Spunkmeyer was a character I didn't know quite what to do with. I thought about adding him to one of the more open Colonial Marine art jams, but he never saw that kind of direct action in the movie. I couldn't put him in a cockpit scene with Corporal Ferro without knowing if I'd ever get to meet Colette Hiller for her autograph. Spunkmeyer was the other person besides Ripley seen using a power loader, but replacing her seemed sacrilegious, and the few artists I spoke with didn't seem keen on drawing that piece of equipment. I considered putting him in with Burke and Gorman as one of the sort of non-combatants, but I felt like it would be too crowded, and I didn't have great reference for his lower half. I then started thinking about obscuring it with something like a xenomorph egg, maybe even having Spunkmeyer squatting to lift a stream of alien ooze off it to reflect his climactic appearance in the bay of the Dropship. I couldn't make up my mind, Space City Comic Con passed into Comicpalooza, and I was swiftly running out of time.
The girlfriend and I walked Artist's Alley, going booth to booth, trying to figure out who to choose for this piece. Eventually, we reached Toni Shelton toward the end of our trek, and we were both impressed with her, so she received the nod. It turned out to be a bit nerve wracking, because she was the only artist on the project chosen that late in the game that I'd never had any experience with. It didn't help that she was so young that she'd never even seen an Alien film, or that she was driven to do good work on this at-home project that lasted until Sunday morning. That said, Shelton's sample pieces were tight, I was confident that the Colonial Marines would stick around for the entire weekend as scheduled, and I wanted her to have the time she needed.
As it turned out, that was the correct course of action. I thought Spunkmeyer was a rather pretty young man with very distinctive features and piercing eyes that Shelton could best capture, and her aim was true. Spunkmeyer was a fairly minor player in the film, and actor Daniel Kash seems to embrace that status, not even taking a proper chair or his own microphone at the furthest end of the table during the cast's panel at the con. When I approached him with the commission explaining that this was the last finished piece and the concluding signature of the project, Kash jumped at the comment as an opportunity for self-deprecation along the lines of "everybody always picks me last." The shame of it is, Toni Shelton drew a leading man, the image of a hero in this narrative that reflected Kash's anecdotes about his self-image while auditioning for the role before Jim Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. I complemented Kash on his straight from the hip, no B.S. interviews and entertainingly surly attitude, but at the same time I felt bad that he didn't seem able to see himself at his best thirty years past, as captured in Shelton's appealing work.
Toni Shelton
No comments:
Post a Comment