Stephen Bobbett – Page 4 – Stephen Bobbett

Broken and Known

A digitally illustrated mandala of telescopes, agave shrubs, and socks in a tumbling laundry

Of all the places to be seized by revelation, I didn’t expect it to be the Wash & Go Laundromat in Redondo Beach, California.

I’m on the West Coast for work, but also for reconnaissance. This past week, I’ve been trying to learn videography as rapidly as Neo learning kung fu. I’m attempting to give our company a healthy dose of modern digital marketing, filming the shoe wear testing process at our biomechanics lab in Los Angeles, and proving to our team we have the internal capacity for webinars, TikToks, and podcasting.

I’ve also been staying at a friend’s studio in the back of their house near Hermosa Beach, testing the waters of a move back to this side of the country.

I miss Southern California. Like, a lot. Yeah, the traffic sucks, and shit’s expensive, and the city sprawl is as thick as kudzu. But I have tried to replenish the word “home” in my brain with at least seven other states in the Union, and none of them fill it to the brim like this one does.

Last time I lived here was in 2008, right when the Great Recession was revving its engines. It was not a great time to be a college graduate in the City of Angels with only an inkling of a career path. I made the right choice at the time (that is, after a brief and impulsive move to the Pacific Northwest that led to a nervous breakdown, but I digress). I moved to the East Coast, where there was extended family and a semblance of stability. And for at least a decade, it remained the right choice.

But stability isn’t always growth, and historically, California is where I’ve come to grow. It’s where my first memories were forged, combing shells on Newport Beach as a little blonde-haired kindergartener when my family lived in Costa Mesa in the 80’s. It’s where I came back when I left home after high school in the Midwest. I got my bachelor’s degree in Azusa, had my first kiss in Pasadena, got hired for my first marketing gig in the Arts District. The decade or more I collectively spent in California was arduous sometimes, but it was nourishing, like how a shrub thrives in the desert.

And now, at the end of a long but fruitful week of shoe footage, I find myself doing laundry at the Wash & Go in Redondo Beach, getting ready to fly to a trade show in Portland. A song comes on the radio. It’s “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls.

This song. I think I first heard it when I was living in Indiana at 16, driving back and forth between home and my summer job as a kitchen manager at a youth camp. The last gasps of radio before MP3s nearly drowned it.

There’s a bit of trivia about this song that’s never left my brain’s disheveled archives. When it was written, the lead singer and songwriter John Rzeznik was suffering from a year-long case of writer’s block. Just when he thought his career might be withering, he got a call to produce a song for the movie City of Angels. And he determined that no matter what spilled onto the page, no matter what he felt about it, he would commit to it wholeheartedly.

He wrote the song in one day, like a primal scream. The song was so ubiquitous—and the word choices were so elementary—that it was easy to overlook the earnest tension on display in the chorus:

And I don’t want the world to see me‘
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

In the music video, Rzeznik swivels on a chair in a lonely tower above the city, peering through a series of steampunk telescopes at a world he either can’t or won’t participate in. In the context of the lyrics, he’s a man torn in two: anchored to his isolation to protect what he perceives as grotesque injuries to his soul, but wanting to risk exposure to people so his soul might have a chance to flourish. It’s not unlike a songwriter in the throes of writer’s block, torn between latching his heart shut or opening it up to the world.

And it’s not unlike a single man with no kids at a transitional stage of his career, torn between the two coasts that, respectively, now offer the same prospects of stability or growth they always have in his past.

The song ends. The washing machine comes to a standstill. The clothes stop tumbling. An empty dryer awaits them.

It might be time for a transfer.

Cuphead Noir

It’s been a hot minute since I sat down and did an intense illustration like this. “Cuphead Noir” was originally drawn in the run-up to TwitchCon ’19, where I shared a booth in artist alley with my friend Ashley Villers. Of any video game fan art I’ve done, I think this is my favorite. I like how the composition and color scheme turned out, not to mention Cuphead is one of those games I could easily play once a year and get just as much satisfaction out of it as the first time.

The FancySchmancy Creature Feature: Fantastic Four

Recently I had the pleasure of watching Fantastic Four: First Steps, and I must say, in comparison to previous iterations, it is a … marked improvement. Before we jump into the Creature Feature, I’ll share my quick thoughts on the film.

