A Ray Gun for Every Occasion
Posted on: Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 18:00 CDT
By MACDONALD, Nikki
Greg Broadmore's day job as a conceptual designer with Weta Workshop wasn't quite creative enough to keep him from slipping into a parallel world. Nikki Macdonald is beamed aboard.
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IN TYPICAL boy fashion, it started with the guns and grew from there. In no time, there was a whole alternate reality of contrapulatronic wizardry jockeying for space in Greg Broadmore's head.
There's the mole-rat leather upholstered Lazoplod 300 (occasionally accidentally embellished with digits from the wrinkly hands of its octogenarian creators), for more comfortable travel on the surface of Mars or the moon; Sir Barthelemy Babbage's Manicurithalizer, for that tough-to-shift space exploration grime; the grovelling, C3PO-like bar serf Automaitre D'; and, of course, Dr Grordbort's extensive selection of ray guns -- one for every personality and occasion.
Is he a few electro-magnetic reverbulations short of a Destroxulonic Plosive Force De-Stabiliser? Broadmore doesn't think so.
And he's about to share his wacky unreality with the rest of the world with the launch of Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory, an antique-styled catalogue of futuristic contraptions, with intricate illustrations accompanied by wry blurbs in mock ad- speak.
Broadmore is perhaps better qualified than most to invent his own alternate reality. It was his overactive imagination and expressive penstrokes that earned him his job as a conceptual designer with Wellington special-effects gurus Weta Workshop. But the day job wasn't quite creative enough (he has to work to a limited brief rather than being allowed free rein) to keep his mind from slipping into a parallel world outside work hours.
To understand where Dr Grordbort's bizarre creations come from, it's necessary to explore Broadmore's early childhood. Unfortunately, a time-travelling gizmo is a surprising omission from Dr Grordbort's catalogue, so we'll have to rely on Broadmore's memory.
He was about five when the sci-fi obsession began, with scratchy black and white re-runs of the Flash Gordon series and the original space explorer Buck Rogers. "I was entranced by it. Flash Gordon leaves an indelible mark on you. I saw Star Wars at about six and that sealed the deal."
He started drawing comics when he was seven or eight, but it took another 20 years before Dr Grordbort's world began to crystallise in his head and work its way into print. And, in true boy fashion, it began with the guns -- a selection of chunky, antique-styled ray guns powered by glass vials still slick with traces of some mysterious orange chemical (aether). Despite being a vegetarian pacifist with a definitely not-army-regulation bushy beard, Broadmore admits he's always been drawn to guns and weaponry.
"I wonder why I'm fascinated by violence and destruction. It's a strange thing. I enjoy playing violent video games. I will happily kill a million terrorists in a video game. But I abhor wars."
Broadmore first penned the ray guns, in a series of comic-style paintings, for his own amusement. But when he showed them to Weta boss Richard Taylor, Taylor was convinced they would have wider appeal. Broadmore expanded his two- dimensional drawings to provide schematic views to enable colleague Dave Tremont to reproduce the designs from scratch, fashioning weighty metal weapons with moving switches, triggers and dials, set in velour-lined, pressed-tin cases.
At about $1000 each, depending on the design, the collectors' items are no toys. And, without the advantage of the instant market created by a film, they needed a story to draw in science-fiction fans.
The more Broadmore thought about the guns -- who would make them, what they would be used for, who would use them -- the more he began to define the details of the world from which they came. And so Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory was born. The book's bizarre contraptions are the products of a world based around a 1920s concept of the future, Broadmore says. It's as if, at that point, a parallel world to our own split off, and, in that world, the science-fiction and hokey science concepts of the era became reality.
Space exploration is an everyday thing, Martians are commonplace, there's a civilisation living on the dark side of the moon and constantly creating trouble for those on Earth.
As well as the fabulously named guns and robots -- endearingly clunky by today's standards of sleek, seamless, mirror-shiny sci-fi - - Dr Grordbort's world also exhibits a British colonial influence, personified by the safari-suited Lord Cockswain, whose interplanetary excursions are documented in a comic strip at the back of the book.
While the slim volume is obviously a flight of fancy, Broadmore insists he is firmly grounded in reality. He argues it's precisely because he's a realist and a sceptic that he's driven to create new realms in his imagination. But he does do an awfully good job of looking at home posing with the Goliathon and the diminutive Victorious Mongoose (still in production, out later this year, a steal at $657).
* Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory by Greg Broadmore (Weta publishing and Dark Horse Comics, hb $24.99), available from April 17.
Source: Dominion Post
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