While it’s all well and good to make a barrel-chested Batman and clad him in leather or put shoulder pads on Superman and dub them “Steampunk” it is something else entirely to dress a man in a steam powered super suit. Sillof, creator of the aforementioned Justice League figures — among a bevy of other, wonderful figurines — has recently unveiled his re-envisioning of Tony Stark and both versions of his Iron Man armor, starting with the an original, boilerplate prototype and concluding with a clockwork masterpiece complete with smokestacks. Someone needs to employ this gentleman posthaste, so that I might purchase these in order to stage a massive, Steampunk DC vs. Marvel crossover/melee.
Instructables has a step-by-step to crochet your very own Cthulhu! A few people tipped us on this one, but Bibi was first.
Bela sends us some fantastic artwork from the talented Sayaka; comprised of an Ectomo favorite, namely: lithe, Japanese nymphets. Also, tentacles.
Asa Gilmore calls out attention to a list of abandoned wonders in Russia, saying “Scroll to the end of the article. If that strange contraption doesn’t scream ‘Steampunk’ to you, I shall eat my hat and say ‘balderdash.’”
Benton Barnett submitted this badass gas mask t-shirt which will now have to be added to my wardrobe. They can be purchase here.
Dr. Hypercube warns us, via ectotweet, to beware the cephalopod loo.
Strange coincidences and eerie alignments this Tuesday morning. Steve Scott is a London based animation director and illustrator who also, apparently, has some sort of telepathic ability that has allowed him to lick the collective brain of Ectomo. This piece, entitled The Society of Victorian Mutants is as close as I believe I’ve seen to summing up the fetishes of Ectoplasmosis’s hive-mind in their entirety.
We don’t think it goes to far to say that Ectomo and Steve -if we may be so bold- should, and shall, be Best Friends Forever and we can hang out and do each other’s make-up and talk about tentacles and Cthulhu. We are sure of this, surer than anything in our entire, short lives. Make haste and hit up his site for an impressive collection of moustaches, Victorian fashion, robots, and pin-ups. Also, could you to pass him this note: “Do you like Ectomo? Circle one: Yes No”
Ah, sweet, sweet Legos. Many hours did they entertain me as a child and the stupendous complexity of the Star Wars Collector’s Series continues to entertain me as an overgrown, awkward, and embarrassing man-child. However, I have lost some of the imagination I had in my younger days leaving me unable to produce inventive works like this steampunk T.I.E. Fighter, made by RebelRock for the FBTBForum Steam-Wars contest. More pictures after the jump.
For the dapper Neo-Victorian gentleman with a constabulary of aeronautical Lilliputians for dandruff, Molly “Porkshanks” Friedrich’s Ludiculous Skytop Zeppelin Hat.
In the dim history of my mumblings there are mentions of a property called, intriguingly, Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat. I first read this and wrote about it back at Table of Malcontents, mentioning it in a post on comic book MBQ. The post earned me to scorn of an entire generation of American manga fans (”white, fat, mousy-haired, wire-framed and lacking in personal hygiene”), and perhaps was not the best venue in which to introduce Rankle.
Allow me, instead, to quote from creator Rosearik Rikki Simons:
Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat is about a child Ghoul named Ranklechick. Ranklechick lives near Jupiter’s moon, Europa, within a sentient space station called the Europan Zoo. He lives with his three-legged cat, Pumpernick. Since birth, Ranklechick has been accused by his father of murdering his mother and now the sad little Ghoul thinks he can make everything right if he can just talk to his mother’s ghost. This is Ranklechick’s obsession, and every Ghoul on board the Zoo must have an obsession in order for the Zoo to survive. Being that he is of the inventor class of Ghoul, Ranklechick invents an absurd collection of devices in his quest to speak to his mother, like his Bliss Extractor, which he uses to try to get an autograph from the ghost of Charles Dickens, or his Sphere of Belligerence, a spacecraft propulsion system that literally insults physics. All Ghouls are social idiots trapped in a society that thrives off of absurdity, like a vast population of Asperger’s patients. Ranklechick spends his time living in the densely populated Europan Zoo, building necrotic communicators when he isn’t being interrupted by the the strange and unnatural — and he has many interruptions: running from handshaking lessons, avoiding being made into candy by the evil android Nathan Burblepinch, getting repeatedly decapitated, suffering the company of oniomaniac children, being possessed by the Spirit of Failure, suicidal disembodied brains, melancholic ham, a sardonic talking three-legged cat for a best friend, and all the while Ranklechick continues to believe he is becoming a comic book character. When all is quiet and he has time to think, he wonders if he’ll ever get to tell his dead mother that he loves her. This is a comedy.
I was so taken with Ranklechick’s cast and setting that I penned two pieces of fanart, something I never, ever do, one of which can be seen to the right. That is Sister Toovibohnes (I’m iffy on the spelling), a straight-laced space nun that lives aboard the Europan Zoo with the rest of the gang.
Ranklechick has been generously made available for free on Simons’ website, along with Super Information Hijinx: Reality Check! (which I have not read, but I believe it involves catgirls and also “the internet”).
I do not personally know Steve Erenburg, who goes by the name of Radio Guy, but he may be one of the coolest people I’ve never met. This is due, in large part, to the fact that he happens to collect and deal in such oddities as the “Shock Therapy Helmet” and “Oudin Resonator”, among other various contraptions, medical instruments, and equipment, including this incredible firefighter’s respirator from the 1800s. I badly want one of these, you know, just to wear around the house.
This shot from the Ryerson University 2006 fashion show displays a series of dresses I’ve been fascinated with for months. No other information about the designer is available at this Flickr account, save that they showed there and then.
The Hand of Glory — a mythical thief’s artifact that casts light viewable only by the cutpurse holding it, generally made with a human hand, chopped off from someone hung at the gallows (if my memory of Hellboy is anything to go by) — deliriously steampunkified with a purple glowing vacuum tube and a mummified cat’s paw.
According to its eBay description, Alex CF’s Necropathic Spetregraph has allowed amateur mediums the ability “to carry out complex interaction with the deceased, by influencing and stimulating electro magnetic current.” A globe filled with radioactive ether, charged with electricity, allows to medium to communicate with the dead through the device of a Ouija board, which is sort of the Speak-and-Spell of Erubus.
Like all of Alex’s creations, this one’s currently up for grabs on eBay at a price of£276.00. One of these days, when Google Ad Riches come my way from the Fishy Vagina Odor Advertising Fortune, I’m going to have to invest in one.
Again, a better concept than the execution, which becomes somewhat sluggish. I suggest the film be sped up to a hilarious clip, in the style of hand-cranked moviemaking!
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
