ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

When Alex Pardee is a fan of a pop culture franchise, he does it justice. This could be anything from the Batman giclee he did for APE, some love for Conan the Barbarian, a couple of cult movie prints, or a secret passion for Cyndi Lauper. Alex has had a long-standing relationship to Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN comic, and he gives it the Pardee treatment for his NYCC 09 exclusive. Entitled, “The Secondmen,” the giclee fine art print measures 17″ x 22″ and is printed with archival inks on Velvet Fine Art Paper. The prints are limited to an edition of 50, hand-signed and numbered by Alex for $80 each. These will be available exclusively at the Zerofriends / Snafu-Comics Booth #1709.

And here are are some words from Alex’s blog regarding his long-standing love for the Watchmen comics:

“In addition to a lot of movies, my Dad introduced me to Graphic Novels shortly after i got out of the hospital when I was 15. About the same time as I discovered THE MAXX, my dad got me Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight”, which then led me to The Killing Joke, A Death In the Family, Hard Boiled, Frank Millers Daredevil, and Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN. With the exception of The MAXX, Watchmen felt the most real, despite the whole particle teleportation to Mars thing, and the airships. Maybe it was because most of the Minutemen didnt even have powers, they just WANTED to be superheroes, and the world hated them. Or maybe it was because Silk Spectre fell out of love with Manhattan because he was a workaholic, or because Rorshach saw dead dogs when he looked at an ink blot, but never really told anyone what he felt, or maybe it was the fear and the desperation of the guy who was scared of the Black Freighter, and where else can someone like the Comedian be a rapist AND a hero?

Regardless, I was unknowingly obsessed with it back then, as most of the superheroes i drew at that time were just bunk combinations of those characters.

Looking back now, a lot of things from Watchmen stuck with me, i always said my first tattoo was going to be a Rorshach test. I have always looked at owls as lonely but heroic animals. I BELIEVED that when you teleported, you vomitted, so much so that I called bullshit on Seth Brundle in The Fly. I never saw anything wrong with Dr Manhattans work ethic and his complete disregard for the rest of the world and his relationships. I subconsciously adapted his work ethic, which is probably a bad thing. I kept sugar cubes in my pocket when i worked at the credit card processing company in sacramento. I liked the 12 monkey’s movie marketing because it reminded me of “who watches the watchmen?” and I even repeatedly dreamt of going to Mars for a day.
In fact, i still do”