On With Flash Bricks
No one, least of all me is surprised by how late this post is. Needless to say I did this quite a while ago, but I enjoyed scribbling about the building process before and wanted to do more. I’m continuing to pick up Flash Pulp episodes sequentially. They’re now up to episode 434. Intimidating. More so when that figure doesn’t include special episodes, guest episodes and all the other stuff…
Illustrating The Story
‘FP002: Mulligan Smith and the Well Dressed Man‘ continues the investigative adventures of Flash Pulp’s resident PI on the bread and butter business of checking up on folks’ spouses. It takes place in two bars, with an assortment of characters. Only one of the two gets a description in the story and it has appealing details, like not being very large!
“The establishment wasn’t large, the single long bar dominated the north wall, which faced onto a series of booths. The rest of the space was loudly dominated by an empty, shabby, dance floor. The paint was black and the booths were a dark fake-leather vinyl – the only well lit portions of the room were the over-sized shelves crammed with cheap liquor.”
The long bar gets a bit shortened, but I had fun making optics and bottles. Plugging the round 1×1 bricks seems fairly effective for a bottle – I assume it’s Heinekin or something. I nicked the pump clip shield from our minifig collection. The bar itself is mostly built sideways with my beloved palisade bricks. I opted not to make the walls darker than light grey in fear of not being able to photograph the thing at all.
The booth(s) were delightful to build and I found a bunch of parts that fit together beautifully. As ever, when I finally notice it, the design of Lego bricks to miraculously fit together when you least expect it is just amazing. Given the size of the base I’d chosen I could only fit one booth in, but I don’t think I’ve got enough of the seat plates to make more anyway.
The front of the bar left me perplexed. In retrospect I’d like to have made a name sign, but it’s all dismantled now. The MOC was only designed for the interior, but it’s nice to make the outsides pretty too. Mostly I had a bit of a play with sideways palisades.
Minifigging the Characters
Since it’s Mulligan I got to reuse Mr Smith. He’s likely to be the only character who stays built. I put a pair of ladies on a night / mid-afternoon out in the booth because it otherwise looked far too empty. Only two of the other characters are described – the well dressed gent himself, and the poor lady he’s chatting up:
“…a man in a decent Armani knockoff with an extremely sweaty collar. Beside the moist man stood a blonde woman in a simple white t-shirt, crisp jeans and weekend cowboy boots. The woman was perpetually craning her head, scanning the smattering of afternoon patrons.”
The two heads I chose are some of my favourites – smugness and scowling. The lady’s top came out of the minifigure bins at the Lego Shop – one of those times when we spend aaaaages trying to find more than one brick slope dress. This one goes nicely with jeans.
I don’t know what an Armani suit looks like, but I reckon they might do a black one. I couldn’t find a sweaty shirt collar though. I can dream. The man (in my mind) is holding a tumbler of whisky, but every time I look at him it’s clearly an ashtray.
There has to be a barman right? A miserable sod in a divey bar.
Endless Building Choices
I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out (except for the front and the walls…) Once again I built something that is virtually impossible to photograph. One day I’m going to remember to put hinges in so I can swing the whole thing open like a doll house. I especially enjoyed making furniture, and again choosing the minifig parts took hours.
It’s a very densely populated and tiny bar! There’s just enough room for Mulligan to lurk by the bar and observe his target’s bad behaviour.
Now Read and Listen To The Story!
Here’s the full story: Mulligan Smith and the Well Dressed Man
There are a handful more pictures here, on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eric_the_bewildered_weasel/albums/72157652854572592
