Lego Blog: Illustrating Flash Pulp episode FP007-12

Making Progress

I’ve finally reached a new thread in the massive Flash Pulp universe! And he’s one of my favourites too – Thomas Blackhall: frontiersman, occult magician, all round mid-nineteenth century bad-ass. He comes in to the universe with a six-parter – no mean debut. There’s some pretty awesome magic and witchery later on in the story, but this introduction features Blackhall facing off with one of the great Bear Lords of the forest, referred to only politely as ‘Master Bear’.

Read and Listen To The Story

You have to do this now:

Here’s the full story: Redmouth’s Legacy – A Thomas Blackhall Tale – Part 1 of 6 

Illustrating The Story

Thankfully the six episodes take place in the same spot – on the top of Talbot’s Plateau, where Blackhall has scrambled trying to escape from the Bear Lord after putting down his son, the eponymous Red Mouth. It’s a tense stand off which Blackhall drags out while he cons the bear into providing his means of further escape. That means I can lazily jam six episodes into just one build…
 The plateau was appealing enough – I’ve been enjoying rock work and hinges for construction. The base of the plateau is a series of plates with slopes built up and around them to give me some more fun choices about what direction I build in. I’ve included the route Thomas uses to clamber up as a series of steps on the left. Obviously it needed a tiny waterfall on the other side.
The plateau itself clips straight on top. The plate widths foxed me for a while, but a few weird length Technics pins and 1×1 plates made it surprisingly neat. It does threaten to flip back and smash everywhere of course. The plateau is supposed to be fairly barren which called for a colour shift (to me) which I think came out nicely. 
The backdrop is entirely separate. I needed some way to give the impression of a forest behind the plateau. I’d seen someone use the flower elements upside down before on Flickr and it had stuck in my head. They’re just sitting upside down on some Technics 1×1 bricks. I like that I can move them round. Maybe I should have done more.
I made some beautiful trees to go on the plateau before re-reading the story and discovering they were not required. All that lives on there is a white pine, which turned out to be quite hard to make. I concluded that I couldn’t do the sloping triangular shape required, but figured I could do a tall wind-smashed battered tree.
 

Minifigging the Characters

 
Master Bear was fairly straightforward – I just needed to acquire a polar bear. I’ve wanted one for ages anyway, and he looks nice with my brown bear. Blackhall was an entirely different proposition. I’ve actually been worrying about Thomas Blackhall since I started this project. He’s not given much physical description in the early stories but there’s a story card for him with a hat… He’s usually clean shaven but he doesn’t sound like that to me. Since he’s supposed to be quite ragged in this one I’ve stretched the limits.
The body is one of the many gorgeous The Hobbit minifigures. This is the body of Bard the Bowman. I’m going classic yellow heads for Flash Pulp, but this one had me veering into pink. I’m not sure where I got this noggin from, but the hat and hair combined is from The Lone Ranger‘s Butch Cavendish, whose costume was also one of my options. He gets a sabre (required) and I couldn’t help but give him some kind of a compass box thing, as well as his bundle of reeds. I’ll probably have to find a new face and possibly hair/hat combo for the next one. Unless I meet with authorial approval to be lazy of course!

That’s a big bear.

There are some more pictures of the details here, on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eric_the_bewildered_weasel/albums/72157664783844732