Frozen Pants and Chilled 'n' Stern are Dead

I do like these new series Ice Warriors. There was something in the early publicity shots for Cold war whihc promised a really faithful return (we'll come to that later), but he prominent teeth in the otherwise beautifully-posed shots were just asking to be lampooned. One of those moments where I drew the face once and knew I'd nailed what I wanted it to look like, and to be candid, it's nice to draw a different version of something you've been drawing for a long time. The new series Warriors have some nice purplish tints in their armour which I'll one day incorporate into a styrene model I've got of a classic series one downstairs.

So anyway, the new Warriors' goofy, toothy overbite owes much of its inspiration to the cartoon advertisements drawn by Dunedin artist John Noakes, who died in 2006 and is better known for his civic murals - 65 bus stops painted and characterised around the Dunedin region and still, I'm happy to say, being restored and preserved to this day. It was an earlier iteration of his work, a weekly back page spot in the Otago Daily Times promoting local hotel the Carnarvon, that was an inadvertent influence on me. The weak-chinned profile on Panel 3 of this second page (above) is a crude approximation of Noakes' caricatures, and I hope he doesn't mind this tribute.