I don’t know where he came from.
I was just doodling around one day and drew an orange triangle. It looked a bit like a pizza slice.
I drew a white circle with a small black circle inside it. It looked like an eye.
Yeah, it was definitely an eye.
I placed it where one of the eyes should go, if this was going to be a face.
Where the other eye should have been, I drew two overlapping red plasters, forming the shape of an ‘X’.
I added a big smile. This guy had no right to look so happy. He was missing an eye!
I smiled too.
I drew a body. It was the reverse shape of the head. Together, they resembled an egg timer.
While I was looking to channel the inspiration I found from Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, I found myself drawing my little orange guy a lot.
The breakthrough came when I accidentally dressed him as Apollo Creed. Then I dressed him as Batman. Then the idea came - what if I made a Gashlycrumb Tinies alphabet book - but all of the deaths were from famous movies!
And instead of creating new characters from scratch for every movie death, what if it was always him?
I imagined he was a stuntman, drafted on set to play out the big death scene.
Except it was always for real. And he always died.
In one drawing, he was Apollo Creed. In another, Batman became Big Daddy from Kick-Ass. Then Max Cady from Cape Fear. Drexl from True Romance. The ideas came fast.
He became integral to the Movie Deaths project.
He needed a name.
I needed a name.
I don’t really know where it came from.
Maybe I saw it somewhere, and I absorbed it subconsciously. But when it came to creating a Twitter identity to unleash my Movie Deaths on the world, I found myself creating the handle SethStanley.
It was me the artist, but also him the character. Sharing the same name as a character in some artwork got…confusing. For everyone.
I think some folks thought it was like high art on some new level. Some folks thought I had mental health problems and I thought I was the orange guy. Most folks didn’t seem to care. And that kind of suited me.
People didn’t know when tweets where from me — or in character, as him. It just didn’t work.
He appeared in different genres. Different time periods. He wasn’t just a stuntman, but a time-travelling one.
I had grand ideas for Seth Stanley, the time-travelling stuntman. The A-Z of Movie Deaths was only the beginning.
Where’s the book, man?
In another life, there may have been a book. In a life where the strength of the idea was good enough to carry it.
But this was as good as it got…
During the making of Star Wars, I imagined, Seth got into an argument with Harrison Ford, while he was still a carpenter on set. He ended up getting the hot-tempered Ford fired, over a petty argument.
Ford missed the opportunity of his second-greatest career role, and therefore his first — as Indiana Jones. It passed to Tom Selleck — Magnum P.I, as movie history dictates it would have.
There was to be an impact throughout the history of cinema, that somehow led to the end of the world.
Eric Stoltz became Marty McFly in Back To The Future (as he was said to be in the recent Flash movie), Sylvester Stallone became a strait-laced Axel Foley — all manner of movie history hell broke loose.
I could just never quite work out why…
But it would have been the greatest book the world had ever seen.
Take that, Dan Brown!
And then, because I’m lazy and I don’t really ever finish things, I ran out of steam and enthusiasm. I put Seth down for years. The A-Z as of now remains unfinished. I never fleshed out the idea for the book.
And now it gets really meta
Then one night, Seth opened my bedroom window and climbed in…
I drew some single-panel comics of me as my pen-name alter-ego, Johnson — the fictional cartoonist creator of Seth Stanley.
I imagined a scenario where Seth crossed over from a dimension in the multi-verse where he was real, into Johnson’s dimension — Earth as we know it.
He came because he was in trouble. Because Johnson hadn’t finished the A-Z. It was meta and weird, and I loved it. But it was time-consuming and there was only the merest thread of an idea holding it together. It didn’t make any sense. Not even to me. But it was fun though.
I couldn’t make it work. There’s a story in there somewhere, but it’s dug in like an Alabama tic. I don’t know if I’ll ever tease it out.
Can YOU make it work? Let me know if you have any ideas. Sometimes it’s easier to progress someone else’s idea than your own.
So I’m going to carry on and maybe one day I’ll get round to finishing the A-Z. Maybe I’ll drum up enough interest for someone to help me work out where to take this thing.
Or else one day, maybe Seth really will come through my window and tell me how things pan out. And wouldn’t that be the damndest thing?
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