dark for a while. Hallway light spilling through the glass window on my office door painted my name across the weathered wood floor at my feet. The letters were distorted, angular, like buildings in a German expressionist movie. It was the perfect visual metaphor for my state of mind--questioning who I was and what I was doing mixed up in this mess. A younger, smarter version of me wouldn't have gotten involved. But my hair was silver now, and climbing three flights of stairs up to my office had become an unwelcome chore. 

One way or another, this would be my last case. I wondered if I'd finish it dead or alive. 

 

Slim

She walked into my office that stormy night with neon letters--E-A-T--reflected in eyes of midnight black; her pinched brow finished the sentence with S-H- --

But never mind that. I hadn't had a client in weeks and I was down to my last nickel. When she sat on the edge of my desk and dangled one stiletto heel from her toes, only part of my booze-fogged brain absorbed the details of her case; the other parts were focused on her writhing toes and the curve of that nylon-wrapped foot. Something about an inheritance due her, an inheritance contested by a long-lost supposed black sheep half-sister showing up on her doorstep at a time so inconvenient it beggared belief and buggered up the works. 

Somewhere along the way I caught her name: Slim. Well, slim she was, and so were her cigarettes. Also her patience, because she was snapping her fingers right in front of my eyes. 

"Are you going to take the case, gumshoe, or are you gonna keep staring at my feet?" she barked. Her breath smelled like coffee grounds and tar. I liked it. 

I drew back from her percussive fingers and rose up from my well-worn office chair. 

"My fee is ten bucks a day plus expenses," I said. "Don't ask me to carry a gun or otherwise fool with rough stuff. I'm strictly an investigator. I'm no one's enforcer, no one's goon, no one's gunsel. Get me?" 

She smirked with lips glossy as patent leather. 

"Sure, I get you. How you do your business is--your business," she said. "Besides, if you get yourself killed, no medical expenses. Or any expenses, I suppose." 

"You'll pay my secretary," I growled. She shrugged as if the cash didn't matter at all, then turned on her heel and walked out the door. 

I flicked off the light switch and stood by the window, looking down at the street, the big neon EAT sign flickering on and off, red-yellow, red-yellow. I hoped to see those long legs again, marching off down the sidewalk, but she must have headed west instead of east. 

I thought about going downstairs to the diner to spend my last nickel, but a coffee went for ten cents these days and I hadn't asked for an advance. My mind had still been preoccupied by the sheen of nylon stretched over smooth, uncallused feet. She was the kind of gal who used a pumice stone. 

A little while later I'd find out I was wrong about a lot of things regarding Slim and her case--but not the condition of her feet. 

 

Harpo Barx

This poor fellow had a little bit too much to drink, and the results are all over the pavement.