Leave me in my pyramid.

A little green buddy in the rain. Man, they look like lime candy.

If anyone is wondering, yes, I’m still around and still drawing—I’m finally back to sketching at the museum again and am really enjoying the routine. At the same time, I’m having a strange time trying to balance lots of work and the reality of living in a country that keeps beating its own personal record of inexcusable evil. It’s hard to hope for more or less than our utter collapse. Hasn’t left much brain space for social media updates, but I’m going to try to post again occasionally as I do have a handful of new drawings stashed away.

Universal Monsters: The Phantom of the Opera #1

Writer: Tyler Boss, Artist: Martin Simmonds, Letterer: Becca Carey

Been liking the Universal Monsters line of comics that have been coming out, although notably they are mostly based on the Universal Monster movies specifically rather than the original source material (albeit with some changes brought about from a 2020s perspective, such as the Mummy book leaning more heavily into what it would have been like for the protagonist to be a English/Egyptian young person in 1930s Cairo, for example, a detail which is kind of glossed over in both the original 1930s movie and even the Brendan Fraser movies in all honestly in regards to Evie and her brother, or elements transplanted from the source in the case of James Tynion IV's Invisible Man in regards to Griffin's personality, experimentations etc.).

This comic, while a very well done Phantom of the Opera comic, for example, is actually based on the 1943 film rather than the Lon Chaney movie (which was largely accurate to the book to a greater or lesser degree). So the Phantom here was a guy who was disfigured and is on a revenge plot, rather than someone who was born looking a certain way who ended up "like that" due to a lifetime of mistreatment from other people.

Personally I tend to like versions of the Phantom who were more the latter than the former as that was more in the spirit of the book (ie the author Gaston Leroux pointing out that Erik, the Phantom, could have been a benefit to humanity as an artist and engineer if folks' prejudice against him hadn't made him murderously misanthropic, which is a surprisingly nuanced take for a story written in the 1910s) than him just being some dude who lived a regular life until he was in a fire or burned with acid or something. Kind of feel like the "dude who was injured" origin kind of removes a kind of societal accountability for the Phantom's actions, while having him wronged by someone/people with more mundane money-based motivations kind of let's the audience off the hook in that regard.

Oddly having Raoul in the detective role in this story somehow makes him more tolerable than he was in the book, where it seemed even Leroux seemed to think that he was an insufferable posh git. ACAB and all, but at least so far he's not tried to gaslight Christine when she tells him something's up nor using the Paris Opera as a place to pick up a new "mistress" as was the style of the time by posh men in Paris who used places like the ballet corps' rehearsal space as a kind of menu for which young woman they'd like to have sex with in exchange for financial backing. Thus the implication by Leroux (who as a journalist who covered the opera was aware of the subculture of sexual exploitation going on behind the scenes) when book!Raoul here's an older man in Christine's dressing room is she's taken part of this subculture, leading him to get very victimblamey until he hears her talking about a ghost... and then shifts to calling her delusional instead.