KLE-Kat5 - (AKA Kellie/Kel) Your typical single mother/criminal martial artist making it in the big city. Rapidly rose to be the Green Cheese’s #2 by merit of moderate competence and quality sarcastic comments and one-liners.
LitterBox - KLE’s son and sound-system.Goes by LitterBox because he thinks its a tough mobster name, and it might be compared to his birth name (Listed as ”Louis Bartholomeow Kat5, Doctorate Pending” on his certificate of manufacture. Kel’s got high hopes). Amateur fence and con-artist, moderate combat training as a projectile.
Biff L. Batt - Of the North Hampton Batts. He’s sowing his wild oats in hands-on crime for a few years before joining his dad’s white collar crime firm. Tends to solve problems with blunt force and money, in that order. He’s pretty sure Carley Synythoid wrote that one song about him.
Lumberface - Some solutions don’t require grace or planning. Some problems require a maniac with chainsaws built into him. For those problems (and many, many others), The Green Cheese employs Lumberface. Also a gourmet carpenter
The Green Cheese - He’s the boss of the Green Cheese Gang and the most dangerous (and only) lunar rat on Earth. Loves schemes, plans, plots, and machinations, the grander and more vulnerable to punching-related mishap the better.
They live in a city I haven’t named yet and are opposed by a beef-witted brother and sister team I hope to design shortly.
All of them except the Green Cheese also have an alternate-head “redeco” character option in the vague planning stage, as I imagine this universe as being the cartoon spinoff of a nonexistent late-90s beat-em-up arcade game and its various sequels.
TyrannoMax Trading Card & Sticker Album, Stikks™ Company, Inc.
Selections from Set 1: Fear the Roar!
The Stikks Company was best known for making sports cards, but they branched out in the late 70s by getting the contract to make trading cards for Cocytus Comics' Nightmare Pit and Tomorrownauts titles (a mint Nightmare Pit series 1 Farrah Fyendlyne vs Glodie Redeemer (37) is $300+ on the secondary market, yow!).
This got their foot in the door for the 80s when the Cocytus / Buzby Spurlock Animation merger put the Cocytus characters on TV sets and toy shelves (semi)worldwide. Buzby-Spurlock needed merch liscenees and Stikks got most of the trading cards and sticker albums.
As with most things, Stikks was acquired by Hasbro in the 90s.
EXTENSIVE Process/Tutorial under the fold.
You were warned, listen to some jams while you read.
Vidu has been advancing their image generation options and wanted us in the Creative Partner Program to show it off. (click the link to try it with 100 free credits, etc).
But I'm rarely doing anything just on straight gens so these are heavy edits, so here's the procedural breakdown.
I used the new GPT-2 because it was part of the assignment, using the text-to-image to generate multiple flat white cardboard sheets with dents and creases at the corners, and plain aged cardstock. I set those aside.
Next came generating the card-images. One nice thing about the Vidu system is the references are more or less universal, so I could use my pre-existing TyrannoMax animation models as the base.
I prompted specifically for the characters to be rendered as acrylic paintings in a mid-80s trading-card art style, describing the scene, and then generating. In some cases taking those results and using them as the reference pic for another pass-through to diminish instances where things felt too animation-cel-like.
For things like the DinoHydra, which I didn't have animation models for, I used the same system to make them.
On the toy each head would be a launcher, except the T-rex that bites, and there's a removable battle saddle, obviously.
I'm going to do further development on the final animation/toy DinoHydra, but going with a rough draft for the licensed out stuff is very period accurate, so much like how I have 'high budget' and 'low budget' versions of some of my animation reference for period accuracy, I went with it.
Once I had the basic cards, it was off to Photoshop. First, the normal color correction, number-of-fingers-correction (dinoids have three fingers and a thumb, and while flubbing that is period accurate in animation, it wouldn't be on cards, so had to fix several hands /away/ from human anatomical accuracy).
These were then composited with the image frame I'd designed based on the one used in Dinosaurs/Mars Attacks. I picked the fonts to try and match the look of Topps' 80s output, to help make that fauxtalgia pop.
With edits in place, I then used Upscayl to make the images very large (about 5000x3000ish), because now comes the simulation of printing effects.
I'm going to start with a new image to show off this part of the process, as I didn't think to preserve the step-by-stop of any of the base cards in the first two posts (wasn't planning this detailed a tutorial at the time).
So lets go with Aunt Acid's character card.
Prompt: <reference> in the corroded remains of a suburban home. She extends one hand toward the POV, acid splashing from her open hand. 1985 science-fiction/fantasy acrylic painting, no text or branding, dynamic angle 1985 science-fiction/fantasy acrylic painting, no text or branding, the painting is in a sci-fi/fantasy pulp illustration style
On the left is the raw gen, on the right is after some selective color correction and the upscale to 5000ish px tall
I duplicate the layer in Photoshop, and I apply a 5px color halftone. This simulates /most/ of the printing process. However, real printed material of this type would have had black as a separate layer, and so the darkest areas of black wouldn't have any halftoning. Photoshop's filter does not do this.
So I duplicate the original layer again, and use Threshold to produce a B&W image that picks up the very darkest blacks only, and I set that to multiply Just color halftone on the left, color halftone with simulated spot-black on the right.
Combining that image with the card template I'd built before, and you get the image on the left, adding one of the cardstock images set to multiply, then flattening and doing some color-tweaking, gets the image on the right.
Her getup is a /titch/ anacronistic, since TyrannoMax is a 1985 series and her look is more Peg Bundy from Married With Children, but bouffants and cat-eye glasses have been just-slightly-unfashionable for most of modern history, so I'm cutting myself slack there.
