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Bleeding Edge's Steve Varner Discusses the Making of "Princess Ai"
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All you need is (Courtney) Love? Not quite! Over the years, there have been several instances of rock stars indulging their passion for comic books. KISS notoriously authorized two comics in the 1970s, literally putting their own blood into the printer's ink. Alice Cooper made appearances in the pages of an illustrated tale in the '70s, and then -- with the help of celebrated writer Neil Gaiman -- did it again in the '90s. Now, it's grunge singer/guitarist Courtney Love's turn. As a co-writer and co-creator of the manga title Princess Ai, she's dreaming up the adventures of a mysterious heroine who suffers amnesia and is pursued by enemies from a past life she doesn't recall, but can't escape. This year, Bleeding Edge is releasing dolls and action figures of Ai, a move which is sure to bring new people to the collecting hobby. According to Bleeding Edge's head toymaker Steve Varner, translating Ai from the printed page into sculpted form wasn't entirely easy. Speaking by telephone, he says, "It was a challenge, but I didn't find it extremely difficult because I was inspired to do it. It kind of fell into shape by itself. Because it is an anime character, I didn't start by just sculpting the way I normally do: Getting clay and wax and an armiture, and going after it. What I did was render it in a 3-D (computer) modeling program, Maya. Maya works graphically, which was good for laying it out since anime and manga characters are kind of graphic. We started in that, then there's another 3-D rendering program that I use called Freeform. I had one of my guys that I worked with on this basically lay out the whole thing in Maya, then he sent the file over to me and I brought it into Freeform. I turned it into a 'clay file,' which is what you work with in Freeform... You can actually feel what you are doing in the computer (with virtual reality gloves). That's a little more of an intuitive program. It's like actually sculpting. I took it pretty far along in Freeform, and then I sent (the) file back into Maya. At that point, we were able to put a skeleton into it, which meant we could animate it. We could move it into different poses and then output it on our thermojet wax printer, just like Gentle Giant uses. "From there I molded it and got it into uruthane and did the finish on it in Sculpey. I finished off all the details, the clothing, the hair and that stuff. I worked wax over the top of it, too, to get that human touch. It was sort of a combination of animation and hand-sculpting."  Complicating things -- at least a little -- was the fact that no "turnarounds" were provided, I.E. specially-produced illustrations showing Ai from a variety of angles. "I worked right off the comic art," Varner says. For the most part, he was left to do all the work himself, simply because the licensors trusted him. "Once we got into the painting stages of it, that's when I really got a lot of feedback. We did end upchanging the eyes and a few things. It was the style, really, because in the book, they kind of vary. We needed to work with the creator a little bit, to pick their brain of what they were thinking." For better or worse, Courtney Love was not involved. "It would have been interesting," Varner says. "I think she has seen the stuff and likes it. It's been in alot of articles now, and I don't think she has any problems with it. I think it's okay (with her), but she's not super-involved with this whole thing. It is nice that she co-wrote it and obviously is very interested in manga. I think that part of it doesn't hurt the P.R."  Asked if fans of Love, or regular readers of manga, are expressing an interest in the line, he enthusiastically replies, "Oh, yeah. We are getting some really good feedback on it. You know what the strange thing is, normally, when we bought a license in the past, like 'Buffy (the Vampire Slayer)' or Lara Croft, we had tons of Buffy fans and they loved Buffy, but when we did Lara Croft, none of the Buffy fans wanted the Lara Croft stuff. Then we had tons of Lara Croft fans, and none of them wanted Buffy. It was weird. It was strange. But, with this particular 'Princess Ai' license, becauce we've got the goth forum that we run, a lot of our goth customers are liking Princess Ai and are buying it. They've got pre-orders in. That's amazing to me, because that's the first time this has happened to us, where we had crossover (from one license to another). Not all of (the fans), for sure, but a good portion of them, are liking the manga stuff, too. I think there's almost a gothic element to all of this." Coming up: In our interview finale, Varner discusses his future hopes for the "Ai" product lines, including additional characters like the fearsome Furies!
By Claude Flowers
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