A new series for the TAPAS blog. I wrote down names on little slips of paper, the names of everyone currently in the TAPAS Facebook group and Discord server, 41 people altogether, and will be drawing one name every day to write about them and their history with the group.
So, er, yeah, as of the nine-day gap between this entry and the previous, this is no longer a daily series. These things happen. Today I drew the name of Carl Mann -- my uncle, my mom's big brother. Someone I've obviously known all my life.
The Elvis gig is part-time. A restaurateur by trade, an artist in spirit. It stretches far back into my memory, when I was under six I spent a lot of time with him. One of my first Halloween costumes in life was a gigantic veiny eyeball, and he made it out of... plaster? Or something? Only the foggiest recesses of my memory can reach back that far, but it's definitely there. I wonder if any photos still exist.
I vaguely recall sitting alongside him while he worked on this 50-foot mural on the side of a local supermarket. The place was demolished several years back, and I only seldom saw it throughout my life. I remember the reference photography he used for the scene. If memory serves, the women on the far left were a bit more boobtastic than called for by a grocery store mural, but I'm hardly one to talk, you've seen my art on this blog.
He showed me the wonders of computer art when I was very little, making animated videos where a live-action me would transform into a rocket ship or an eagle and fly off.
As an autistic child, I flitted from one interest to another, endlessly jabbering about them for months at a time. Spent more years obsessed with Barney than most kids do, spent the first grade endlessly spouting Pokémon statistics to people who had no clue what in the living hell I was saying -- when my interest turned to a video game which, unbeknownst to me, was based on Dungeons & Dragons, Carl alone had some inkling of what the heck I was talkin' about.
As I got older, I started having crazy big ideas for creating film franchises, full of big Hollywood stars, and wanting my family members to star in them too. I wonder if anyone who remembers those days can remotely take me seriously as a creator now... I suppose I'm still a lot of hype and not a lot of follow-through, but I'm gettin' there.
Carl's always had a house full of comic books, so he's certainly someone who's been living the dream amidst the golden age of superhero films we've seen recently. In recent years, I discovered he likes anime too. Didn't think he was the type, so that was fun to discuss now and then, I don't think I'd have ever heard of Assassination Classroom if it hadn't been what he was watching.
He also has a prolific face-painting side hustle. Kids at picnics love it, and sometimes sports fan will pay him pretty well to prep them for the stadium like so.
The story of how he officially joined my team begins with the character of Merlin in the Keys & Kingdoms universe. If you hadn't heard, the premise is that Merlin will make a little cameo once in every K&K story, never doing anything important, just popping up like Stan Lee. And when working on the voice work for the Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices pilot, I'd tapped my grandpa to play Merlin -- who isn't in the pilot, I just had in mind that he'd record some later appearances for much the same reason that, during filming of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, they filmed a whole bunch of Stan Lee cameos all at once in case they lost him before Phase 3 was over.
After working his lines a bit, Grandpa told me he just never had what it takes to be a performer, not even for a little cameo. And so he suggested I turn to Carl, which was something I had already been contemplating. We don't need any Merlin lines yet, but I imagine he could in fact play it with a Stan Lee impression.
And, for obvious reasons, we also discussed set design at the time, but haven't really gone in-depth on that conversation. Maybe we should. An upcoming task is about figuring out how we'll go about set and background design prior to, you know, actually designing some. The time approaches.
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