Overall, I thought the movie was a lot better than Marvel Studio’s usual 7-out-of-10 fair. The art direction was spectacular, the musical score was iconic, the dialogue was sharp and mercifully devoid of quips. I like that it took place in another dimension, so the story wasn’t trying to carry the weight of 15 years of world building. The cast gets to act their heart out, the action sequences are the most genuinely suspenseful I’ve ever seen in a Marvel movie, and the effectiveness with which they showed the sheer scale of Galactus made him feel like a genuinely terrifying threat.

My only gripe is that, like most Marvel movies, this one suffers from status quo syndrome. None of the characters felt like they go through any sort of arc, and when you compare it to films like James Gunn’s Superman, where the main character actually has to grapple with some of his core beliefs, it feels a little hollow. But given the Fantastic Four’s track record … I’ll take an 8-out-of-ten if I can get it.

Anyway, since Fantastic Four: First Steps takes place in an alternate dimension, I thought it would be a fine opportunity to discover one opposite of ours and record that version in my abyssal bestiary. So, without further ado, I introduce to you the Fantastic Four of Earth 161.

An ink drawing of a cartoon-y Mr. Fantastic but wide-eyed and weeping as he holds a tissue in his hands.

Creature No. 6: Mr. Sensitive, discovered by Twitch user Harukio. This version of Reed Richards may not be the smartest person alive, but he’s certainly the most in touch with his feelings. Mr. Sensitive boasts the same stretchy appendages as his counterparts in other dimensions. Unfortunately this means he can remain bedridden for weeks at a time, retrieving pints of Cherry Garcia from the fridge while he binges Nicholas Sparks novels for the emotional catharsis. At present, Mr. Sensitive is in a dissociative fugue state after Sue Storm critiqued his lingonberry muffin recipe, and is currently recovering in a seaside cottage, while Galactus eats his whole entire planet.

An ink drawing of a version of Sue Storm holding a martini glass and levitating a shaker, gin bottle, and olive jar in a few force fields

Creature No. 7: The Inebriated Woman, discovered by Twitch user Daedlogistics. In this dimension, Sue Storm’s remarkable powers can only be activated by conspicuous levels of alcohol consumption. But hey, when you’re the world’s most hardworking super-mom, you deserve a cocktail or five now and again, you know? While she can’t turn invisible, she can turn emotionally unavailable. And although many foes have threatened her marriage to Reed Richards, none have come as close as when she stumbled into the foyer of the Baxter Building midday, drunkenly declaring to the attending staff that Reed, quote, “can stretching everything but the part that counts.” Ooh, no force field can shield you from that one.

An ink drawing of Johnny Storm in a novelty cowboy hat that holds two beer bottles and two twisty straws, a pair of slatted sunglasses, and a singlet in American flag patterns. Fireworks are going off behind him. He has sparklers in his hands and is grilling burgers with his fired-up fingers.

Creature No. 8: The Patriotic Torch, discovered by Twitch user Harukio. In this dimension, Johnny Storm takes a page from the Steve Rogers playbook, donning the stars and stripes to become a living Fourth of July firecracker. This Johnny still loves the ladies, but nothing compares to the red-hot, flaming lust he has for Lady Liberty. When he’s not grilling burgers and supplying pyrotechnics for Bruce Springsteen concerts, you can find him scorching through the cosmos on a mission to protect the planet he loves most: America.

An ink drawing of a version of Ben Grimm / The Thing where he’s been turned into a creature of cotton candy

Creature No. 9: The Floof, discovered by Twitch user KevoKoala. After a bombardment of cosmic rays, this version of Ben Grimm transforms into a behemoth of living cotton candy. Now the fluffiest hero on the planet, the Floof fears no foe—except maybe hungry carnival goers, sudden bouts of rain, and baffled raccoons from 2010 viral videos. Catchphrases the Floof has workshopped include: “It’s Empty Calorie Time!” “Let’s Get Sticky!” and “Time for a Dia-beatdown!” Sadly they landed as softly with the focus groups as most of his punches.

