As a queer person, I’ve always felt attracted to works of art that present themselves a certain way to a broad audience, but when presented to the right people (or upon further inspection by “the other ones”) have a completely different meaning.
One “recent” work that has become a favourite of mine is the song “Broadway Here I Come” written by Joe Iconis for a number of reasons: it references Broadway/musicals; it presents itself like a happy/positive song when it’s, in fact, very dark; it was created for Smash (one of the few tv series I watched during my cruise ship time); it was sung by Jeremy Jordan; it was also sung by George Salazar in the “Two-Player Game” album (which I have listened to more than I probably should…).
Every time I heard the song, I kept imagining what an equivalent visual work would look like. I even made a different version earlier but I wasn’t happy about it. It didn’t have the gravitas or emotion that I felt listening to the song.
Then, after playing Cuphead for many many hours and reading the art book I decided it would lend itself very well to the narrative to actually try drawing it as a Cuphead level. Since I’m not monetizing it and created it just to print one for my living room, I felt comfortable using three Cuphead monsters and just “dressing them up” in the musical references for the sake of speed, but I also wanted to create some of my own monsters, so made up another three.
I’m really happy with this new version. I like how it’s humorous and “light” while still retaining the double entendre in the song. If you look at it quickly, you’ll see a horizontal scene happening at the ceiling of a roof or at a paved street; but if you take your time looking at it, you start realizing that the bricks actually go sideway and that there are building shadows in the sky going side-to-side indicating that it’s actually a vertical scene. Same thing with the protagonist jump, I used a classic ballet jump pose as a reference and because of their clothing, it just seems like they’re dancing on air, but in fact they’re free falling and being confronted by their inner monsters on the way down to the ground.
Here’s a list of all references (from left to right):
- In the moon, you can see the cats from the Cats musical poster.
- The protagonist is loosely based on me and is wearing Frank-N-Furter’s (Rocky Horror Picture Show) outfit and hair, and boots from Kinky Boots.*
- The clock in the background, really blurred and faded, is based on one of the backgrounds from Wicked.
- The pink and blue round character on the floor was created by me and it is based on the drawing for “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig And The Angry Inch. I added the classic Hedwig make-up, hair, and some legs to it.
- The blue ghost character represents The Phantom Of The Opera. The ghost is an existing character from Cuphead, and because the mask is so iconic, I could’ve added just that and called it a day. I decided to add a few extra touches to give it more character by adding the flower that is on the poster of the musical and a halo with musical notes to bring the “angel of music” reference.
- The green flying hat is one of the characters I created from scratch and is a reference to Wicked. Though her hat was not green, I didn’t want to use human characters to represent the inner demons and the musical really revolves around that colour (plus black recedes too much on this dark blue sky so I didn’t want any full black characters).
- The green frog is also an existing Cuphead character that I modified to reference The Book Of Mormon. They mention a frog with a clitoris for a face in the musical so I modified his face and dressed him in the main clothes from the musical.
- The cloud cow is the last existing one from Cuphead (though in the game is a bull with a nose ring). If you’ve seen Into The Woods you’ll probably recognize it as “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold. I also really liked how the Cuphead bull was already a cloud because it gave me the chance of connecting it to the giants living in the sky in the musical.
- The last character is the blueberry pie that was created by me. It represents the musical Waitress as it’s a pie (biiiig thing on the show. So many pies!) and in one of the lines she says she’s is baking a “Deep Shit Blueberry Bacon!” pie (I now realize I forgot to draw the bacon, oh well, whatever. I don’t like bacon anyways hahaha). Because the musical revolves around her pregnancy and people generally say “a bun in the oven” to talk about pregnancy, I thought it would be nice/weird/spooky to have the baby in a tray like it had just literally come out of the oven.
* I also learned that drawing myself with Frank-N-Furter’s wig in a cartoon style makes me look like Albert Einstein’s long lost Latina daughter.