<This is the part of the tutorial where I ramble about the OC for a bit>
Her whole schtick is that she got exposed to Dr. Underfang's primordial ooze (man that sounds dirty) while alive, and she survived the mutations, so she doesn't wind up geneincarnating into a beast-person but does gain super-powers and has her personality exaggerated to villainous levels. She and Cold Shoulder are similar in that regard.
I haven't decided whose Aunt Acid she is yet, because I'm not sure if its funnier if she's Dr. Underfang's, Cold Shoulder's, or Ms. Nice/Ms. Nautilus's. Now, she will refer to basically anyone younger than herself as if they were a beloved niece or nephew she hasn't seen in years, but she's legitimately related to one of the villain mains, and that's the one that threw her in the giant vat of glowing ooze.
Her super-power is pretty self explanatory: she constantly produces and can also shoot an acidic compound that varies between 2.5 ph and cartoonishly ultra-caustic, she also generates tear gas-like fumes that become hallucinogenic with extended exposure. Her powers are constantly active unless temporarily suppressed by exposure to a strong chemical base (or a whole, whole lot of baking soda).
Her motivation is she's having a midlife crisis and when she finds out that her niece/nephew is actually a villain goes "that sounds fun." Essentially, Aunt Acid's getting her groove back via supervillainy and TyrannoMax and pals are the unfortunate staff on her carnage-ful cruise.
Meet Sting-Or, the very predictably named Scorpion baddie newly added to the Horde's roster.
Brief Figure Breakdown: He's a tail-mod crotch, King hiss limbs and the matching 'ribbed' torso, hordeboots, standard reptosect-monster feet, new head, tail, shield and armor, mantenna hands, and Sting's WWEternia claw gauntlet. He has an extra human hand so he can use it, since Mantenna-hands are too wide.
Now, why do I say this is Scorpia's dad?
Well, not just because he's a Scorpion guy.
Specifically, it's because he's called out as being the King of All Arthropodia on Etheria in his mini-comic, an especially that of scorpions and other venomous insects, who allies with the Horde when they come to Etheria. "Well" you say, "he might be a more recent regent."
Except he was keeping a young Duncan at bay while Hordak stole Adora as an infant. He's king when Hordak gets there, he's around when Hordak steals Adora, Scorpia is the princess of the Scorpion people. It feels really intentional that they'd use him in that specific context for his card art.
I've never seen anything so strongly hinted without being outright said in MOTU fiction.
Check out the not-actually-a-helmet helmets, same shape.
Oh, and to be clear, this would establish him as the dad of the chain-smoking-voiced mook from the space Bronx from the original series, not the hug-factory from the Netflix series. It also establishes that the scorpion-people have a World of Warcraft level of sexual dimorphism.
Mattel seems to have the rights to the Filmation cast, including stuff made for the show specifically, so Scorpia (the original style) wouldn't seem to be out of bounds rights-wise, but it's kinda surprising we haven't seen a figure of her since Classics... and the Netflix version has never gotten a toy to my knowledge.
To that point, I find that sort of thing frustrating, because it's to everyone's benefit for companies like Dreamworks to be extremely chill with their merch partners. Wouldn't want to rake in a bit of extra merch cash on the side while drawing more people to your IP by just letting the toy company make toys, would we?
Sting-Or was invented during Classics as a Scorpioni-Arachna hybrid, but he was also part of the Eternian contingent of the Arachna empire under Queen Tyrantula, so safe to say we can disregard all that. He could still be a High King or something and each species has its own monarch, but Occam's Razor is def on your side here lol.
That said, Mattel doesn't have rights to the Filmation cast. They have to pay a licensing fee to DreamWorks, which is why it took so long to get any of them produced in Classics in the first place. You are correct that the Netflix adaptation does not have any toys.
I too find it frustrating lmao. DreamWorks is chill with their merch partners, generally, but Mattel isn't a merch partner. They are the owner of She-Ra's toy licensing, and neither company was inclined to pay the other for any of the requisite rights. I'm inclined to favor DreamWorks on this for reasons both historical and contemporary, but essentially by the time the two companies got their shit ironed out Target, who had bought exclusive rights to the first wave of dolls, backed out. Iirc the failure of Mattel's DC superhero girls line had led them to believe girls didn't want superhero toys.
And then fuck us, basically. The marketing for the show was a hot mess. We don't even have DVDs 😔 despite being one of the more successful Netflix originals, neither company saw merch as being profitable after the disaster of the first production season's products.
I mean, they got a Shadow Weaver in there, and she's flat-out Filmation original, as is Montork (an accessory/alt head, but named), Kol-Darr, Vultak and the Collector vehicle, and a lot of the Cartoon Collection guys have really specific accessories. so whatever the leftovers of Filmation are charging them, it's clearly not so insurmountable that Vultak is considered too obscure to pay for, so a Filmation Scorpia doesn't seem that far-fetched.
And I didn't know that about Sting-Or's classics backstory, but it looks like Red Shadow also underwent some major changes (going from having always been a man-beast to being merged with a wolf, the removal of the mind-control aspect of the iron mask, etc) in lore from Classics to Origins. So it's probably a matter of "continuity is whatever we said it was last unless it isn't"
And sure, they screwed up at every turn on She-Ra's toys, but it was eight years ago, they're coming up on their first nostalgia wave for the target audience and the collector/nostalgia market is its own beat. They should at least work out something for 2028 for the 10th.
And at least a chunk of that something should be in 5.5" scale.
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