An ink drawing of a version of Doctor Doom who’s head and feet have been turned into hands

Creature No. 10: Handsy Von Doom, discovered by Twitch user DoctorDiggityDank. After the tragic explosion of a necromancy machine that would have allowed him to give his dead mother one last high five, the Victor Von Doom of this dimension was grotesquely disfigured, as his face and feet became hands. Blaming Reed Richards for his disfigurement, he will stop at nothing until he has flipped each and every member of the Fantastic Four the bird, and received their heartfelt apologies. Until then, the Latverian wizard will continue to hold the world hostage, wielding five butter guns with reckless impunity.

The FancySchmancy Creature Feature: Kongs

For a while I’ve wanted to figure out a way to do short videos with the drawings I do during the FancySchmancy Creature Feature. I think I’ve found a format I like: narrating over speed drawings like an eldritch David Attenborough.

More to come, hopefully, but please enjoy this first episode, and be sure to follow the YouTube and Twitch channels.

The Real Punk Rock

I wasn’t a fan of Superman growing up. He was always a little boring to me. Every decision he made seemed to be the right one, and besides proximity to a glowing green rock, he had no natural weaknesses. Morally and physically, Superman’s strength always made the stakes feel too low for his stories to be truly heroic.

I gravitated more towards heroes like Batman: ones that were brooding and flawed. I liked that Batman walked a mental tightrope, barely hovering over the psychological precipice his villains would often willingly plunge themselves into. I liked his lack of superpowers, how his thinly armored mortality meant that his heroism required more risk. In the battle for my fandom, Batman often won, and Superman often lost.

That said, I always wanted to love Superman. I remember when the teaser for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel first dropped—the swelling orchestrals, the bucolic scenes of a young Clark Kent—I thought we might get a movie about whether the world’s most famous do-gooder from the Second World War could exist in a 21st-century world of moral grey.

Unfortunately, Snyder’s answer to that question seemed to be: who cares? Sure, he gave us a couple of ham-fisted allusions to the Christ and a paint-by-numbers scene of our hero crying over having to murder of General Zod (which, to me, seemed to be a no-brainer given Zod was a genocidal maniac). But otherwise, there was no wrestling with the anachronism of Superman. If anything, the MCU took up that banner with their Captain America saga. But no such exploration for the man in red, blue, and gold.

For that reason, I was hopeful for James Gunn’s Superman. Gunn’s stories are usually about the exploits of barely reformed thieves and mercenaries, so a Boy Scout like Superman might seem like an odd fit. But Gunn knows how to find what makes comic book characters tick, and how to match that ticking to the beat of your own heart.

In Gunn’s film, I found a Superman I could root for—and who felt like he was rooting for me.

As an adult who’s a fraction less cynical than his teenage self, I’ve come to understand what Superman is, and I think James Gunn understands it, too. Superman is, at its heart, a thought experiment: in a world where power and cruelty often go hand-in-hand, what would it be like for the world’s most powerful man to be kind? It’s why Superman must be kind in his stories; otherwise, despite the laser vision and the freezing breath, there is nothing truly remarkable about him.

His rival Lex Luthor has power, too—in some ways more power, as his intelligence gives him an omniscience about the world that allows him to manipulate it in ways that Superman can’t. Lex tells himself that people’s reliance on Superman’s strength weakens them, a self-deceiving humanism that acts as a smokescreen for his solipsist view of the world. In truth, Lex isn’t jealous of Superman’s power but of his kindness, the actual quality that indicts Lex Luthor as just another unremarkable, power-hungry man.

There are so many things about this movie I could praise. The casting is flawless, especially with David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan. I could watch a two-hour stage play of their Clark and Lois, just dialoguing about their strange, budding relationship in a Metropolis studio apartment. I love the genuine Midwestern warmth of Ma and Pa Kent, the plucky grit of the Daily Planet staff, the disjointed foibles of the Justice Gang. I love how weird this movie is, how unabashedly it embraces the cosmic, surreal, and eclectic nature of comic books. I love how it promises a DC universe where many stories can be told and voices can be heard, without the MCU burden of sterile cinematography and tangled plots that clumsily weave between films.

But mostly I’m just glad that it gave us a Superman our pop culture has desperately needed for the past decade: one who recognizes that kindness is the most rapturous and radical way to wield power. James Gunn has given us a modern Superman we can now hold up to the Lex Luthors of the world and say: see, you bastards? This—this is how it’s done.