Silent Hill: The Grinning Man - Atop the Fourth Wall

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara looks at one final comic from Scott Ciencin's Silent Hill books!

http://atopthefourthwall.com

Originally uploaded October 17th, 2011.

ORIGINAL INFO: A world of nightmarish delusions come to life… written by someone delusional.

RUMINATIONS: The “you know you’re not going to top last year!” thing was a bit of meta-commentary on my part. After the previous two years, I wasn’t exactly sure how exactly I was going top the silliness and awesomeness of the Dying Inside finale and then the emotional rollercoaster of the Dead/Alive finale. Since I realized I couldn’t top it, I just decided to go for fun again, especially with the darkness that was going to come in the following weeks for the finale itself. Even by this point I’m pretty sure I had settled on what the girl in the magic gun’s name was going to be, but I wanted to start laying the seeds for a future storyline about trying to figure that out.

Whately being the end boss for the Silent Hill reviews made sense – he was supposed to be a huuuuuge deal in these comics but never amounted to anything, so I just took the concept as presented and went with it, making him full of more bark than bite, relying on the Pyramid Heads to have any sort of real power. He was, of course, played by my Dad again, who always loves a chance to act in the show. The two different Pryamid heads were played by both myself and Will, alternating our outfits each time depending on who was on screen, though any time there was a Pyramid Head in the white apron, it was him.

The bat’leth I got from ebay, of course, but what’s more shocking is the price: it was only $50. These days that same type of bat’leth is going for $200, possibly due to increased demand, I can’t be certain, but a lightweight metal bat’leth at that amount was a steal, so I grabbed it and knew I would use it in the show. And indeed, I said lightweight – it only weighs about five pounds, meaning you can actually use it for extended periods of time pretty comfortably. Also on the Star Trek front are the phaser rifles – the larger one from First Contact being the one that Liz always favored as well as the “LEGO Phaser Rifles” as SF Debris refers to them. All have now broken (in fact, one of the LEGO Phaser rifles broke while we were filming) and I intend to go back and fix them eventually, I just haven’t gotten around to it due to me using the magic gun more and more on the show. What’s really sad is that I actually was up late the night before making the rifles and of course they had completely fallen apart by the end of shooting.

This episode fully reveals Holokara for the first time. People noticed the mobile emitter, of course, from the Paint it Black episode but nobody was really sure what was happening with it and were even wondering if they just had never noticed it before for weeks at a time. Holokara would end up playing a larger part in the “Gun and Sorcery” storyline the following year, though for this moment it was just there to deal with the Silent Hill stuff.

You may notice some boxes on the wall of my parents’ place and that I took pains not to show the couch. It was unavoidable, really – aside from the fact that my parents had discarded the old couch that had been shown in a few episodes (most noticeably the Mechakara fight), they were in the process of getting rid of the carpet in their living room and replacing it with hardwood floors. That’s the problem with ever going back to my parents’ place to try to film old stuff – my old bedroom has been repainted and the shelf removed to become an office and the living room now looks completely different from when I lived there.

The shot of Linkara and Holokara together is both an homage to the 4th Doctor serial “The Pirate Planet” as well as being just a bit of a continuity hiccup, since Whately really should be in the shot, but of course isn’t. I’m also wearing sandals, because Linkara apparently likes being comfortable when he’s right about to go into battle.