{"id":5729,"date":"2015-03-23T11:28:59","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T19:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5729"},"modified":"2015-03-31T06:22:41","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T14:22:41","slug":"pones-and-bones-a-trip-to-anti-narnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5729","title":{"rendered":"Pones and Bones: A Trip to Anti-Narnia."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"I'll<\/a>

Cover by Philippe Jozelon.<\/p><\/div>\n

We open with trailers for Coming Attractions: to the immediate right you can see the French cover for Echopraxie, <\/em>from Fleuve.\u00a0 I like it. Whoever the artist is, they’re channeling a bit of a Giger vibe.<\/p>\n

Immediately below, on the other hand, is the cover for Head of Zeus’s UK edition (they’re the guys who put out the Firefall<\/em> omnibus; the stand-alone\u00a0Echopraxia<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 appears slotted for a May release).\u00a0 I think I may like this cover even more than Firefall<\/em><\/a> (and I liked that a lot<\/em>)\u2014 it has a kinda literary feel to it, plus it’s the first time I’ve seen the word “fucking” quoted as part of a front-cover blurb (even if they did asterisk out a couple of letters).<\/p>\n

But what I especially like is the contrast between<\/em> these two covers: the cool palette vs. the hot one, the light vs. shadow. I kinda wish they could be front and back covers of the same edition…<\/p>\n

\"I'm<\/a>

Cover by Jessie Price.<\/p><\/div>\n

***<\/p>\n

And Now\u2014Our Main Attraction.<\/strong> (Please turn off your cell phones.)<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Up in the frigid wastes of Scarberia\u2014 not too far from the Magic Bungalow, as it turns out\u2014 there’s an unremarkable door\u00a0 set into an unremarkable brick wall in an unremarkable industrial park.\u00a0 It’s nothing you’d look at twice, if you didn’t know that it was a portal to a whole other world.\u00a0 Think of it as the back of the wardrobe, from those Narnia books.<\/p>\n

Assuming, of course, that the Narnia books had been written by HP Lovecraft.<\/p>\n

One of the cool things about having fans is that you never know what any one of them might turn out to be.\u00a0 You answer an email from some anonymous reader and they turn out to be half an industrial rock duo with NASA connections, or an astronomer whose brain you can pick when you find yourself on thin ice.\u00a0 I have a whole subdirectory of such wondrous fans, ripe for exploitation.<\/p>\n

A few of them have turned out to be economists; I’ll be exploiting them a fair bit over the next few months. But only one of these economists has a partner who makes disembodied bodies for a living.\u00a0 The company she works for is called MindWarp<\/a>, and you’ve seen their handiwork in everything from “12 Monkeys” to “Pacific Rim”.\u00a0 Not to mention “Hannibal”, for which they do pretty much all the rubber work these days.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Joe Fenner (the Economist) and Jenn Pattinson<\/span><\/span> (the Rubber Woman), I got a chance to take my whole family to antiNarnia for a visit last week.\u00a0 Some of what we saw has yet to appear in public. I wish I could show it to you\u2014 some of it moves\u2014<\/em> but the unaired stuff is embargoed.<\/p>\n

If you watch any kind of genre at all, though, you may recognize a fair bit of what follows. (All pics can be embiggened by clicking.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

\n

\n

\"One<\/a>

One of these people is an economist. One of them builds corpses. One will be spending a lot of time in therapy.<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n
\n

\n

\n

\"The<\/a>

The truly creepy thing is, these things don’t just look real; they feel<\/i> that way, too.<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\"A<\/a>

A bit of whimsy to lighten the mood. Also a sampling of the productions to which MindWarp has contributed (just out-out-of-frame: every Saw movie ever made). “Pacific Rim” surprised me; I thought that was all CG. “Black Robe” surprised me more; that was just missionaries and Iroquois. (Although I guess there were some pretty explicit torture scenes in there…)<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n

\n

\"This<\/a>

This is not a movie prop. It was built for the sole purpose of dropping down on unsuspecting trick-or-treaters during Hallowe’en.<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\"Who<\/a>

Who doesn’t wish they had a basement storage room like this?<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Lesser<\/a>

Lesser FX houses would just build a solid mannequin, slice it up, and paint the slices. Not these guys. These guys built the body from the inside out<\/i>\u2014 viscera, skeleton, body fat, connective fascia, musculature\u2014 and then<\/i> carved it up. I don’t know if mere pictures can convey the icky verisimilitude of the result.<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n

\n

\n

\"Poantempole.\"<\/a>

Poantempole.<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We open with trailers for Coming Attractions: to the immediate right you can see the French cover for Echopraxie, from Fleuve.\u00a0 I like it. Whoever the artist is, they’re channeling a bit of a Giger vibe. Immediately below, on the other hand, is the cover for Head of Zeus’s UK edition (they’re the guys who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-misc","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5729"}],"version-history":[{"count":56,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5815,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729\/revisions\/5815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}