Cosplay Model - Marie-Claude Bourbonnais

Call Name: Marry Bardot

Status: Cosplay Model/Pin-up

Real Name: Marie-Claude Bourbonnais

Profession: Glamour/Adult Model, Pin-up

Does: Mortal Kombat, Gen 13, Fetish, BDSM

Yet more shots from Comiket

Final batch, and thx to Phil C from Odaiba...

Cosplaying Appleseed

First off: Lose weight. Pump Iron. Train. Train. Train. (not like these guys)

Second: Get the right hardware. Seburo Industrial is a good starting point.

Third: Kick some ass. The bad guys won't know what him them.

And We Await the Shrike...

Following up on my last post regarding Milton's Paradise Lost, the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons have been optioned as a movie. Sorry, to be more specific - optioned as an UNfilm-able movie much in the same way as Paradise Lost and other stories that probably never should have been committed to celluloid. These would be other notable titles like Watchmen and Dune. The jury is still out on how successful Watchmen was, and Dune only worked as a miniseries that could have used a hell of a lot more budget.

The Hyperion Cantos is especially challenging, especially as the first book of four is written as a space opera in the format of the Canterbury Tales. The book is essentially a novella broken up into different tales of a traveller on their way to a pilgrimage. The second book picks up where the first book left off but more as a traditional forward moving narrative. But therein lies yet another problem, one of the main sub-stories of the Hyperion Cantos actually travels backwards.... plus with about ten main characters whose storylines all split off after book one, it gets even more complicated.

Anyways, arguably one of the major characters is The Shrike. I say "arguably" as he is more of a plot device than anything else. He's a god, the messenger of pain, and (spoiler alert), the counterbalance to the spirit of empathy. He is the herald of the future with origins in humanity's past. He is silent, vicious, perhaps non-sentient, and pretty much invincible. He teleports, time travels, and control the local quantum stream to a degree, ie., he can utilise different potential selves simultaneously to accomplish his goals. He is his own superposition, to use a phrase from quantum physics. He is the ultimate bad-ass, a chrome four-armed demon covered in spikes and shards of razor-sharp metal. You gotta respect that.

I bring you several artists' renditions of what he should look like. At the moment, he is only limited to our imaginations. And I dare someone to dress up like him at Comic Con..

Cheap, easy and creepy Japanese Halloween designs

Kakurenbo - or Hide and Seek to Western audiences, is a mainstay on Halloween for the Cartoon Network and rightly so - it's one of the very few authentic horror anime productions ever made. It's about a group of kids in neko (cat masks, usually found in traditional Noh theatre), trussed up in post-modern Road Warrior yukata (summer robe) playing hide and seek (sort of) against wooden, mechanical demons. To lose means to sacrifice your soul to the game (surprise, surprise).

More on it: http://www.animefringe.com/magazine/2005/10/feature/01.php

To throw these costumes together would most likely have to require visiting a Japanese curio shop, most major cities having one. Picking up a yukata would usually be easy. They are usually long but the hemline can be cut. The mask may be tougher, as usually such masks are pre-painted. You may consider doing it the ole paper-mache style if you have the time and inclination. The wigs can be crafted fairly easily enough from regular black straight-hair wigs with enough hair spray or sugar-water does the trick. A dreadlocked wig could also work. The twin brothers' red eyes can be accomplished with some theatrical contact lenses.