Minions at Work: A Photocomic

A new (old) Christmas post will appear tomorrow.

Some images, I like them so much I keep thinking of new punchlines for them, and using them over and over. This is one. It’s noteworthy in a number of respects. First, it’s unusual in that it was shot outdoors. This doesn’t happen often, for lack of appropriate places to shoot, and the general difficulty of logistics. Shooting things outside begs the use of vehicles, my huge guard tower and so on, and I have to haul all these, set them up, endure the inevitable strange looks if I’m in a park or other pubic location, and then lug it all home again. And coastal Oregon basically offers two kinds of days. Days where the weather is crap, and days when every public place is jammed with tourists. So I rarely get beyond my own front lawn, which is what we have here. The “road” is literally my front walk.

Also, for Minions 1.o, it has a lot of post processing “special effects” added in my photo editing software: the smoke, the electric arcs, markings on the vehicles, even the digital readout in the speed gun. And usually, the figures in “Minions at Work” are highly “kitbashed,” meaning they combine figures, costumes and accessories from several different figures and manufacturers to create a new character. The GI Joe state trooper is probably one of the most unmodified figures seen in the run. It was just a great little set, and there wasn’t anything I could do to improve on it. Hasbro doesn’t do stuff like this any more. The only addition was the “speed gun.” It’s actually a radio tracker from an “Adventures of GI Joe” set, where it was to be used to track the radio collars put on wild animals for scientific purposes.

Finally, there’s a bit of trickery with the “police car.” Much as a 1/6th scale police car would be a great thing to own, I don’t have one, and it seemed I really needed to represent one in this panel. What I DID have was a New Bright Toys large-scale, radio-control, Ford F-150 pickup, color: black. Though it’s big, the pickup is closer to 1/10th scale than the 1/6th scale of the Minions universe. But by just showing the (two low) truck nose, which is black, I trick the viewer into assuming its the nose of a black-and-white patrol CAR. Truck people would never be fooled if they look closely, but odds are they never would (until I just mentioned it). A photo-edited-in police car bumper-sticker adds to the illusion.